For the past 65 years, Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been serving the community of Burnaby, and for about 57 of those years Les and Violet Holmes have been married.
The pair met in the late ’50s. She was originally from Kelowna but had moved to the Lower Mainland to work as a psychiatric nurse at Riverview hospital. He was an RCMP cadet, fresh out of Depot in Regina, Sask. Originally from Ontario, he found himself stationed in Burnaby after he finished his Mountie training.
Les was living at Fairmont Barracks in Vancouver and Violet was living in the nurses’ residence at Riverview. The pair met in 1957 when their friends attempted to fix them up.
“One of my classmates met his troopmate, and one night she was going out with him and said he had a friend and did I want to come on a blind date?” Violet said.
Violet and Les had another chance encounter a while later when Violet was driving in her old Zephyr along Lougheed Highway with a couple of nurse friends.
“We were stopped by a RCMP motorcycle cop, and of course it was Les. It wasn’t like it was for speeding or anything, I thought it was because he could,” she laughed. “And it was fun, of course, everyone got a kick out of it.
They started dating shortly after, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Soon after they met, Les was put on Doukhobor patrol for a handful of months before he was transferred to the Nakusp detachment in the West Kootenays.
“So it was a long distance for a while,” Violet said.
“We didn’t realize how serious we were about each other until that happened,” she added.
The pair recalled one particularly funny (and harrowing) memory, when Violet and some nursing friends drove to Nakusp in the winter to see Les.
Violet had told Les that because of the snow they were going to skip the Monashee Pass and go through the United States instead.
But their plans changed when the border was closed so the women were forced to brave the road through the Monashees.
Les and some fellow officers, meanwhile, were escorting a few prisoners on a transfer. During the trip, the bus happened upon a group of women whose car was stuck in the snow.
“And then the bus driver says, ‘That’s your girlfriend right there,’ and I said, ‘It can’t be because they’re going down through the States,’” Les laughed.
Shortly after his time in Nakusp, the couple was married.
“(Les) came back to Burnaby and we really put down roots, first in an apartment, then we bought a little house,” Violet said.
The couple had two kids.
Les spent about 12 years working at the Burnaby RCMP detachment, and so did Violet.
After they were married, Violet stopped working at Riverview and instead, would sometimes pick up shifts as a matron for the Burnaby RCMP.
A matron’s main duty was to be present when women were arrested and booked into the cellblock, to ensure police were respectful and that no wrongdoing was committed. The matron was also responsible for supervising the women’s cellblock, which Violet said could be quite boring.
“I usually read or wrote letters, and occasionally they (the prisoners) would be noisy, but most of the time not,” she added.
Matrons were also sometimes required to accompany officers on raids or arrests, just in case any women were present. (This was all before the RCMP started allowing women to become officers themselves.)
Violet’s contribution to the RCMP didn’t end there, In the 1990s, she designed the Mounties’ official tartan.
Les’ career continued as well. He began climbing the ranks of the RCMP. He was the first Mountie trained to conduct polygraph tests.
After a few years in Toronto with O Division (prior to the creation of the Ontario Provincial Police), the couple returned to B.C. where Les was assigned to drug enforcement with E Division.
His final posting before retirement was as the assistant commissioner of the RCMP’s Alberta division.
