My mother, Doreen Wilcockson, who has died aged 90, was a painter and art teacher who inspired many of her pupils to work in the arts.
In the 1950s she studied in London at Central Saint Martins art school (1952-55) and the Royal College of Art (1955-58), where her drawing skills were much admired. Doreen’s sketchbook chronicled her lifelong adventures, but her vocation was for teaching.
She was born in Croxley Green in Hertfordshire to Eileen (nee Royle), who operated a knitting machine in a factory, and Frank Harrison, the chief engineer for Odhams press. At Watford grammar school she stood out as a gifted linguist, and at 19 was able to speak German with fellow fruit pickers at a camp in Kent. A lederhosen-clad young man was a serious contender for her hand, and continued to telephone her on her birthday until she was 84.
As a bored 17-year-old she wrote to several French mayors, requesting that they find her a summer job. Three months later she was in a chalet in Montgenèvre staying with a GP and his family of seven children. Doreen’s English puddings were raved about; the plimsolls she brought scarcely survived.
Mountains put a spell on Doreen, and as head of art at Beaconsfield high school in Buckinghamshire she regularly went skiing with “her girls”. At the age of 76 she completed La Sarenne in Alpe d’Huez, the longest black run in Europe.
Doreen’s teaching career started at Westonbirt school in Gloucestershire. Then a posting to the Queen’s school in Rheindahlen, Germany, resulted in a romance with her boss, Peter Wilcockson, the head of art. They married in 1963 and my sister Laura and I were born in Germany, before we returned to the UK in 1965 for Peter’s new job at Newlands Park teacher training in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. In 1966 Doreen was a founder member of the staff at Beaconsfield, and she taught there until retiring in 1998.
She then created a new village sign for Chalfont St Giles in 2001, and a new life in Woodchurch, Kent, where she often designed the cover of the parish magazine, and cared for Peter, who died in 2013. Having lost her soulmate, Doreen became captivated by birds, her realistic whistling confusing the robins and crows that gawped at this long-legged grey bird.
She is survived by Laura and me, by her grandchildren, Alexander and Molly, and her stepgrandaughter Louisa.
