Our mother, Gillian Maddison was a pioneering craftsperson and inspirational teacher. Born in south London to Charles and Florence Prickett, Gillian was artistic and musical from an early age. She learnt the piano and violin, travelling weekly with her sister Valerie to classes at the Royal Academy of Music. She never lost her love of music and even the week before her death, badly affected by dementia, she sang in tune and clapped in time to a pianist organised to play at her birthday celebration. Badly disrupted by the War, she was evacuated, moving billet many times. Going to Art School wanting originally to be a jewellery designer/maker, her mother pressured her to move into teacher training as a more secure career. She graduated from the London Institute of Education and started teaching Art, which she continued up until her retirement. She met her husband, Alan, doing Christmas Post Office work as a student. They married in 1952. Gillian was a gifted art teacher, offered an advisory post whilst in her first job (which she declined as she felt she didn’t have enough experience). Returning to study, Gillian was tutored by Geoffrey Deeley at the-then Regent Street Polytechnic, in sculpture and lettering. She took up a free-lance career alongside part-time teaching. During the 1970s and 80s Gillian taught at Reigate County School for Girls, always concerned to give Art the same status as the school’s academic focus, with an unrelenting focus on high quality pupil effort and outcomes. Her teaching career - in her view - reached its pinnacle when she was appointed to teach at the City and Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, where she taught a number of now well-known lettering practitioners. She took a particular interest in those who were making lettering their second career, or who faced financial or other challenges. As a practitioner, she had a distinctive, fluid and highly visual style, built on painstaking layouts. Major commissions include works for St Clement Danes Church in the Strand and the NEC in Birmingham. Gillian joined the National Association of Master Masons in the 1970s, their only woman practitioner member, regularly winning a stream of professional awards. Her critical views about machine-made and mass-produced memorials sat alongside her passion for encouraging young crafts-people and improving the standards for their craft. She also created memorials in churchyards across the country and she was an influential figure in the renaissance of the art of making stone memorials. She has work in St Martin’s Church (Dorking), the Parish Church at Farley Hill, and St Michael’s Church (Barford St Michael). She was an early supporter of Memorials by Artists, now based at Snape Maltings, an organisation dedicated to creating high-quality, individualised memorials. Some of her best work is for individuals she knew well personally. Gillian and Alan moved to Barford St Michael in the 1990s from Dorking (where they had lived for 40+ years) where she threw herself into village life and made many friends. A lifelong Methodist, Gill attended Chapel and also joined the WI. She died after a short illness in Highmarket House in Banbury where she had enjoyed a year of great care and nurture from the staff, as you can see in some of the photos on this site. Sarah and Elizabeth