Maxted Miscellany: Jill and Ian - fifty years together

Our wedding photo - the baby was not really ours
Emma was loaned by Ian's school friends Sheron and Colin

On St Patrick's day 17 March 1971 Jill Simpson and Ian Maxted were joined in unholy matrimony in Croydon Register Office, carefully timed for the library tea break so that as many work colleagues as possible, and several regular readers, could join family and friends by climbing through the library window to take the short cut to the register office.

Married life began in a three bedroom end of terrace house in Brampton Road, Croydon for which we paid the grand sum of £6,000.

We had met at work in 1967. Ian was working for a year as a trainee assistant in the reference department of Croydon Central Library while Jill was in the lending and children's sections.

The earliest photograph with both of us,
we are still in touch with Doug, centre right.

We each brought our own baggage into the little house - not just books and furniture but family, friends, experiences that we came to share and build on together.

Jill brought school friends from Coloma Convent School and the experience of the seminal year of 1962-3 as an English assistant in an idyllic village school in the heart of the French Jura.

Christmas with Susanne and Roland 47 years later in 2009

Ian brought school friends from Colfe's Grammar School, the experience of three years in Keble College, Oxford reading modern languages, and close links with Germany, both West and East.

We both went off to library school, Ian to Sheffield, followed shortly after by Jill who went to Manchester. At weekends we would meet up half way for walks in the Peak District. The friends we each acquired there still play a part in our lives, particularly the Sheffield group, who go under the name of Supsliskans and are maintaining a lively exchange of emails during Covid.

Supsliskan reunion at Sheffield, 1993.

Jill returned to Croydon, transferring to the reference library and we both acquired friends there with whom we are still in contact. Peter and Kate represent our Croydon friends on this occasion.

With Peter and Kate in Devon, 2019

Ian became a research assistant in Guildhall Library, later rising to the dizzy heights of assistant keeper of printed books. We also share friends from the City of London where Ian commuted each day.

Two of our friends from Guildhall days, Ralph (1939-2015) for whom we chased round Europe

searching for panoramas and Bernard

with whom we share a fascination with early prints and maps

Our son Neil was born in 1974 and we gradually began to realise that London was not the ideal place to bring up children.

In 1976 the post of county local studies librarian for Devon was advertised and we moved to Exeter, Ian starting work on 2 January 1977.

We still feel as if we are on holiday here. Just weeks after our arrival we cycled along beside the canal to the Exe Estuary with Neil in a child's seat and basked in the winter sun looking out over the water. We could not believe our luck.

Devon - a much nicer place to bring up a young family, Dawlish, 1979

Jill obtained a cataloguing post in the University Library and, after Kate was born in 1978, managed to juggle a series of part-time jobs in the University Library, the Local Government Library at the bottom of our garden in County Hall and later in Exeter Medical Library.

Devon Library Services ran an active twinning programme with Calvados in France, and later Baranya in Hungary and this also extended our circle of friends on an international scale. Ian's controversial exhibition Boney, or Napoleon through English eyes which was shown in 1985 almost wrecked the twinning links but it only strengthened ties with library friends in Caen. For our friends in the DDR, the fall of the Berlin Wall meant they could finally visit us in Devon.

Caen library friends in Bénédicte's garden in Bayeux, 2014

German friends Hubert and Sigrid visited us from Weimar soon after the Berlin Wall came down.

Our work also brought us into contact with American friends Merriol, Doug and family who own Lewtrenchard Manor in west Devon, the home of the writer Sabine Baring-Gould. Merriol who, like Jill, worked in a medical library is the granddaughter of SBG and we have worked on projects with the family library. During our travels we added Karen and Doug, and Sandra and Larry to our American friends, meeting up with them in the Languedoc, Hungary and Morocco.

Lewtrenchard Manor, Devon

Kate graduated from Bath Spa University in 1999 with a degree in music and teaching. She went on to have a gap year travelling in Asia and to work with excluded and vulnerable children in Eastbourne, Brighton and Exeter where she now lives with her partner Matt and children Pippa and Sennen.

Kate blown away by her academic achievement, 1999.

Neil graduated from Keble College Oxford in 2000 with a degree in chemistry and father and son contrived to collect their MA and MSc at the same ceremony to the delight of Ian's 88 year-old mother.

Neil and Ian graduate together, 2000

After obtaining his doctorate and working in various research posts in chemical plants in Didcot and Hull, Neil now lives in Beverley with his Sri Lankan wife Jeevani and their two daughters Deyvika and Indika. We attended their wedding in Sri Lanka in 2003, and afterwards there was a reunion in the garden of the nunnery in north Oxford where they had first met, a rare opportunity to bring together family, friends and work colleagues.

Family and friends gather in Oxford to celebrate Neil and Jeev's wedding, 2003

Gatherings of three generations of our "nuclear family" are all too rare, mainly concentrating around the Christmas break, although even this was not possible in Covid year.

Jill and Ian with children and grandchildren in Killerton Chapel, Christmas 2018

We both retired in 2005 with plans for our own gap year. In fact on Ian's 60th birthday in July we held a gap year party in the Coaver Club at the bottom of our garden. Many of you reading this will have been present at the event, which gathered together once more both family and friends.

Another gathering of family and friends after our retirement, 2005

The Colfe's Latin class of '62 reunited in 2005
Peter, John P, Ian, teacher Ron, and John H.

We had let the house out for a year to four library school trainees at the University and returned home after 13 months travel to find it miraculously intact. Finding it difficult to settle we repeated the process several times and, as most of you will know from Jill's blogs, have been travelling with our trusty little campervan Modestine for fifteen years exploring every country in the EU and several beyond, including Morocco and Turkey.

Our home in Exeter, not a bad place to return to

Jill's ocular shingles, contracted in Romania in 2013 but only diagnosed in France, rather cramped our style, and Covid-19 has meant no trips abroad and few in Britain last year.

Some of our many library colleagues from our time working in Exeter will be reading this and need no reminding about the way things have developed for libraries since our retirement. Back from our travels in Exeter, Ian has been dragged into a so far vain attempt to reverse the act of cultural vandalism that in 2011 overturned the achievements of almost thirty years of local studies work for Devon. Jill urges him to get a life!

But quite what that life will be, remains to be seen as we have finally decided, with great reluctance, to take our leave of Modestine after seventeen years of loyal service. Recent trips had become a bit of a struggle and so our daughter Kate has welcomed the chance to take her off our hands even before we put her on the market with 217,867 miles on the clock. Saying goodbye to what has become more of an inanimate family member than Alexa could ever be has been almost a rite of passage, so we will conclude this account of our last half century with a few pictures of her on our travels.

We had hoped for an event to celebrate fifty years together, perhaps a rerun of our gap year party of 2005, but lockdown #3 makes this impossible. A Zoom event would be unmanageable, judging by many of those we have participated in, so we are continuing Jill's series of travel blogs with this "special edition". We haven't been able to include pictures of you all. It would have made this blog inordinately long and we have already asked a lot of your tolerance, so please don't be offended. Thank you all for your friendship over this half century, it has meant a lot to us at so many different times.

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Some images of Modestine on her travels. Click on the images or caption to visit the blog.