I’m thrilled The Guardian has seen fit to publish this obituary of my friend and colleague of 23 years, Gill Stoker, on its website today, the day Gill would have turned 70.
As regular readers will know, Gill died in February, nine months after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour.
She was a remarkable woman. Although I knew her for more than two decades as a colleague at Mary Evans Picture Library, where she applied her deep knowledge of history, literature, music and poetry, and great expertise in English grammar, to everything she did, she remained a bit of an enigma.
Always cheerful and polite, and happy to chat about interests in common, especially opera about which she knew a great deal, she kept her home and work lives quite separate. So none of us know very much about her life beyond Mary Evans.
That began to change after her husband Richard died unexpectedly in early 2021, and Gill asked me if I would help her establish a charitable trust in his memory. I had no idea quite how eminent a composer and teacher of composition Richard had been. As his Guardian obituary, written by Gill, explains, in 1962 he won a scholarship to study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris, around the time that such luminaries of the music world as Daniel Barenboim and Philip Glass were also taking lessons at Mlle. Boulanger’s piano.
Gill was working at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, when she replied to an advert placed in the window of a shop on Floral Street for a singer to work with a composer on some jazz numbers. She met Richard and they fell in love. Recordings they made together lay hidden at home until after her death. I was hunting for inspiration for the music for her funeral - she left no instructions as she was determined she would beat the tumour somehow - when I found them. Her exquisite rendition of James Taylor’s Fire and Rain brought gasps and tears from friends and colleagues at her funeral.
Born in Derby in 1954, like many girls of her generation, her aspirations were initially thwarted by parents fearful of the rapid social upheavals of the 1960s. Despite excelling at school, she was obliged to make do with a secretarial course, ‘useful and safe’ in her mother’s words.
She spent two years at Derby College of Art and Technology, but she managed to add French to her studies and by the time she completed the course was proficient in shorthand in both English and French.
As soon as she was done she fled to London, supporting herself with a series of secretarial jobs and enrolling at Birkbeck, University of London, where over the course of 12 years from 1982 she took Bachelors and Masters degrees, before completing her PhD on the life and work of the illustrator Sir John Tenniel.
As the Guardian obituary mentions, although she spent 21 years as an associate lecturer at the Open University, it was relatively late in life that she had her greatest success as a teacher: teaching English to overseas students via Youtube, where she now has almost 2 million subscribers. It’s no exaggeration to say that in her sixties, Gill became an internet sensation.
Her latest lesson, published just this week (Josh at engvid.com, who produced Gill’s lessons, tells me there are still another 12 in the pipeline), begins hilariously with her explanation of the idiom ‘a closed book’. She could almost be describing herself, such was her modesty about her achievements and reluctance to talk about herself.
Gill’s friends outside work were as surprised as I was to discover just how much she did with her life:
When she heard two male acquaintances belittling the composer Ethel Smyth for the way she spoke and dressed, Gill decided to write a one woman play about her life which, having gained an acting diploma from Rose Bruford College, she toured around the country. It gave her enormous pleasure in recent years to see Smyth’s reputation restored to its rightful place, with a production of her opera The Wreckers, performed at Glyndebourne in 2022, and her Mass in D being sung at the Proms.
Gill also threw herself into all manor of community initiatives: becoming involved with The Blackheath Poetry Society, Lee Fair Share and Lee Forum among others. In the week she died, a local referendum calling on Lewisham and Greenwich councils to take into account the wishes of local people as expressed in the Lee Neighbourhood Plan, won a huge majority.
And her love of poetry inspired her to establish and curate Poems and Pictures, a section of the Mary Evans website where Gill published poems inspired by a picture from the collection at the rate of one a week. Since her illness, that project has been rather neglected, but today, to mark her 70th birthday, Poems and Pictures was re-launched with a poem by Elly Nobbs, which I know Gill would have loved. Now running for nine years, the site is home to more than 400 poems and we will be continuing the project in her memory.
Gill grew up an only child in Derby and often wondered what life would have been like if she’d had siblings. In her forties, after the death of her father, she came upon a letter that her mother had hidden away years earlier, from a sister who had been given up for adoption eight years before Gill was born. Assuming her mother would have resisted making contact, Gill set up a secret meeting between the three of them. It went well and Gill gained a sister, Vivien, with whom she would speak on the telephone weekly. And Vivien brought with her three daughters: Gill had found the family she’d long wondered about.
In May of last year, with great progress being made setting up The Richard Stoker Trust, Gill reported problems with her keyboard: she was perfectly able to type, but for some reason the the screen was showing gobbledegook. It took a couple of replacement keyboards before I realised there was nothing wrong with the computer.
She suddenly became very ill, and after her GP received back the results of a blood test, an ambulance was sent to her house. Unable to rouse her, the fire brigade were called. They managed to gain access through an open window to find Gill asleep in bed. She was taken immediately to Lewisham Hospital where, while investigating the cause of her haemoglobin levels having fallen to 50 per cent, a mass the size of a golf ball was discovered in her brain.
Three weeks later she was well enough to endure eleven hours of surgery at Kings’ College Hospital during which most of the tumour was removed. She clearly remembered being woken three times during the operation so the surgeon could check he wasn’t causing harm to the part of the brain that controls language. The surgeon was Portuguese, so naturally, with a great chunk of her skull temporarily removed, she chatted to him in Portuguese. Did I mention that Gill was also an exceptional linguist?
Two weeks after surgery, and still not at all well, we got the news via a skype call that Gill’s tumour was a Glioblastoma, and therefore incurable. Nonetheless she rallied, getting herself well enough for 15 consecutive daily visits to Guy’s Cancer Centre for palliative radiotherapy in August and September. Each day, with one friend or another, she would travel on the train from Lee to London Bridge and make the short walk to Guys, where the staff we fabulous. Surgery and radiotherapy gave Gill a few extra months, but in November she started going downhill once again.
Towards the end of the year we managed to persuade her to move into residential care. But Gill wasn’t done yet. After a week during which she struggled to adapt to life in the wonderful Leah Lodge, she managed to escape. After an hour of panic, but an impressive emergency mobilisation of friends, we found her at home lying on her bed, sending us messages to say how good it felt to be home.
Gill never saw home again. After Christmas her condition deteriorated very rapidly, but she died peacefully, and without pain on 13th February.
After her diagnosis she was thrilled that so many of her friends, none of whom were previously known to each other, had rallied round to support her. Staff at Leah Lodge, where she spent her last weeks, said they’d never know a resident have so many visitors.
In her final weeks, as well as the exceptional care she got from the care home staff, her GP, Helen Butler, and nurses from St. Christopher’s Hospice were all exceptional. If you’d like to make a donation to St Christopher’s in Gill’s memory you can do do here.
One morning last August, on the train to Guy’s with Gill, she looked at me and said:
‘once this is all over we’ll have to have big party, in Philippa’s lovely garden. Wouldn’t that be great?’
We will have that party, and it will be great. But Gill won’t be there. And it won’t be the same.