Obituary: Gillian Allison Owen (born Darwent) 11/9/1961-12/6/2009 “For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” William Shakespeare Gill was not a perfect human being, but she aspired to be one. She was a brilliant, inspiring, compassionate teacher of English Literature, and a wonderful wife and mother. She won many honours. At seven years of age she wrote a short story good enough to win an adult writing competition. She won a place at Wadham College, Oxford, where she studied under Terry Eagleton. In her twenties she was judged “best young teacher in the west of England” while an English teacher and head of Drama at Helston School in Cornwall. She became Assistant Chief Examiner for the Cambridge Board of Examiners while working at Ernesford Grange Comprehensive School in Coventry. Yet her expectations of herself were so great that she felt a failure in not becoming something like a minister for education. She was very frustrated that her health was never robust enough for her to advance further with her career. These very real achievements were small victories compared to the winning of the hearts and minds of so many children, where she particularly excelled in bringing a passion for Shakespeare to disadvantaged children from the inner city. Working for the Prince’s Trust, she ensured that large numbers of Coventry children had the chance to see Shakespeare performed at Stratford. More controversially, she was persuaded to write the first SATS paper on Shakespeare for the National Curriculum. Perhaps her finest achievement came last spring, working at the Oxford Community School. In just three months she took her group of children to an extraordinary level of performance in the regional competition of the project “Stand up for Shakespeare” run by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was what Peter Brooke called “Holy Theatre,” an improvisation based on many Shakespeare plays, which focused on Shakespeare’s fools and the skull of Yorick. Two of her students were chosen to be part of the first National Youth Ensemble at the R.S.C, performing at Stratford and working alongside people like David Tennant. There has been a terrible price to pay for her meteoric career. Gill burned out. She always pushed herself harder than her vulnerable physical frame would allow. She had survived the loss of two brothers in the womb. It left her with an undiagnosed heart defect and an overactive brain. It is only now with major breakthroughs in prenatal and perinatal psychology and psycho-neuro-immunology that we are beginning to realise the effects of very early experiences on our later lives and how to respond to them therapeutically. We are compelled, like characters in Shakespearian tragedy, to act out these early imprints in our grown up relationships. Gill found the template for her lost brothers in two intensely close friends at school, Geoffrey Quilley and Tristan Humphries. Tristan became a famous painter, perhaps best known for his portrait of the prime minister of Australia, and Geoff became a leading art historian at the London Maritime Museum. Gill married Geoff but remained very close to Tristan. After Tristan died, Gill began a major project in his memory using both literature and visual art around the theme of an early English alphabet and associated texts. I quote from one of the works: “D” was a drunk and had a red face, is on the covering cloth. On the glass below “If sack and sugar be a fault God help the wicked” is inscribed above a model of Falstaff, tucked inside a wooden box, surrounded by many bottles. Tristan died very young and tragically from alcohol abuse. Geoff then abandoned Gill and her two small boys for Tristan’s widow. Gill never fully recovered from the recapitulated twin abandonment. She could not bear to survive again alone. Her heart and mind were cracked if not yet broken. She was unable to work for a while, returning to live in Surrey with her parents. Then she worked part time as educational consultant and then teacher at the The Warwick School. She recovered enough to marry Nick Owen, a poet, psychotherapist and photographer, in 2004 in a druid ceremony among the megaliths of Avebury at the winter Solstice. Together Nick and Gill founded “Wychwood Poetry and Pictures,” a group for people creating art work including both visual and literary media. She moved to Over Norton in Oxfordshire and took a job at the Oxford Community School. Her health increasingly began to fail her, and she missed many lessons. Yet in spite of this limited attendance one of the school’s leadership team members observed that she had never known a teacher so beloved by both students and colleagues. She saddled herself with too much of the burden of shame and guilt the school felt in failing to reach Government performance targets. She was an old fashioned teacher, brilliant, inspirational, committed to reach the hearts and minds of even the most damaged Afghan asylum seekers. She drew raw real poetry from children who hardly knew how to write English. She could never have become a “curriculum deliverer” in a New Labour dystopia. In December last year she had a heart attack, and although she recovered enough to begin work again part time, her heart kept failing her. Time away from work at least enabled her to connect ever more deeply with husband Nick and her sons, Joel and Caleb. On Friday 12 of June 2009, she died very suddenly, while preparing for a dinner party. “Out, out brief candle” She is deeply missed. Her alphabet remains to be finished by her family.