Alice Strike, believed to be Canada's last surviving female veteran and oldest surviving veteran of the First World War, has died at the age of 108.
Strike was born in Godalming, England. She joined the Royal Flying Corps and later the Royal Air Force as a pay clerk in 1914. Early in the war, she met and fell in love with Canadian Jamie Stobie, who would take her to live in Winnipeg.
Strike is being remembered as someone who lived life to the fullest. Her daughter, Kathleen Buzza, 80, told the Halifax Chronicle Herald that her mother very much enjoyed being a veteran.
"(My mother) and her friend of years and years and years, they used to go out to the Deer Lodge Veterans Hospital in Winnipeg and see the vets, and they would stand in the blowing snow and sell poppies on Armistice Day," Buzza told the newspaper from her home in Dartmouth, N.S.
Buzza said her mother always live every moment of her life to the fullest. "She didn't complain, never, not even when the war was on.''
Strike won several awards, including the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, and the John McRae Medal on the 80th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
It was during the First World War when she met Stobie, whom she saw riding his horse through Woking, England.
The two married and moved to Winnipeg, where they lived for 40 years, and raised three daughters and a son. When her husband died, she married George Strike, a fisherman from the Queen Charlotte Islands.
He died and Strike later moved to Nova Scotia. Buzza wanted her mother to be closer to her.
Strike is survived by her daughter Buzza, her son, James Stobie, who lives in Victoria, B.C., four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
