Bell was born in Raymore, Saskatchewan, the son of an Irish father, Robert Patterson, and a Scottish mother, Mary Bell, who immigrated to Canada in 1901. He grew up on the family's farm until moving to
Portage la Prairie to work in a grocery store. Later he attended the
Salvation Army Leadership Training School in Toronto. In 1938, he married Charlotte Nice, a Salvation Army officer from Neepawa, Manitoba. They raised four children. From 1935 until 1953, he led churches in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. In 1953, while minister of the
Church of the Nazarene in
Abbotsford, British Columbia, he was elected to
House of Commons of Canada in the
1953 election from the
riding of
Fraser Valley,
British Columbia. He was defeated in the
1958 election. He ran for the party leadership at the
1961 Social Credit leadership convention but withdrew before the first ballot. Patterson returned to Parliament in
1962. He became acting leader of the Social Credit Party in 1967 when leader
Robert N. Thompson resigned citing the party's lack of financial support from its BC and Alberta wings. Once the writs were dropped for the 1968 election, Thompson sought and won the
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada nomination in his riding.
Bud Olson had left the party a few months before joining the
Liberal Party of Canada, leaving Patterson as the acting leader of the remaining three-person Social Credit
caucus into the
1968 election in which all three MPs were defeated, including Patterson in
Fraser Valley East. Patterson returned to Parliament in the
1972 election representing
Fraser Valley East as a Progressive Conservative, and was subsequently re-elected as a Tory until his retirement from politics in 1984. ==References==