Ottawa man’s gift blooms in England
$3.74M will buy one million bulbs and much more
When Keith Owen of Ottawa was dying six years ago, he offered all his money to a small town in England, and told them, “Why don’t you plant a million bulbs?”
That’s what is now happening in Sidmouth, on the coast of the English Channel, as the townspeople prepare to use a remarkable gift from a quiet Canadian.
An echo of the Dutch gift to Ottawa perhaps? Owen, an investment banker, never told the people of Sidmouth.
All he said was that visiting their town was “like returning to England as it used to be.”
Today the flower bulbs are piled high at the town’s garden centre, waiting for volunteer gardeners. There aren’t a million yet. More like 150,000 so far.
And Keith Owen’s legacy will keep on giving for years. He arranged that his £2.3 million ($3.74 million) would be invested, and that the town’s conservation and heritage association should spend only the interest each year.
While some rich donors dictate how gifts will be spent, Owen left the Sid Vale Association free rein, and they’re spending it in all sorts of ways: a new roof for the 200-year-old cricket club; a trip for two girls to a Scouts jamboree in Sweden; a racing rowboat. And bulbs everywhere, in more than 40 plots.
The Sid Vale is the valley around the River Sid. Sidmouth is the town, with about 14,000 people. It has Roman and Saxon relics, and a man from Sidmouth sailed with Lord Nelson on the admiral’s Victory in 1805. But the town isn’t well known to history.
But Keith Owen’s mother lived there. Born in England, Owen travelled a lot and finally settled in Ottawa, taking Canadian citizenship. He was divorced and had no children.
He enjoyed going back to see his mother in Sidmouth until she died.
Then, six years ago, Neville Staddon got a phone call. Staddon is the treasurer of the Sid Vale Association, which runs a museum and has done community projects since the 1840s.
A Canadian voice asked him about making a donation. Fine, Staddon said. A substantial donation, the voice said.
Staddon suggested they should meet.
Owen was 69 and expected to live only three more months due to lung cancer, and he brought the news of his intended gift. He said it might reach one million pounds, though it later turned out to be much larger.
“I said that’s rather a lot for a society our size,” Staddon recalls. “What about splitting it up between ourselves and the National Trust?” The Trust has a professional staff and oversees historic properties and areas of natural beauty.
Owen said no. He wanted to give it all to the volunteer organization, which now gets £120,000 or more each year. And he swore everyone to secrecy until after his death.
“It took a while for (the news) to filter through,” said Alan Darrant, the association’s president.
Now the good works are popping up all over town, each with the logo of a green woodpecker, a local bird.
“As you go around the area, more and more of these plaques are appearing and you think, Oh, Keith Owen has been at work again!” Darrant said.
There’s a new thatch roof for the cricket club and a new gig, a traditional ocean-going boat for six rowers, once used for rescues.
“It’s very popular amongst some of the coastal towns in southwest England, and they have rowing competitions,” he said. Sidmouth didn’t have one, and now it does.
The local rugby club has as many as 300 young people on weekends. “We’ve contributed money toward their building where there are changing rooms and somewhere to eat.”
They repaired the clock in a church tower.
“It’s all manner of things from the small to getting more extensive now. Things are happening that wouldn’t have happened without Keith Owen leaving that money.”
This year’s job is planting bulbs, literally tonnes of them.
“We’re favouring the natural bulbs,” Darrant said. “So lots of woodland snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils,” all expected to multiply. “It’s going to be quite stunning, I think. You can’t quite visualize it, but it’s an enormous number.”
An army of volunteer planters are lined up for October.
Sidmouth is a seaside resort town, but on a small scale. Many of the residents want to avoid opening up to mass tourism, and this struck a note with Owen.
“He used to wander around quite a bit,” with a guide book on the area, Staddon said. And he wanted to preserve the town’s historic character.
He never flashed around his money. He wasn’t the first to offer to pay for drinks at the pub, Sidmouth clergyman Handel Bennett notes, though after his gift to the town, no one is complaining. No one outside the group sworn to secrecy suspected he had money at all.
The bulbs were just an idea that came up one day as he illustrated how he wanted Sidmouth to be unconventional.
“He didn’t particularly say that’s what we had to do,” Staddon said. “He said, ‘Think outside the box. Plant a million bulbs,’
“He didn’t want us to say that was just Keith Owen who did it. He wanted to involve other people as well to encourage local philanthropy.”