December 18, 2020
Richard (Dick) Ogden left Langley Lodge Seniors Home to be with his Heavenly Father on Friday the 18th of December 2020, peacefully, eldest son at his bedside.
Dick was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, England, 1934, and its working-class paradox of deferential independence characterised him to his final hours. After military service he apprenticed at Rigby & SonsWireMill in Bradford where he met Jean Mary Sutcliffe whom he married in 1958.
The couple emigrated to Canada a decade or so later with the first two of what would be three sons. True sportsman, birdwatcher as under-gamekeeper on a Manor in the South of England from age fourteen, Dick was trophied cricketer—fast bowling in Freddie Trueman style—and life-long racing cyclist, successful competitor in the B.C. Seniors Games.
No less, Dick was bibliophile, occasional epigrammist ("no man is possessed of every excellence"), and amateur linguist: defending contra mundum hodiernum the truths that study of language is an objective empirical science, that grammar is prescriptive or else nonsense, and that alongside Shakespeare at the pinnacle of English literature, just above the Brontës, stand Dickens, Wodehouse, and Dr Johnson; sharing (with Churchill) the latter's monarchist and moralist politics.
But more than these was unabashed witnessing Faith. Converted to Christianity on a train journey from London with his young family, through an irregular encounter with a charitable member of the Gentry, Dick was a deep evangelical, worshipping at St. Matthew's Anglican Church and Seven Oaks Alliance Church, Abbotsford.
Dick was predeceased by wife Jean and middle son Timothy, and is survived by his second wife, Bernice; eldest son Stephen (Yoko) with grandchildren Joshua (Mindy, and great-grandchildren Rosemary, Gerard, and newborn Margaret Jean), Helen, Marian (Luigi), and Caleb; and youngest son Simon (Airlie).
Full funeral services are prohibited under COVID-19 banning orders.
In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Langley Lodge Care Home, where angelic and accomplished personnel palliated Richard Ogden's final weeks on Earth