My mother, Penelope Geldart, who has died aged 97, travelled to Canada in 1949 to work as a set designer and painter for the theatre. She married the following year, and although she often returned to the UK to visit her family, she lived in Canada for the rest of her life.
She was born in Chester. Her parents, Hugh Sparling and his wife, Grace (nee Atkin), had met during the first world war in France, where Grace was serving in a canteen and Hugh in the army - he later became a headteacher in Birkenhead. Penny and her brother, Peter, grew up near Heswall, Cheshire, and spent summers by the sea at the family’s house, Isallt Fawr, in Anglesey.
After leaving Wycombe Abbey girls’ school, Buckinghamshire, in 1938, Penny carried out second world war work with the Women’s Timber Corps, which took over the tasks of forestry workers who had been called up. A keen amateur artist during childhood, after the war Penelope began designing and painting scenery at the Liverpool Playhouse.
In Canada, at LaSalle Academy, the Canadian Repertory theatre, Stratford festival theatres and other theatres, her colleagues included Christopher Plummer and William Shatner. In her memoir Life Before Stratford, the actor Amelia Hall described Penelope as “vivacious, outgoing, frank, honest, yet elusive and secret: very English and young forever”.
In 1950 Penelope married David Geldart, who worked in communications for the government. In the modernist house, designed by James Strutt, that David and Penelope built in Gatineau Park, just north of Ottawa, they raised three sons, Robert, Alan and me. When we were old enough, Penelope went back to work, at CJOH TV, where she worked behind the scenes on photography and graphics for the newscasts, and on sets for the chef Graham Kerr on his series The Galloping Gourmet.
Later she worked for the government in the field of multiculturalism, maintaining a directory of ethnic groups across Canada. She also volunteered at the Aylmer Heritage Association and the Old Chelsea Library in a village near her home. For some years she worked at the Canadian Mediterranean Institute, and travelled a few times to Greece and its islands, which she loved.
Penelope was brought up to write letters and she liked to draw, sketch and read. She walked everywhere, and for many years played tennis. One of her favourite papers was Guardian Weekly. She loved going to the park, to watch people at play and dogs running around.
David predeceased her. She is survived by her children, by four grandchildren, Ian, Vanessa, Dawson and Mia, and by her niece, Lois, and nephew, James.
