Kathleen Jill Bower (2 Mar 1938 - 31 Mar 2022)

In loving memory of Kathleen Jill Bower who sadly passed away on 31st March 2022 in Southampton,
after a few months living with pancreatic cancer.

Jill is survived by her husband Kenneth Goldsmith and her children from her first marriage, her daughter Sarah and her son Clinton, and their children who called her “Nana by the Sea”.

Jill was born 2nd March 1938 in Greenford, Middlesex only child to parents Kathleen and Henry “Harry” Codling. She remembered vividly being evacuated with her family during WWII to Carlisle, as a young girl and helping a to deliver milk by horse drawn cart. After the war her family returned to London where she left school to work for Glaxos until her first marriage to Roy Bower (deceased). After which they moved out of London to Buckinghamshire where she become a devoted mother to her children.

During her Early life she was a keen ballet dancer and always regretted that she could not continue it as a career due to juvenile arthritis. She found a way to dance however through finding ballroom dance clubs wherever she lived. Jill was also a talented pianist, and although she played most of her life for pleasure, she was also an accompanist for music examinations and for choral societies. She was still playing regularly into her 80s.

Jill always had a great talent for trying her hand at new things and when her children were older she took a parttime job as lithographic print maker for Frosts of Henley. During her time in the area friends introduced her and her first husband to sailing and they both studied hard to gain their yachtmasters certificates. Family holidays became south coast based around sailing trips and she had fond memories of the West Country where her parents retired to.

After her first marriage was dissolved, she moved to Southampton to pursue her love of sailing and for many years had a part share in a yacht, spending half the year sailing the South Coast & Channel and travelling all over the Mediterranean including in Greece, Turkey and France and was an active sailor into her early sixties.

From these adventures she made a great many friends through boating and through ballroom dancing which is how she met her second husband Kenneth. They were married in 2015 in St. James Methodist church, Shirley, Southampton. They were both still dancing at that time and showed-up many half their age with a foxtrot and waltzes at their wedding celebration.

“Jilly” will be remembered for her great love of life, music, dance and the sea, and the joy and energy she brought, truly a life fully lived and the life and soul of any social gathering.