Reverend Canon Barbara Bilston (15 Jun 1935 - 5 Apr 2025)

Reverend Canon Barbara Bilston's funeral is being live streamed on the Bacton Benefice face book page via: https://facebook.com/bactonbenefice.

Revd. Canon Barbara Bradley Bilston, née Sheldon, was born 15 June, 1935, to a working-class family in Bollington, Cheshire. “Close to the cotton mills of Lancashire,” she would later write, in an evocative memoir she produced for her family during Covid, Bollington stands also “on the very edge of the hills of Derbyshire.” Her father Frank labored as a coal miner as a young man, while her mother Ada was chief tester for the Fine Cotton Spinners. After the couple married in 1929, Frank found better paid work at Ferodo’s brake-lining company, though the journey to Chapel-en-le-Frith wasn’t easy:

It involved him riding his motor bike 11 miles each way over lonely Pennine roads every working day, winter and summer, through snow and rain. During the 2WW which followed, that meant 364 days a year – they got Christmas Day as a holiday. It was shift work and it was hard work, and the journey, especially through the blackout was terrifying, but it was better paid than the pay in the cotton mills.

Barbara always closely associated the “dark Satanic Mills” of William Blake’s “And Did Those Feet” with the landscape of her childhood.

The cottage in which she spent her toddlerhood was cramped: it had “a small living room, then up 2 steps to the kitchen which just had a Belfast sink, and a small pantry off. Upstairs there were 2 bedrooms, with a small landing between. No bathroom, no indoor toilet, no electricity, though there was gas.” Facilities were decidedly primitive: “The privy was down the yard, and up 8 steep steps, but at least it was ours. Many cottages shared a privy. When I was about 3 my parents managed to afford to have it replaced with a water closet. They were thrilled, but I remember being rather frightened of the loud whoosh when it was flushed.”

Two events were pivotal in her childhood. The first was a traumatic injury to her eye; Barbara fell onto a stick. The second was the outbreak of War in 1939. The two became terribly connected in her memory because her injured eye required regular visits to the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, and the city was under bombardment. Barbara was, to the end of her life, set on edge by the sound of a siren. She vividly described the experience of hiding in the cold cave that functioned as a bomb shelter near her home and the blank terror of going into (and out of) Manchester for weekly appointments. The Eye Infirmary kept moving in response to casualty numbers and bombings, so they were never quite sure where it would be; once, she fell over smoking rubble and dislocated her knee and had to be carried through the streets to the hospital. The Infirmary’s basement, where most appointments were held, was terrifying, a largely unlit maze – and then there was the awful smell of the gas masks, which they had to keep with them at all times: “They were rubbery and they steamed up inside, especially if you wore glasses . . . I could never understand why they were helpful. I couldn’t breathe in mine. Even if they protected you from the gas, you would die of rubbery asphyxiation.”

During the war, evacuee children stayed with them in Bollington and with nearby relatives. But their house was so tiny it was hard to accommodate them – until Barbara and her parents moved to a farm, called Long Lane, which had been occupied by a family of Russian refugees who’d fled the Revolution in 1917. Here, and with a little more space, they were able to welcome a mother and sister, the Bergheimers, Jewish refugees who’d lost the rest of their relatives to the gas chambers. The families remained friendly for decades.

After the war, Barbara’s life changed profoundly. The Education Act of 1944 made grammar school education (private, fee-paying) accessible to those who passed an entrance exam. Barbara was one of the very first children to pass the “11 Plus,” so she left her village school and entered Macclesfield Girls Grammar. She began in September 1946, as the war ended, exceptionally proud of “my new school uniform with a satchel (not a gas mask).” Here she made friends, particularly with the young teachers. Three became close friends for life, and it was after spirited conversations with them about religion that she decided to leave the Methodism in which she had been raised and become an Anglican. She also decided to pursue a college education, in the teeth of her family’s derision. “Eh, Bunty! Twenty -- and still at school?” her aunts would snort (“Bunty” was her nickname). Undaunted, Barbara took off for the University of Leicester, then Manchester University, entering a very different world in the process: “I even had to slide down from a hay cart to go to Manchester University for the degree ceremony.” Her mother was supportive, though her father was not. Dubious of the whole enterprise, he told her she must leave university when he learned two Nigerian students were in her seminar-group. He was nonplussed when she refused.

After university, Barbara went into social work, and her stories of life in the asylums and homes for domestic abuse survivors in the 1950s and ‘60s were heart-rending. On one astonishing occasion, she stumbled across a relative of her own, Lizzie Kirk, who had been admitted for post-partum depression and then abandoned for a full sixty years. Barbara was also required to lie on patients undergoing ECT, to prevent them from injuring themselves. About the only positive thing that came out of the experience was that she learned how to make a perfect “hospital bed,” she later explained, wryly -- “mitre the corners of a sheet, and you must remember that the open end of a pillowcase must ALWAYS point AWAY from the door.” (She was rather disappointed that her own family did not follow Matron’s Rules.)

After a stint at the London School of Economics, Barbara worked in Wandsworth as a social case worker, then moved into hospital social work at University College Hospital, followed by a job training social work students at the North London Polytechnic. “There were six applicants for two posts,” she explained, “I got one, and a friendly chap called Bill Bilston got the other.” They were married in 1972 and settled in Suffolk; their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1973. (Bill died, tragically young, in 1982.)

Barbara loved social work education, and she absolutely thrived working – as she did next, and for several decades -- for the Open University. As an OU tutor, she was committed to spotting and encouraging talented women, particularly those who’d pursued motherhood early and, in later life, sought new intellectual and professional opportunities. Barbara’s job took her all over the UK and Europe, across Scotland, Ireland, and France in particular, as well as to Cintra House in Cambridge and the OU’s main office in Milton Keynes. She positively enjoyed her commutes. She served on Assessment boards, liaised with social work agencies in her region, and managed and supported other tutors. She remained deeply concerned, in all her work, with threats to children and society’s most vulnerable; a flavour of her commitment to child protection may be read on the OU’s website and in the Church Times.

In 1990 Barbara became a Reader in the Anglican Church and, around the time of her (reluctant) retirement from the OU, and after General Synod’s vote to ordain women, she was ordained, first as Deacon in 1997 then as Priest in 1998. At this point she embarked on what was effectively a second career, drawing on her skills and training in social work to enhance and deepen her ministry. She represented the clergy on the diocesan safeguarding panel and as a volunteer safeguarding trainer; she was a member of the diocesan board of patronage, a ministry reviewer, and a founder member of the mid-Suffolk Voluntary and Statutory Partnership for women on mental health. She came to see churches as a valuable, even critical resource for identifying and supporting our most vulnerable. Barbara served as Rural Dean of Stowmarket for 13 years and was made an Honorary Canon of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2012.

Throughout the course of her near-ninety years, Barbara was fiercely determined and committed to doing what she believed to be right, as all who knew her will attest. She barely noticed her age and remained devoted to ministry to the very end. She was deeply proud of her three grandchildren and threw herself into learning about their lives – even though they were unfolding half-a-world-away, in the US -- with enthusiasm. Covid she viewed as an opportunity to learn new skills, and she thoroughly enjoyed learning how to run services with PowerPoint and audio on Zoom. She absolutely loved technology of all kinds: her mother was one of the first in their small Cheshire community to embrace the washing machine and the television, and Barbara was surely one of the first in hers to embrace the Apple Watch, the iPad, iPhone and more. She had a powerful sense of humour, a lively sense of the ridiculous, and an abiding interest in history and politics. She will be inexpressibly missed by Sarah, her daughter; her son-in-law, Daniel Markovits; her grandchildren, Maisie, Rosa, and Karl; her goddaughter, Katie Higginbottom, and by her many, many dear friends and colleagues from the world of social work, the Open University, the Church, and the wider East Anglian community.

Barbara Bilston died on 5 April 2025 at the West Suffolk Hospital, aged 89 years.