Unknown to us all, Jill had already started her final journey when I posted our previous blog Jill and Ian - fifty years together in April 2021. From diagnosis in 2022 until her death on 2 July 2024 the journey was long in duration but short in distance, from our home behind County Hall to Woodhayes nursing home, just ten minutes walk away. I decided to give Jill a humanist celebration to see her to her final destination and I was delighted to find Jenny Lloyd to act as celebrant. There were no flowers, only a small but colourul posy on her wicker casket but, at our suggestion there was a plentiful harvest of food for the Exeter Foodbank brought to the event. The text of the service is given here, followed by an account of the reception afterwards at the Coaver Club.
Jill used to go to jazz concerts with her father, Henry, and always enjoyed Jazz on the Quay. Stranger on the Shore with Acker Bilk was a particular favourite and Kate learned to play it on the clarinet. So you can see why it was a perfect piece to open our ceremony for Jill today.
We are here in remembrance, in sadness, in love, to celebrate Jill’s life. And there is much to remember, much to celebrate. How do you tell the story of a life? Unpick the threads and lay it out – especially a life as rich as Jill’s? So just a few snapshots before we hear more from Ian.
Jill, wife, mother, grandmother, colleague, friend: indefatigable; always restless, always on the move; digital pioneer, self-taught website developer; francophile, fluent in the language; documenter of travels; fearless, fearsome adventurer. Mind you, there were misadventures along the way: being poisoned by disinfectant, having the suspension go and the wings fall off while at the wheel. Jill was an expert packer of wine and French delicacies to take home after each trip. She was economical to a fault with a wonderful disregard for best-before dates – and ancient tins could be found hiding on shelves. A stone from Budleigh painted with two faces signalled which mood she was in at the end of each day. You’ll be able to see it at the Coaver Club later on.
I’m Jenny Lloyd, a celebrant with Humanists UK. Ian, Neil and Kate have talked to me about Jill and painted a vivid picture of her life. Collective and individual family memories are at the heart of our ceremony along with some of Jill’s extensive writing and tributes from friends and colleagues. There is music of significance (as you’ve already heard). And you will see a sequence of photographs of Jill spanning the years. Together, we have created a ceremony which we hope will evoke your own memories of Jill so that you can pay tribute to everything she meant to you.
We live on through what we have done and said; through the stories our lives; through the memories we leave behind. Jill will live on in all these ways and in the rich legacy of her extensive accounts of travels with Ian and her letters from France from the sixties.
Whether you are here in person or on-line, whether you’ve come from near or far, your presence is significant and helps us capture Jill’s presence. A warm welcome to you all – family, friends, colleagues.
Jill Simpson saw the light of day seven months before me on 15 January 1945 in Croydon Hospital. She was brought home from hospital to Fir Tree Avenue, where the family lived in a post-war prefab, a building which had a brief moment of fame after the family moved to Longheath Gardens, when it was stolen and was later discovered, re-erected in the South of France, not the first connection that Jill had with the country she loved, as she had visited Paris aged six in 1951. Most of the family’s childhood holidays were spent in West Penwith, an area we were to return to with our children thirty years on.
Jill narrowly failed the eleven plus, but a chance meeting with a school governor when buying school uniform for the local Secondary Modern secured her a governor’s place in Coloma Convent School, where she studied for her GCEs. The headmistress of the school, Mother Mary Cuthbert, had links with the Dominican Order who ran a rural school in the depths of the Jura so, from 1962 to 1963, she obtained a teaching post in Champagne-sur-Loue, a village of about 120 souls, teaching English to children scarcely younger than herself who were being trained to be good farmers’ wives. Her letters home at that time show her torn between becoming a travel agent or a librarian.
She studied for A-levels at Croydon Technical College while working in Croydon Central Library, which was where she got to know me in 1967 when I was a postgraduate trainee in the reference department prior to going to library school at Sheffield. A-levels completed, Jill obtained a place to study librarianship at Manchester College of Commerce, now Manchester Metropolitan University, and we would meet up at weekends in the Peak District, midway between Sheffield and Manchester. We married in 1971 and Jill returned to a post as a professional librarian in the reference department in Croydon in 1968-1969, while I worked in Guildhall Library in the City of London. In 1969 she was financed by the Frank Denning Foundation to produce a comparative study of libraries in the UK and the Netherlands with practical experience in the Royal Library in the Hague.
Neil was born in 1974, and we both thought that Croydon was not the best of places for a young child to grow up. So when a post in the local studies library in Exeter was advertised, we both leapt at the chance and moved down in 1977. Kate was born in 1978 and the care of two children made Jill’s opportunity for work difficult, but over the years Jill worked in almost every library in Exeter, the University Library, Polytechnic South West College of Art Library, the Local Government Library in County Hall right at the bottom of our garden, the Public Library in central Exeter and finally Exeter Medical Library, where she put her reference library experience to good use in developing the Medical Library’s pioneering website in the late 1990s. By then the children were off our hands, passing through university, and we began to take trips to Europe in a series of second-hand cars, staying with friends or in hotels. It was Jill who did all the driving and she wrote extensive accounts of our travels in a series of notebooks. We even ventured into Sri Lanka for Neil’s wedding in 2003, our first journey outside Europe, for a wonderful experience with drummers and fire walkers. These trips were always curtailed by the limited amount of leave we had, and Jill was determined that, once we retired, we would do something more ambitious.
We both retired as soon as we could in 2005, Jill having acquired a micro-camper Romahome, which we named Modestine after the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the Cevennes in 1878. The next decade or more was the high point of Jill’s life. In the first years we were away more than we were back home in Exeter. Jill was so restless, always moving on from one place to another and documenting the events of each day in great detail. I was her trusty navigator and official photographer. She set up a series of travel blogs on the internet so that a loyal group of friends, family and work colleagues could follow our every move. We visited every country in the European Union (even venturing surreptitiously into Russia) with Modestine, and also Asia, (Turkey) and Africa (Morocco).
We also hunted for leafcutter ants at carnival time in Trindad and explored Maya cities lost in the jungles of Mesoamerica. But Jill’s horizons were beginning to narrow. In Germany during October 2012 she caught shingles on her optic nerve and this made driving more difficult. Brexit was also beginning to shut Europe down. During our last trip abroad, from April to June 2019, we visited our friends in Caen and watched in disbelief as Notre Dame burned down. Jill had driven more than 200,000 miles and we had set ourselves the target of driving as far as the moon.
Then in 2020 came Covid and lockdown when travel was impossible, but as pensioners we felt we were weathering the storm well. I first began to wonder about Jill’s state of mind at the end of 2021 when she found it difficult to grasp what we were trying to do when working on the library of writer and folk song collector Sabine Baring-Gould in Lewtrenchard, beyond Okehampton. At first I put it down to the effects of Covid and lockdown, the need to dispose of Modestine in 2021 because of the after-effects of Jill’s ocular shingles, and the news of Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine in February 2022. But when she began to have difficulties finding her way around friends’ houses and then round our own, I realised that something serious was amiss. Jill was diagnosed with dementia in September 2022. I cared for her at home, trying to maintain her mobility by taking her on walks each day. The Coaver staff club in the grounds of County Hall, where some of you may have attended our retirement party in July 2005, was a godsend, being so near. I tried to help her recall her early memories, keyboarding the letters she wrote from Champagne-sur-Loue in 1962-3, and some of Jill’s manuscript accounts of our travels before Modestine, and sorting her early photographs but it was too late. Jill’s decline was such that it eventually became clear that our house was too dangerous and ill-equipped a place for me to continue to care for her alone, and in March 2024 Neil and I moved her into Woodhayes nursing home where she was well cared for, but continued to decline until her death on 2 July.
I had already some time ago lost the Jill that I had married and who had accompanied me through 57 years of our lives. My grief has come in small packets as I have said farewell to a bit of Jill at a time and I am looking to the future, preparing to put her memories in order by completing her travel writings and adding them to the 580 or so blogs that make up her remarkable digital heritage.
Bon voyage, Jill. You will continue to travel with me for the rest of my life.
We’re going to see a sequence of photographs spanning Jill’s life, set to Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen (Slumber now my weary eyes) by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ian’s favourite composer. You have the words in German and in translation. The pictures and music give you time to think about the Jill you knew in your own ways.
[The pictures are in a separate blog: Jill: a life in pictures.]
There have been so many tributes. Here are some from library colleagues and from colleagues and friends in admiration of Jill, the traveller and recorder of adventures:
I will always remember Jill as being friendly and keen to support those she worked with.
All through my working life in the South West when [meetings of regional health libraries] were such a support, Jill was a big part of them. It was a life saver for me when I started. She did a lot of good cataloguing work for me, almost single-handedly re-cataloguing the Roborough Reading Room Collection back in the 80s.
She was a lovely person – couldn’t have been further from the traditional stereotype of a librarian – lively, energetic, engaging. Your travels, so elegantly blogged were absorbing. I always admired her courage in tackling driving in all corners of Europe.
Jill impressed us with her sparkling personality, sensitivity, friendly manner, sense of humour, hospitality, and kindness. Her energy and passion for travelling with you to so many places and friends, captured in those numerous fascinating blogs, live in our memory. We realised what a blow it was when travels ended and Modestine departed. We got to know you through Jill and [my late wife’s] shared profession. […] I remember when you talked about “doing Europe” when you had the time and, my goodness, you certainly did! What a wonderful partnership you achieved, and it is all safely stored for others to revisit. I think that in time it will become a resource of great value to researchers wanting to track changes, both social and cultural.
[From a profoundly deaf library colleague who could not himself travel] You both have had a good life, travelling all over Europe and chronicling your ups and downs as Modestine drove across the continent east and west, south and north, and now a slowing down of pace.
[From a library friend in Germany] Next Tuesday I depart for a 10-day tour of the Baltic countries, so naturally I thought I would check your account of travels there with Modestine. I found out that you were there in 2008. I'm sure that things have changed there a lot since then but I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading your, or rather Jill's account of your travels there. It was so fascinating to re-read your diary, her style so readable and informative and personal. I don't suppose I will experience the half of what you did, it is an organized bus tour through the three Baltic countries so no comparison with a camping trip in Modestine but nevertheless I will be thinking of you both.
To friends in Rohrbach who have a holiday house above Lake Garda I recommended your account of your travels there. You see what a legacy Jill has left.
[From an American couple we met in the Languedoc and later in Morocco]. Jill was clever, articulate, adventurous, observant, and funny among many other attributes. It was my pleasure to know her.
As one friend has said, both Jill and Ian "brought a lot of joy to people's lives with your journey reports" a point of reference for many.
19th August 2005, Champagne sur Loue
Modestine has brought us to this little village of 120 souls situated at a height of about 250 meters on a bend of the River Loue in the foothills of the Jura mountains. It is a land of small villages and, as far as we can tell, an internet desert. Yesterday we cycled along the country lanes by the river to Arc et Senans, the nearest larger village which boasts the Saline Royale, a salt works designed as a model village by the visionary architect Claude-Nicholas LeDoux in the 1770s and now housing, in a typical French love of the Great Idea, a Centre pour le Futur. Even here there was no internet access.
We finally left England as planned on 10th August. Right up until the day before when we found the courage to make the final commitment of purchasing our Channel crossing we somehow couldn’t really believe that it would happen! It was such a massive relief when we stood on the deck of the Normandie, crossing from Portsmouth to Caen, to realise we really had done it and were on our way, with a whole year ahead of us to explore Europe, with no commitments forcing us to return. The crossing passed in a sort of haze. We kept thinking we’d wake up and discover it was a dream! We both realise there will be black moments as well as golden ones, but it’s all a very life enriching experience for us to share.
24 October 2005
In the afternoon we left Puy-en-Velay for Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille about twenty kilometres to the south, the sleepy little town where Robert Louis Stevenson purchased his donkey Modestine for 65 francs and a glass of brandy, before starting his famous twelve day journey through the Cevennes in 1878. We found a designated area for camping cars by the little medieval church of St. Jean on the Esplanade Sevenson, together with extremely clean facilities and a well-stocked Huit-à-Huit supermarket.
25 October 2005
We started our journey almost one month later than Stevenson and, so late in the year, the roads were empty of visitors. Our way wound on by-ways across an undulating landscape with pine-covered hilltops and higher mountains in the misty distance. Buildings were constructed in volcanic stone and there were dry-stone walls separating the fields and lining the roads. We passed through the village of St. Martin-de-Fougères where Stevenson had seen the church “crowded to the door, there were people kneeling outside on the steps, and the sound of the priest’s chanting came forth out of the dim interior”. When we passed through today the village was deserted but we were able to admire the striking gothic doorway to the little church.
2005-2019. 580 blog posts later:
Monday 15 April 2019
In the evening the dreadful fire in Notre-Dame was picked up by Yves on his mobile phone. We watched it live on television in disbelief. We gathered around the television, incredulous that this massive stone building in the heart of Paris was burning as we watched! Even over the 14 years of our recent travels we have visited the church several times and I can recollect the sense of awe entering through its massive doors as a six year old child. To see the tall spire burn and fall was stomach churning.
26th June 2019, Exeter
We recently returned from a couple of months travelling around France, seeking out our friends and revisiting places that have become dear to us over the years. Neither we nor Modestine are in as lively a condition as when we set out on our travels fourteen years ago and with the heavy pall of concern hanging over Europe concerning Britain’s role after Brexit, travel is becoming far less enjoyable that when we first retired. We count ourselves lucky that our travels coincided with the time when Europe was at its best. We were able to travel freely, people were welcoming, the Euro was worth 62p rather than the 89p of today and Europe was a safe and happy place in which to travel, explore, meet people and enjoy friendship and hospitality. We have been very privileged to have travelled when we did.
We have been relieved and surprised at how warm the welcome still is as we travel around. Of course we have friends, real friends who always make us feel welcome and by whom we are accepted almost as family. It still takes us by surprise, oppressed and depressed as we feel back in England at the constant stream of political rhetoric assailing us from the media. If we believed half of what we constantly hear back in England we’d be too nervous to think of crossing to our neighbours in France. The reality is that Europe still wants us to remain, even after we have all behaved so badly and so rudely towards them over the past two or three years. In one of the many colourful and lively street markets in southern France on our latest visit people were pleading with us not to leave, saying we were still welcome and needed. As if we had any say in the matter!!
Together we have celebrated Jill’s life and marked her very special presence in the world. You have committed her memory to your hearts for always. Now with enduring love, we take our leave. And as we say goodbye, let’s think of Jill and Ian, “fast companions”, who travelled hundreds of miles together in Robert Louis Stevenson’s footsteps, and, in his words from Travels with a Donkey “crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along … by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.”
Ian, Neil and Kate would like to thank everyone at Woodhayes who cared for Jill so well during her short stay. And a special thank you to everyone at the Coaver Club who were always so welcoming, supportive and understanding whenever Jill was there after her world had faded.
Thank you so much for your contributions to Exeter Food Bank. There is a box outside for whatever you’ve brought with you and, in case you didn’t get the message, there is a link to the Food Bank on the back of your service sheets. Jill would certainly have bought tins with her, possibly nearing their best-before date. And if you prefer you can make donations in Jill’s memory to Hospiscare, Dementia UK or Age UK, Exeter.
Jill will live on in your memories, in the stories you will tell; through her children and grandchildren; through the legacy of her writing. And you are all warmly invited to join Ian, Neil and Kate and all the family at the Coaver Club now where you can share your memories, tell your stories and talk about the Jill you knew. You’ll find more photographs there and the stone. And to send you on your way to the next stage of your celebration of Jill’s life, something French, Edith Piaf with "Non, je ne regrette rien".
There were about sixty people attending the celebration at the crematorium and about forty at the reception at the Coaver Club, including some who could not make it to the service. It was appropriate that the reception was held there, both because the staff were alwys so welcoming when it was the only place that Jill could manage to walk to, and also because our retirement party was held there in July 2005. It was a happy time with groups of friends and work colleagues reuniting, and even an impromptu musical performance from the Latin class of 1962/3 together with our Latin teacher at Colfe's Grammar School. Sixty years on, longer than I have known Jill, the words from the fifth verse (which few of the pupils could remember at assembly) seem appropriate:
And as through life we journey on,
Where'ere our lot be cast,
We'll ever prize the mem'ry bright
Of days long since gone past.
a thoughtful idea from Kate.
This lithic emoticon was made by Kate at Jill's suggestion,
at a time when Kate was finding it difficult to express her emotions.
Jill never knew it was later used as a secret sign of her own moods.
a re-enactment of the reunion at our retirement party in 2005.
Best before 26 June 2014. Disposed of 24 July 2024.
75 cans of food, 12 milk or fruit juice cartons,
8 jars of coffee, 6 packs of tea (700 bags),
11 packs of rice, pasta or cereals
and 50 toilet rolls (sheets not counted).
The total value of the goods contributed was about £200 and in addition £180 was donated to Exeter Foodbank online. This type of donation seemed to be a first for the funeral service and could be encouraged by other foodbanks. Once the donations to Hospiscare, Dementia UK and Age UK Devon are added in, your generosity has raised almost £1,000, a tangible testimony of the regard in which you hold Jill. I will ensure that we match this amount.
And so, Jill reached her final destination as she would have wished, with a warm embrace from family, friends and colleagues. For me it was a happy day; I was more emotional looking at the webcast and preparing this final blog than I was at the time. Once all the administrative details have been settled, I plan to revisit some of the places in the British Isles and Europe that came to mean a lot to us, so you may well see more of me. In the meantime, thank you so much for being with us on our travels, both with and without Modestine.
