She wouldn’t have welcomed it, believing that what she did mattered, not who she was, but Judy was welcomed into the Hall of Fame on her birthday 2019 as Woman Engineer of the Week see https://www.facebook.com/pg/WES1919/posts. She would have been more pleased that she was associated there with Winifred Hackett Woman of the week 98. She respected her as she respected no-one else. Including her husband.

See

I’ve just been looking again at the service used at Judy’s funeral – the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

The vocabulary was rich and strange, the spelling crazy and the grammar challenging – but it was magnificent. It was so alien to the let’s pretend world we live in.

It contains no reference from beginning to end to Judy by name and very little to her at all. Just to a brother departed – which the Rector amended to sister. He is an out and out women’s liberationist and could not help himself tampering.

Judy would have liked the anonymity. She would not have objected hugely to have been mistaken for a brother.

As we sang so well “And we are to the margin come, and we expect to die”. That is a cheerful thought from a certain perspective.

Judy’s funeral was as good as it could have been. It was a very Ecumenical service held in a friendly Salvation Army Hall, and led by the Rector of Bridlington Priory Church using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The music was led by the Priory Organist and Choirmaster and we sung good Methodist hymns. The congregation consisted of Salvationists, Anglicans, Methodists, Romanists,Theosophists, IHaveNoIdeaists, Atheists, Moslems and Vegetarians.

And we sang well. Apart, maybe, from an imbalance between the tenors and basses. We listened again to the Good Lord’s favourite language – Elizabethan/Jacobean English, with its strong metaphors and deep seriousness. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is good on the relative inconsequentiality of our daily anxieties and is not very impressed by our attempts to play Let’s Pretend. The Whiteley family came in force, BUSS stalwarts met again with their customary camaraderie, and Judy’s local and distant friends assembled to remember her and to celebrate her departure.

One of the best things about it was that no-one started to even hum I did it my way

to be continued