In memoriam/ obituary Elly:
It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of H. "Elly" Desplanque-Deventer, age 88, of Amherst. After a courageous battle with COPD, Elly passed away peacefully at home with her daughter by her side on Wednesday, August 24, 2016.
Born in Velsen, Netherlands, she was a daughter of the late Cornelis and Marchje (Reinds) Deventer.
Elly arrived in Gander, Newfoundland from the Netherlands in 1953, then moved to Nova Scotia where she met her husband of 56 years. After moving to Amherst, they married and raised their family. Elly enjoyed classical music and birding.
She will be dearly missed by her children Eric (Wendy), Calgary, AB, Joyce Desplanque (Susan Bent), Brookfield, NS and Kelvin (Dawn), Ottawa, ON; 4 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren; sister Miep Deventer, Netherlands; several nieces and nephews.
She was predeceased by her husband Constant; infant son Marnix and several brothers and sisters.
in memoriam / obituary Con:
HARRY THURSTON
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JULY 13, 2011UPDATED APRIL 29, 2018
Engineer, hydrologist, naturalist, marsh man. Born Oct. 6, 1917, in The Hague, the Netherlands. Died Nov. 21, 2010, in Amherst, N.S., of heart failure, aged 93.
Every Saturday morning for six decades, Con Desplanque could be found walking one of his beloved standard poodles on the hiking trails through the Amherst Point Bird Sanctuary, arguably Nova Scotia's best birding spot. Con was its undisputed resident expert, having identified more than 200 species, including such rarities as the yellow rail.
Con was a man of the marshes all his life. Early summer vacations with his family on Ameland, one of the Dutch Wadden Islands, fired his interest in biology and the outdoors, leading him to study agriculture, forestry and land reclamation in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
Drafted into the military after high school, Con was a platoon commander when German paratroopers dropped from the sky around The Hague in May, 1940. "We gave the Germans a good fight," he recalled, but after four days the army capitulated, his platoon demobilized and he entered the Dutch underground.
His job as a superintendent of the Zuiderzee Reclamation project allowed him to penetrate a German radar station and map its layout. When the retreating Germans bombed the polder dikes, he commandeered the sea-dike magazines as shelters for the women and children displaced by the flooding.
After the war, Con served in Indonesia during the revolution against Dutch rule, living in the jungles of Java for half a year, where his only regret was not having a bird book.
His first sight of Canada was Sable Island when he immigrated by ship in May, 1950. Like many Dutch immigrants to Nova Scotia, he was assigned to do farm labour for little pay. In a Truro pastry shop, Con met Elly Deventer, herself newly emigrated from Holland. The couple married in 1954 and had three children: Eric, Joyce and Kelvin.
The family settled in Amherst, N.S., where Con had been hired by the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, a federal agency charged with repairing the dikes in the upper Bay of Fundy, which had fallen into disrepair during the war. Recognized as a professional engineer in 1967, Con retired in 1982.
While designing tidal sluices and drainage projects, he became a leading expert on the famous Fundy tides and the ecology of the bay's salt marshes, co-authoring several scientific papers. He was a gifted, largely self-taught scientist.
Con was a good father and a good husband, but he also found time to be a troublemaker. He wrote reams of letters to the editor on politics and religion, and acted as a gadfly to careless scientists and journalists. His legacy remains in the modern dikes that protect the Tantramar Marshes, which connect Nova Scotia to the continent.
