Christine Abney

Christine Abney was born July 13 1936 in Victoria Jubilee Hospital to Stuart and Mary Hughes of Bamfield BC. She attended Grades 1-10 in a four-roomed school at Bamfield, which she reached by rowboat, and Grades 11-12 at Oak Bay High in Victoria, where she graduated in 1954.

In October of the same year she married Donald Abney of Bamfield. The following July she gave birth to their first son, Don, aboard a fishing boat en route to hospital in Port Alberni. The family was transferred to Montreal in 1956, where their second son, Chuck, was born in 1957. In November they returned to the west coast, settling on Osborne Road in North Vancouver. Their daughter Julie was born in North Vancouver General Hospital (now Lions Gate Hospital) in 1959.

Throughout the next decade, Christine devoted her life to her family and their various activities, including school functions, Cubs, Little League, and Job's Daughters. In 1968, with all three children in school, she began to work as a noon-hour monitor at Braemar Elementary in North Vancouver. It was her personality that secured her the job: with no experience whatever of paid work, she had to leave the entire four-page application form blank except for her signature. She stayed at Braemar until 1973, by which time she had become school secretary. During the early 1970s Christine's marriage broke down and she was faced with raising three teens on her own. In 1973 she moved to Argyle Secondary School in North Vancouver as secretary and eventually head secretary. A longtime smoker, she was diagnosed with lung cancer July 30 1987 and died of the disease April 28 1988 at the age of 51.

Christine was a person who put the needs of young people first. Her home was always open to her children's friends. One year, she crossed a picket line to ensure that Argyle students would receive their transcripts on time. Once she knew that her cancer was terminal, she took steps to set up this bursary, asking that it be awarded each year to a student who could not otherwise finance further education, and requesting that recipients be urged to think of her death before they smoke.