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

Rejoice for a sister deceased,

Our loss is her infinite gain

A soul out of prison released,

And freed from its bodily chain …

as Charles Wesley so cheerfully said.

And cheerful is the abiding memory that Judy leaves behind.

Judy lived all her life with arthritis, and never ever talked about it. To anyone. She was fully signed up to the view of Epicurus that whatever situation you find yourself in, find something you can be thankful for and enjoy, and go for it 100%. Never mind the other things. She was the only person in the Western world who carried and gave birth to a child without telling anyone anything about it, other than mentioning to her husband once that she was pregnant.

Judy spent 2 years between the ages of 12 and 14 confined to bed in Wharfedale Children’ hospital. The treatment was to stay in bed and to stay away from her family. She never forgave the medical profession for abandoning her there. Here she learned to cope by developing a protective shell around her which never left her. She could never tell a lie – ever. She was dreadfully gauche – but you always knew that what she told you was the truth. However uncomfortable.

She messed up her Maths course at University, preferring to play cards, do the Guardian Cryptic crossword, and help run the Methodist Society. She was thrown out of Methodist International House in Manchester, for her involvement in a letter of protest to the Management about the way the manageress patronised the black students.

She never graduated, but became a Technical Abstractor, writing summaries of engineering papers for GEC. Then came the big break. She was taken on at the Manchester Business School as Mathematical Assistant to an aeronautical engineer Dr Winifred Hackett. They loved each other. Dr Hackett suggested that she might see whether computers would be useful for carrying out the mathematical analysis she was doing. Oh, they were, and her life changed for ever.

When she moved to Leeds to be near her mother, she got a series of short-term contracts in the Postgraduate School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Bradford. They needed someone to supervise programming in different research projects. Soon enough they created a personal post for her, whose job description was “To assist in the development of computer software at the request of Prof Howson.” That should cover most things.

She soon developed an unofficial personal advisory service to Arab Research students at the University, and noticed that many of them from different engineering departments had the same basic requirements to draw graphs of experimental data. She developed a comprehensive set of tools to produce a variety of technical charts which she made freely available. She wrote up the work she had been doing, and was awarded an M.Phil for her thesis.

Characteristically, she quarrelled with her supervisor, the professor of Computing, believing him to be mathematically incompetent and told him so. She re-read her thesis 4 years ago and said “I couldn’t have written it better myself”

Soon this software was being used all over the University and in other Northern Universities. When she wrote an article about her work in a prestigious American Electrical Engineering publication she was deluged by requests for her software from all over the world.

She had to either stop sending copies out, or find a way of formalising the distribution. She founded the Company Bradford University Software Services Ltd, and then began the happiest years of her life. She could spend all her time programming, and soon enough the Company was making enough money to take on staff.

They were the best people imaginable – completely committed to what she was doing, and just as fascinated by using IT to solve problems. She published a number of academic papers, including one on drawing a smooth curve though an arbitrary set of data points, which became known as Butland’s Algorithm.

Judy was rude, stubborn, difficult to work with, arrogant, and good at her job. We all loved her.

In 2005 Judy relocated to Bridlington where she enjoyed living next to the sea. For the last 3 years even when her memory went AWOL, she remained to the end extraordinarily cheerful. She had increasing difficulty walking, and died, exhausted by all the effort of living.