Kenneth W. Blake

It is with a mix of sorrow, pride and gratitude that the family of Kenneth William Blake, late of Wolfville and Berwick, Nova Scotia, note his passing after a lengthy illness on Thursday, September 25 at the age of 92. As Dad himself said on so many occasions, what a remarkable and rewarding life he’d lived. He’d seen every part of the world, experienced more horror, excitement and triumph in his youth than most of us today can even imagine, had a satisfying and very lengthy career, been sustained over more than sixty years by the love and support of the two beautiful women in his life – Mildred and Phyllis – and, for the past thirty years, delighted in his wonderful friends and neighbours in Wolfville.

Dad’s career in music spanned fifty years and much of the globe – from London’s west end to Haifa and Freetown, from symphony orchestras in Victoria and Halifax to dance bands in Penzance and Torquay, from parade squares in Delhi and Cape Town to CBC studios in Halifax, and from POW camps in Java to music classrooms in Dartmouth. Dad never had any illusions about being an artist; his choice of music as a career had been a fluke. When he’d tried to enlist in the Royal Navy at fourteen, only the Marines would take him and then only as a band boy. But Dad knew how to work hard, and so he did what he had to do; he became an accomplished journeyman at his craft. He took pride in his professionalism and sought to instill that same concern for technical proficiency and discipline in the many young people he mentored later in his career. Dad’s work ethic was always an inspiration to his family and may be his most abiding legacy.

Dad lived to see his three children and four grandsons all well settled in their own lives, and he delighted to the very end in reports of the antics of his two gorgeous young great-granddaughters. Even in his most trying times, Dad managed to find a measure of contentment. He enjoyed music, current events and talking books, and anyone who ever met Dad was immediately charmed by his quiet grace and his self-effacing humour. Dad simply expected others to be as generous and understanding toward him as he was to them, and hardly anyone ever disappointed him. No one who watched Dad support Mum through her twelve-year battle with cancer will ever forget his example of loving selflessness. But perhaps Dad’s remarkable capacity to transmute pain into humour emerged most fully as he struggled in his later years with his own advancing blindness and Parkinson’s disease, and with the care of his second wife Phyllis in her own battle with Alzheimer’s. There was always that wonderful sense of humour, no matter the hardship. At his ninetieth birthday, he still had his well-wishers in stitches with his darkly funny story of why one had to conceal one’s birthday from the rest of the Marines’ mess aboard ship.

Dad’s stories! There were always stories, over dinner or a whiskey or a beer, after a chocolate or a peppermint, on the deck or by the fire: charming stories of his magical childhood in a tiny Wiltshire village, of his boyhood in the Royal Marines; terrifying stories of dive bombers and ship sinkings, of winter on the North Atlantic, of route marches in North Africa, and of bombarding Pantelleria, Salerno, Anzio, and Gold Beach; touching stories of mothers in South Africa, and mobs on the streets of Delhi; and hilarious tales of commanding jungle fighters in Ceylon and burying the ship’s cat at sea. Dad’s stories could be moving, they could be uproariously funny, they could be small, they could be grand, but they could never be boring. And they were always original - like Dad, truly original. They – and he - will be so deeply, deeply missed. Oh Dad, what we’d all give to hear just one more story….

Dad’s many friends are invited to join us in celebrating his life at a memorial hymn sing on Saturday, November 8 at 2 pm at St. John’s Anglican Church, 164 Main Street in Wolfville, to be followed by refreshments at the Blomidon Inn.

If you wish to send your condolences or recollections of Dad to his family, you can send an email to [email protected]