Obituary

Gillie Johnson
3 April 1948 -17 January 2010

Gillie Johnson -- a mentor, advisor, and friend to hundreds of people in the voluntary sector -- has died age 61 from pancreatic cancer.

A love of music, a commitment to social justice, and an expansive and varied community of friends and neighbours were central to Gillie’s childhood in Wimbledon and remained central for the rest of her life – when she taught music in Spain in the 1970s, supported the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, led the youth project Bridges in Hatfield, worked with Stonham Housing Association, helped set up the ex-offenders’ organisation Revolving Doors, was co-founder of the community green space Waterloo Green Trust, and, finally, when she began to work independently as a consultant and fairy godmother to charitable organisations and the people who drove them.

Gillie believed that voluntary organisations had the potential and responsibility to bring about real change – to take risks, to act with creativity, and to truly be guided by the people they were meant to serve. Encouraged when these ideals were realised, and outspokenly critical when they were not, she looked dismissively upon organisations that became preoccupied with gaining contracts and institutional growth. “Why don’t organisations ever die?” she wanted to know.

In her flat in Kennington, with its strings of tiny white lights and lemongrass scented air, its political postcards jostling for position with pictures of her family and friends, Gillie welcomed scores of people whose journeys she helped map with guidelines of justness and fairness. And God help you if she ever caught you neglecting those guidelines. Her outrage could be nuclear, her laughter so joyous and roaring it sometimes made heads turn in restaurants.

Many of us remember trudging to her flat in misery, going up the stairs in search of help, and leaving ready to take on the world.

People who would never have met otherwise came together in gatherings at Gillie’s flat, got to talking at theatre excursions Gillie organised, or were put in touch through introductions Gillie made, because, as many pointed out, “She always saw a person in front of her -- not a jail lag or a tramp in the street or a managing director of some big corporation.”

When Gillie’s unofficially adopted daughter Ali gave birth to a girl, Gillie was there and it was, she said, the best day of her life.

Winding down late at night, listening to jazz, ice clinking in her glass of wine (“pink or white”), her bulging Filofax by her side, Gillie kept answering the phone and the conversations kept going. In a second life, she once said, she’d want to be a professional jazz musician -- Miles Davis or Dexter Gordon.

Gillie is survived by her mother Kathleen Newis, her sister Margie Staker, her unofficially adopted daughter Ali Wood, and the many organisations and friends thriving because of what she gave them.
 

Simon Keyes and Linda Mannheim, 15 March 2010