Angela Woodruff (10 Apr 1945 - 7 Oct 2018)

Angela was born on 10th April 1945 in the Aspland Maternity Home in Gee Cross, a part of Hyde, in the north east corner of Cheshire and close to Derbyshire and Lancashire - her parents were John Grundy and Kathleen (nee Platt). She was educated at the Manchester High School for Girls from where she went to Manchester University to take a degree in Law, graduating in 1966. During this period she developed her passion for French (one of her A-level subjects) and France, spending several summers 'au pairing' with families in Belgium and France. Her first 'date' with her future husband Phil (then known by his first name of David) Woodruff was at the Manchester Grammar School annual dance, travelling from Gee Cross on the usual trolley bus service, in 1961, although their relationship only developed a little later. Phil moved to the University of Warwick with the first group of students to start a PhD in 1965 while Angela started articles at a solicitor's practice in Manchester in 1967 having spent 6 months at the College of Law in London to obtain the Law Society examination qualifications needed to start her articles. It was during this period, at Christmas 1966, that Angela and Phil became engaged, agreeing they would not marry until the end of Angela's articles in 1969. However, it was in August 1968 that she suffered the first huge shock in her life when her father died suddenly from a heart attack while walking in the Lake District. Although he was 63 (Kathleen was 12 years younger) he had been extremely fit and the shock of his sudden death had a huge impact on Angela. Nevertheless, Angela and Phil were married in May 1969 as originally planned (but with a much smaller reception) immediately after she completed her articles, and after a honeymoon in Cornwall she started work as a solicitor at Moore and Tibbits in Warwick. Their first house was a small cottage in Moreton Morrell (purchased for £1625!) in which they installed central heating and a new kitchen. Encouraged by their success in building work restoring houses they then took on a rather more ambitious project by buying the shell of the Wagstaffe School in Harbury on 1st April (!) 1971. This was followed by one year of evenings and weekends working on the conversion, before moving into the building site with a few marginally habitable rooms in 1972. A complete set of rooms were finally occupied in 1973.
With the house in order a first holiday across the English Channel in a Triumph Spitfire, with weeks in Dordogne, Munich and Alsace (all visiting locations of Angela's pen-friends and au pair connections), was followed by the arrival of the rest of the family - Richard born in June 1974 and Matthew born in September 1975. This was in the time long before statutory maternity leave but she did take around 6 months leave for Richard's birth and it was during this period, pushing Richard in a pram around the village and meeting other new mothers in a similar situation, that she made good new friends whose friendship has endured through the intervening years. By contrast, with the perceived pressure of work, Matthew's arrival was fitted into a 3-week 'holiday'! Many more holidays in rented gites in rural France followed, many of these shared with the family of Janet and Chris Tovey, one of the original Harbury pram-pushers, only ending when the boys went to their respective universities (Southampton for Richard and Reading for Matthew). Angela also took up tennis again with the Harbury Tennis Club, playing league matches for the club, winning the club's mixed doubles competitions a couple of times, and acting as club treasurer for many years. Later, medical advice following hip surgery caused her to give up tennis but to return to hiking, particularly in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, with renewed vigour.
Angela was very much a 'people person', often saying that the best part of her job was meeting many different people and helping them with their problems. She was a great listener, and it was not only professionally that near-strangers would unburden themselves of their problems and life story to Angela at a first meeting. She was especially good at interacting with older people and always keen to help them in any way that she could.
1998 brought the second big tragedy in her life when her mother died. She was 81, so this might not have been so remarkable, except that Kathleen was extraordinarily fit and well, and her sudden death was not due to natural causes but to murder by Dr Harold Shipman. She was his last victim. As a result of their own 'detective' work Angela and Phil took evidence to the police of wrongdoing, and the resulting enquiry led to him being convicted not only of Kathleen's murder, but also of 14 other similar murders. The public enquiry that followed his conviction, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, came to the conclusion that he had murdered more than 200 patients. The impact on Angela of this event, and the 18 months of enquiries and trial, was profound and never left her. It may well have also contributed to her third tragedy when, not very long after she retired in 2011, the first signs of Azheimer's disease became apparent, ultimately leading to her death. She leaves not only husband Phil and their two sons, Richard and Matthew, but also three grandchildren, Sophie, Emma and Jack.