Chris was born in Bridgend on May 27, 1943 to Ted and Gladys Kemble. She died on December 2nd 2015 at Frimley Park Hospital from Pneumonia following a 2-year battle with renal cell carcinoma (Kidney Cancer). She is survived by her Husband Alan, Son Gavin, and Brother Alan.

Although her parents were Londoners born and bred, Chris was actually born in Bridgend in Wales after her Mother had been evacuated there because of the Blitz during World War II.
After the war, they moved back to Kennington in London where at aged about 2 or 3 she contracted tuberculosis. To give her the best chance of surviving this fatal disease she was taken in to the famous Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital. Unfortunately during the immediate post-war period money was extremely tight and both her parents had to work as hard as they could,with the result that Chris spent about a year of her early childhood by herself in the hospital; her parents could only visit her roughly once every week or 2.I’m certain it was this experience, perhaps subconsciously, that shaped her determination to give me (her son) all the attention and opportunities I wanted throughout my childhood and young adult life. She once told me that she had been told many times as a child what she couldn’t be; she tried to make sure that I knew that I could become anything I wanted if I just worked at it.
Sometime after the war, the family escaped the difficult living conditions of Kennington when they were moved by the Council to the Shiny,brand-new Sheerwater estate in Woking. There she went to school at the excitingly also-brand-new Sheerwater Secondary School, where she met a number of people with whom she formed strong, lifelong friendships.
Whilst at School, Mum began to have problems with her ears that would unfortunately plague her throughout her life, requiring multiple operations that effectively removed her inner ears and surrounding bone and tissue and left her extremely hard of hearing without a hearing aid. She and I tried learning sign-language during a period when she was volunteering extensively with a deaf charity, but we ended up just relying on our ability to lip-read; we often had conversations through the closed kitchen window without making a sound
After Mum left school at 16, she went to work in London, commuting by train from Woking. She became a Comptometrist, (what’s one of them? You ask: it’s an early form of electronic calculator/computer) and at one point worked with the construction company Costain helping them bid for and build the then brand-new M1 motorway.
At the time, Mum was an avid and competitive badminton player at the Sheerwater Badminton Club. It was here that she met her future husband of 44 years, and my Dad, Alan, who as it turned out not only lived only a few streets away in Sheerwater, but after meeting they also discovered:
    They had been Dancing partners at after-school clubs
    Lived very close to each other in London as kids – Kennington is less than 2 miles up the road from Brixton where Dad was from.
    They both had the same car: an Austin A40

She and Dad spent many years playing badminton together as doubles partners before injuries made them both retire from the sport. She also took a keen interest in tennis, and had a sportswoman’s eye for what made a player great – or not! She loved players who could return serve and play rallys rather than just serve endless aces.

After getting married on June 26th 1971, they spent a short stint sub-letting (illegally – ahem!) a council house just a few doors down from Mum’s Parents before moving into the show home of the recently built Pinewood Park in Farnborough a few months later.
In October 1972, their lives changed again with the arrival of, well, me, and Mum stopped work to become a full time mother and household engineer.
Mornings were my mother’s. That’s where she did her engineering, her cleaning, and the shopping and other chores. I remember clearly, once-a-week we would walk the half mile or so to Watties, the local shops, where we’d meet Ron the butcher. There she taught me to ask and pay for the half-pound of Liver we would almost inevitably buy. The green grocer’s was next door, and there too she relayed valuable life skills (I was no older than 5!) beginning with teaching me to find, weigh and pay for the 1/4 lb. mushrooms we would also almost always buy. Then once a month, we would pop across the road to the mothers club at the church hall where we’d buy rusks and Marmite, both of which I still love to this day.
Afternoon was my time, and Mum would often take me to the local field and we’d kick a ball to each other, an activity neither of us were any good at at the time – we must have looked a right pair! But I loved it and that was all the encouragement Mum needed to keep at it for my sake.
In 1980 Mum and Dad moved to what became their permanent home, less than a half mile from their first. As I became older and more self-sufficient, Mum went back to work, first at the twilight shift at a perfume Factory and then later as a clerk for a company processing paper airline tickets (often including those of the rich and famous) where she met another of her long-time friends. She finished her working life as a clerk for an accountant processing VAT payments for pubs and bars.
Mum was perhaps at her most adventurous in her taste in  music. I recall growing up constantly barraged with the “oldies from the ‘60s” on Radio2, Abba, Barbara Streisand, and then increasingly country and western music  especially  Tammy Wynette. I still surprise myself (and my peers) to this day when I can sing along to the lyrics of some of those tunes from that era.
In an attempt to keep-fit, Mum took up Tap dancing, but she found the style “a bit airy-fairy”, so she switched to Line Dancing. She got hooked, and to my surprise, she got Dad hooked too. 2 nights a week they would gladly go out to different clubs and when I was out in the states for the first time, I had orders to bring back cowboy boots for the pair of them. They would go on Line Dancing holidays both here and abroad with their club and were still involved right up until the onset of Mum’s illness made it too painful to participate. They were so hooked that when the interwebs came along and it was time to get them an email address, there was nothing more obvious than to make it “linedanceloonies”!
Sometime after her recovery from Breast Cancer treatment, and later a quadruple heart bypass, Mum bumped into someone from the local Lawn Bowls club whilst exercising and decided to take it up and for some time participated in weekly league events. To her surprise, she was pretty decent at it -   under certain conditions.  When she joined the Hawley club, she was quick to point out that she would only play when: it wasn’t Raining, wasn’t too cold, wasn’t too hot, and wasn’t too windy. Bowls was also the source of a number of enjoyable holidays around the country and to Portugal where the heat was just cool enough to be OK to play - when accompanied by a nice cool Gin & Tonic.
While we’re on the subject of Holidays, Mum made sure we had one every year when I was a kid regardless of whether we could really afford one. I have fond memories of many inexpensive caravan/chalet holidays in Bracklesham bay, Cornwall, and holiday homes in Wales, mostly all involving long drives with sandwiches in laybys. I recall clearly her first ever flight, to the Isle of Man. As hard as that was for her, we had a great time there and it was great practice for what turned into many future flights for trips to Spain, Barbados and her many trips to North America including the Northern Passage and Rocky Mountaineer train journey in Canada, and Denver, Yellowstone, Memphis, the Grand Canyon, and of course Seattle in the USA. Ironically, we spent more quality time together since I moved to Seattle than we ever did when I lived away from home in the UK.

Mum was diagnosed with Renal Cell Carcinoma, or Kidney Cancer back in early 2014 and had one of her kidneys removed almost immediately, but unfortunately the cancer had already metastasized and by December last year the disease was pretty far advanced. Mum recovered quickly following her 2” brain tumor removal in February of this year and I’m grateful that it bought us almost another year with her but the remaining tumors were getting increasingly painful and in the end her death was a welcome release from what would only have become a more and more painful decline. Throughout all her life’s illnesses she showed remarkable bravery, courage and a determination to fight and I’m proud to be her son.

Mum, I miss you, and I know everyone here today does too. I know I will miss you for a very long time to come. I love you.