Barbara Biddle received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal for her efforts to preserve her home neighbourhood of Montgomery Place in Saskatoon, Sask.
In a world that’s changing ever faster, it’s easy to lose sight of the past that, after all, birthed all the wonders of the present moment. But that wasn’t going to happen in Montgomery Place, a neighbourhood of Saskatoon — not if Barb Biddle had anything to say about it.
Biddle grew up in Montgomery Place, a rural subdivision set up in 1946 to house Second World War veterans, who, under the Veterans’ Land Act, could get low-interest loans to make the small downpayments that would give them their own homes. There were a number of such subdivisions set up across Canada at the time, but Montgomery Place is one of the best preserved.
“So many of these small communities have simply been absorbed into larger cities,” Biddle recalled in a recent interview. “But Montgomery Place, though it became part of Saskatoon in 1955, still has the character that made it a wonderful place to grow up.”
All the streets are named after military commanders, navy battleships and military airplanes. Biddle, for example, lives on Ortona Street, named after the December 1943 battle in Ortona, Italy, in which Canadian forces won an important though costly victory over Nazi forces. This was understood in Montgomery Place because all of the residents were military veterans and their families. Biddle’s Canadian father and British mother had both served with the Allied forces during the war.
“It was a unique place,” Biddle says. “Most of the lots were relatively large, half an acre, and we didn’t have sidewalks.”
The community was particularly closely knit, Biddle says, because the veterans were all of roughly the same age and were undergoing the joys and vicissitudes of rearing families at the same time.
In 2003, Biddle retired from a 36-year career with the Canada Revenue Agency. She had, at the time, no great projects to occupy her time. However, when it came time for her aging mother, still living in the home Biddle had grown up in, to enter a seniors’ residence, Biddle and her husband, Roger, moved into the family home. Soon, Biddle found herself more and more involved in the community, including the community association, of which she eventually became president.
One of her beliefs was that communities as unique as Montgomery Place should be acknowledged and remembered as an important part of national history. To that end, she and the community association applied to have the community designated a National Historic Site. In September 2017, a plaque was erected during a ceremony attended by many of the original families.
In a separate effort to honour veterans, Biddle has found the names of 565 veterans who bought properties in Montgomery Place under the Veterans’ Land Act program. These names were chiseled into a granite monument that stands in a community park and was dedicated in June 2013.
To bring the community’s history to its children, Biddle has partnered with two elementary schools to take teachers and students on historical walks around the neighbourhood.
In the fall of 2022, in a well-deserved gesture, Biddle received the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal for volunteer work.
A long-time member of Federal Retirees, Biddle says the association does exemplary work. “In representing the rights and concerns of federal retirees, it does a very good job,” she says.