Marie Crawley Davenport (Jan. 1900 - June 1975) was born in northern England in the city of Kingston on Hull, but was raised primarily in Wales, where she attended university to study art. Her studies were cut short when she and her sister Nancy, moved by a sense of adventure, went to work as bank tellers In Dublin at the end of the First World War in Ireland. The demand for capable and educated young women to fill clerical positions was booming.

It was in Ireland that she met and fell in love with Michael Fives, an Irish Catholic priest who resigned from the priesthood in 1918 and changed his surname to Davenport in order to spend his life with her.

It is unclear whether the couple emigrated to Canada from a desire for further adventure, or to escape what would presumably have been a major scandal, but in 1920 they left Ireland forever and disembarked in Saint John, N.B., pausing in Ottawa before pursuing Michael;'s dream of becoming a successful farmer in the Canadian West.

However, farming in The Canadian West bore little resemblance to life on an Irish dairy farm. After a failure or two, and with a second child to raise, they settled in Saskatoon in the mid-1920s, where Michael got a steady position at a dairy.

The early part of their lives in Saskatoon was tumultuous. A dairy worker's wages were not conspicuously generous at the time, and while Michael worked long hours and put his oratorical skills to use in the trade union movement, Marie raised the children and struggled to make a home in temporary housing. They moved through a series of rooms and houses at ever-more-respectable addresses finally coming to rest in the Nutana neighbourhood, where Marie bore their third child.

It is uncertain when Marie returned to painting probably in the late 1940s or early 1950s. She took a series of art classes through the University of Saskatchewan's Extension Department, and became a part of the growing art community in Saskatoon. Her skill with oils, a deft eye for colour and a love of the prairie landscapes earned her a decent reputation, as well as a modest financial return from the unforgiving Prairie. In the end, she quipped late in her life, the brush had proved mightier than the plough.