My aunt Janet Slade, who has died aged 96, was a well-known character on the streets of Cambridge, the city where she lived for more than 60 years. In particular she became locally famous in her later years for spending many evenings handing out free hi-vis jackets to cyclists at the Addenbrooke’s roundabout.
Jan had begun to lose her eyesight at 70 due to macular degeneration and this made her acutely aware of the need to be seen on the roads. Her Safety at Night campaign led her to hand out more than 1,000 luminous jackets, and probably saved many lives in what is a big cycling city. All the jackets were paid for either by Jan or members of her family.
Aside from road safety campaigning, Jan had also earlier come to public attention in Cambridge through her prominent role in a 15-year campaign to save the city’s St Andrew the Great church from redevelopment as a shopping centre. The church survived and is now a thriving place of worship.
Jan was born in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, to Mary (nee Baguley), a nurse, and Walter Danks, an architect and builder. When she was five the family moved to Reading in Berkshire when her father’s business failed in the Great Depression. She went to the local Abbey school and then Reading University, where she studied fine art and played in goal for the hockey team.
Teacher training followed in Great Yarmouth, where she met John Slade, a sculptor whom she married in 1949.
Jan’s first job was as head of craft at the Cambridgeshire County high school for girls (now Long Road sixth form college), where she also taught history. She spent 15 years there before taking six months off to travel in eastern Europe and Japan on a Goldsmiths scholarship, then setting up as a freelance potter and selling her beautiful work at Covent Garden market in London on Sundays.
Blessed with immense practicality and physical strength, Jan did her own loft conversion and when she needed a beam in her kitchen “to chuck tea towels over”, she collected a 10ft length of wood for the purpose on her bicycle. When she turned right, the beam continued straight on, but Jan calmly went back for it, picked it up and took it home.
At 91 she had a heart valve replacement and at 94 made an amazing recovery from a broken hip. “How are you Jan ?” I would ask as she grew older. “I’m dying darling – but it’s taking such a long time,” she would reply.
A practising Christian all her life, she drew her last breath in her armchair by the fire in the home where she had lived since 1961.
John died in 2004. She is survived by their sons, Tim and Sean, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
