Lesley Hayes (née Holcroft, Class of 1964) One Saturday at the beginning of June 2017, a small party got together in rural Herefordshire, at Belmont Abbey. It was a special occasion. On the first anniversary of Lesley’s death, her third son Oliver wanted to sing - alone, unaccompanied and largely invisibly - the plainsong Latin Requiem Mass for both his parents. Bereft, Lesley’s husband, Brian had done his very best to soldier on without her, but only six months after her death, he had suffered such a bad stroke that recovery became impossible. One of the Belmont fathers said the Mass, quietly and simply, while Oliver’s lovely voice soared through the dark pillars behind the altar and into the abbey church, bringing a special poignancy to those old familiar prayers: “Requiem aeternam…; Libera me, Domine…;, In paradisum…”. At the end, we followed him out to the hillside where Lesley and Brian are buried, and we all sang the Salve Regina together, in the breezy sunshine.


That night, we had a dinner never to be forgotten, when Lesley and Brian’s children entertained us with the warmth, the munificence, the loud discussions and the hilarity their parents had taught them. There was no solemn mourning, no overt grief. That was only to be expected: even at the funerals, the previous year, there had been nothing but stoicism and warmth. As lovely Rebecca had remarked, with tremendous determination: “Don’t be nice to me, or I’ll cry”. Ma always said, “You can cry at weddings but Never Cry at Funerals”.


Some time later, Hilary Mantel was delivering the Reith Lectures on the radio. While talking about her own grandmother she declared that “women with ten children do not have biographies”. It was an annoying sentence. Lesley had ten children, and her life was full, fascinating and very important, to many people. Do only those with loud public profiles deserve biography? Perhaps so. However, Lesley’s life merits recognition, so, while this is not a biography, nor even a conventional obituary, it is at least an acknowledgement that she lived, though it may be far too short, patchy, unofficial, possibly inaccurate, and personal.


Born 10th January 1946, she was the oldest of the three children of Oliver and Gabrielle Holcroft of Worcestershire. She had two little brothers. The older, Patrick, is now Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire and a delightful man: the younger was Harry, a traveller and water-colourist, always known to us as Flash, whose early death in India, a couple of years ago, caused Lesley immense sadness.


Nobody who saw her perform as Mr. Toad in a school production at St. Leonard’s has ever forgotten it. It might have been an early intimation of the strength and inherent optimism and cheerfulness of her character. At Mayfield she was always on the edge of naughtiness. Our contemporaries occasionally disappeared amidst rumours of drunkenness or mysterious sexual aberration, but we existed just below the expulsion level showing off outrageously in singing lessons (with appalling ham accents), dyeing our hair orange in the dead of night or managing to miss games for years on end.


That last came about because I smashed my thumb in a car door at the same time that she developed water on the knee. These two afflictions allowed us never again to engage in team sports of any kind. We would instead drift about looking for butterflies. My own interest in lepidoptera was casual, but Lesley became a real expert.


She was also an expert stamp-collector, and would attend the Stanley Gibbons fairs in London where quite often she was the only woman. She knew what she wanted, and she usually got it. She didn’t easily pass her driving-test, however. The first time, she drove right through a sign saying “Pershore Welcomes Careful Motorists”. At her second attempt, she failed to do an emergency stop and killed a cat. She was often the hero/victim of extraordinary events. There are enough stories about her to fill this magazine, but just one more will have to do. Soon after leaving school, she went with three friends in a Mini to drive round the world. They got to Spain, and had a bad accident, which left Lesley in hospital. Her only visitor was a fellow who had heard that this English girl had broken her back and thought he should see her. He proved to be the Duke of Windsor. Apparently he wasn’t much help.


She married Brian and, over the course of 20 odd years, gave birth to eight boys and two gorgeous girls, my god-daughter Rebecca and the last of them all, little Decima. All the boys are lovely, too, I should certainly add. They moved house quite often, finding places of increasingly uncertain plumbing, but bursting with history. From the haunted Manor at Gayton (where Lesley always swore she saw a solemn monk walk straight through a wall), to the pre-conquest castle at Holt to the crumbling elegance of Cagebrook, their homes were vast, draughty and full of children. Their London residence was a houseboat named, appropriately enough, Toad Hall. Nothing about their lives together ever seemed remotely boring.


From the point of view of her contemporaries, however, her real gift was friendship. She was extremely good at that. She would phone, slightly hesitantly, late at night, and if you seemed to be awake, she could talk for hours, pausing only occasionally to top up her glass. She came to every single one of our many reunions over the years and regaled us with stories and jokes. Her life wasn’t always easy, by any means, but she confronted everything head-on. She was an excellent, generous cook, magnificent company and a friend to be relied on in every circumstance. Her laugh will never be forgotten by any of us, and I am not alone in seriously missing those long, trusting, intimate, life-affirming, late-night calls. On this earth, there are dozens, hundreds of people whose lives are better for knowing her, and as for Heaven, it will surely be a much happier place with her in it.


(Sue Gaisford, née Speak, Class of 1964)


Faith Moore (née Stevens, Class of 1965) Faith was born on the 26th March 1947 and was one of five sisters who attended St Leonards and Mayfield. She left Mayfield in 1965 and trained at the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College in Kensington Square. She became a primary school teacher and taught at St Mary's The Mount in Walsall from 1975 – 2010. Faith is remembered for her huge sense of fun, positivity, generosity and wisdom.


Many OCs attended her requiem including her family Clare Wright (Class of 1960), Christian Dooley (Class of 1961), Antonia Stenner-Evans (Class of 1967), and Mary Stevens (Class of 1971), her sister-in-law Nicky Stevens (nee Allen, Class of 1969), her niece Antonia McGall (née Stevens, Class of 1993) and Janie Briggs (née La Coste, Class of 1965), Niam McAleer (Class of 1965) and Amanda Platt (née Harding, Class of 1965). She died of cancer on the 3rd July 2017 and leaves husband Patrick, sons Ben, Matthew, Daniel and Tom, daughters-in-law Alex, Siobhan and Charlotte, and grandaughters Orla, Clemmie, Mhairi, and Tabbie.


OC The Old Cornelian SUMMER 2017 51


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64