BY GINNY WARE Liz Roe
HELPING people comes naturally to Liz Roe and despite her own frailty, at the age of 80 she continues to put her heart and soul into meeting the needs of others.
could get involved with having been a teacher.
iz is probably best known for her local fundraising efforts for termi- nally ill children, helping to raise more than £400,000 during the 21 years she spent leading the Dartmouth and District Friends of the Children’s Hospice South West.
L
This is an exceptional achievement and involved many thousand hours of selfless hard work but Liz is modesty personified and only agreed to By The Dart singing her praises publicly to highlight the wonderful on-going work of the hospice. Liz’s husband Phil isn’t so retiring though, he’s full of admiration for his kind-hearted wife. ‘It’s the dedication she had for the hospice that I find so wonderful,’ he said. ‘Come rain or shine, she was out in it all doing whatever she could to raise money for the charity.’
As I sat sipping coffee in the
couple’s cosy cottage on Bayard’s Cove, Liz explained how she became involved in launching the local fund- raising group for the hospice. She has always had a soft spot for
children and, as a former headteacher at a big Birmingham comprehensive school, obviously has tremendous organisational skills, which she put to good use as leader of the group. She said: ‘I saw in Brian Lang-
worthy’s ice-cream shop a little sign saying Children’s Hospice South West and I thought this is something I
‘I was involved in a church-based children’s society but they announced they were going to allow homo- sexual couples to adopt children and I thought not with my help you’re not. I believe children deserve a mother and/or a father but not two of the same sex.
‘So I gave the hospice a ring and
Jill Farwell who started it all with her husband Eddie, happened to answer the phone. I explained that I didn’t know anything about the hospice so she invited me to come up to Little Bridge House and see. The hospice, in North Devon, was about to be opened.’
In fact the pair had met before, at Helen House Hospice near Stratford-upon-Avon, where Liz used to volunteer at weekends. Two of the Farwell’s three young children, Katie and Tom, had life-limiting illnesses and the family had to travel four hours from their home in North Devon to visit the Oxford-based hospice – then the only one of its kind in the country. Experiencing the difficulty of traveling so far with young children is what led the Farwell’s to found the Children’s Hospice South West, which now also runs hospices in Cornwall and near Bristol. Sadly, Jill died of breast cancer in 2004 but Liz remembers her with huge affection. ‘I was inspired by the most wonderful lady in the world,’ she said.
‘Jill was a lady who could inspire and teach in a word alone. She would come to our meetings and just say a few words and they would really inspire the group – that is some- thing we miss.’
After visiting Little Bridge House,
Liz returned to Dartmouth where she launched the fundraising group with friends Carol Harding and Vivian Nash. More than two decades later the group is still going strong, although Liz retired last year. She said: ‘It has been a joyful ride because I feel everything we have done has been successful to some degree. But our fundraising here wasn’t just me, it is everybody, everyone helps. At the start we three ran it for 12 months but we had a few more people join and they have all been wonderful. They’ve all played their own part in it. It’s the teamwork that’s so nice, that’s more important than anything I’ve done. ‘We had so many good friends and the goodwill of the town. All the shops and businesses have always helped as much as they can.
‘I opted out at the end of last October. I needed to stop. The hospice is still in my heart, I still have the bookstand outside my house and little things like that.
‘We have had a wonderful team and they still are a wonderful team. Phil has also been a great support all the way through, he will do anything and has helped with all sorts of things. ‘You can’t do anything on your own, it needs other people.’
As well as providing a welcome respite for parents of terminally ill children and a home-from-home for the visiting youngsters, it’s the caring ethos staff at Little Bridge House have that has made the biggest impression on Liz. Tragically, Liz and Phil’s son Peter, died in an accident when he was a young boy, and Liz knows only too well how isolating that can be. ‘Having lost a son I know people
Left: Stalwart charity worker, Liz Roe, with her book stall outside her home in Dartmouth’s Bayard’s Cove.
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