One year ago tomorrow my dear wife of 53 years passed away with a brain tumour. This website would not be what it is without her contribution in many ways. She was the love of my life.
Lynne was born at the end of the 2nd world war to a couple in Liverpool. The marriage did not last long and Lynne’s mother returned to her parents in Burnley, so she was reared largely by her grand parents, as her mother chose to work and let her mother, Lynne’s grandmother, stay at home. Lynne’s grandad was a tackler in the cotton mill, right across the road from his house in Burnley.
Being a bright child, Lynne’s grandparents were keen to see her progress, enrolling her for ballet lessons and then when that failed after another student pirouetted into her, so that she ended up with a cut forehead, piano lessons. She was sent to the local Baptist church where she learned a lot about the Bible, and won various prizes with her Bible knowledge. After passing the 11 plus exam, which all children took in those days, she was sent to the local girls high school, the equivalent of the boys grammar school.
Her closest friend at school was Gerald’s cousin Judith, who eventually took her along to the Methodist youth club of Gerald’s family’s church. She was 14 when they met there and within a year or two they were close friends, getting engaged at 19 while Lynne was at teacher training college in Bingley, just over the border in Yorkshire.
Gerald was at Art College in Burnley then, but had cleaned offices to save up for a Lambretta scooter, and soon they were getting together every weekend, especially after Gerald was at Leeds University to gain his post graduate teaching qualification.
That scooter took Lynne to see her first thatched cottages in Devon, and eventually even to Paris where Gerald worked one summer painting.
Both of them finished their teaching courses together; Lynne gaining a teaching post near Hipperholme Grammar school near Halifax, where Gerald had found work. They graduated from the scooter to an old mini van then and the scooter was retired. Their first home was a cottage on a farm near Haworth in Yorkshire very near to “Wuthering Heights”, the farm on the moors, of Emily Bronte fame. The moors became the location of their many walks.
It was in that cottage that they heard something on the radio that brought them to begin reading the Bible, and within a couple of years they were baptised and members of the Church of God, which is mentioned several times in the New Testament. Marcus was born in 1972 and Guy followed three years later, just after their arrival in Australia.
Both ended up teaching in NSW, though Lynne only started teaching after raising the boys on their hobby farm for several years. After 13 years though, they returned to the UK for family reasons, and both ended up teaching again, this time Lynne becoming a travelling Gypsy teacher until the government funds were withdrawn and Lynne was offered early retirement aged 50! Meanwhile Gerald had become an unpaid ordained minister – looking after a group which he founded, called the Northwest Church Of God, in Britain.
The early retirement with pension access suited Lynne very well as they had just bought an old farmhouse with some fields and barns, in Wales, from where Gerald commuted to his school near Manchester.
Always Lynne helped Gerald with his ministry, and the church website, one of the very first church websites, typing out very many of Gerald’s hand written articles, which still appear on the Ozwitness website, today.
Eventually the boys were old enough to go their own way and zoom – it was off to Australia once more for them! As soon as they were married and began to have children , Lynne said it was high time to return to Australia too, and so Lynne truly became the patriarch of the family’s emigration to this great land, which she has thoroughly enjoyed exploring, from the red centre through to its to it’s circumference, until finally settling in Dunsborough, in which they had enjoyed many happy holidays.
Few people could have had a happier varied life and achieve the wonderful peace that Lynne has displayed with her beautiful smile even until almost the very end of her life. We thank God for that and today celebrate Lynne’s life and future in the Kingdom of God, for Lynne had found in the Bible a clear explanation of a glorious future for all mankind who have ever lived.
Thank you Lynne for all those wonderful years.