My friend Jenny Baynes, who has died aged 73 after a stroke, once made me laugh so much that I had to lie down in the street. Six foot tall, and quite a dresser, she made people laugh all her life.
Her school performance of the title role in Toad of Toad Hall is still remembered; much later, her comic verse sent up middle-class parental aspirations. She played the flute, sang in choirs, was a gifted watercolourist and travelled widely. But the centre of her life lay in her love for her husband, the theatre and radio producer Jonathan James-Moore, and their daughter, Kate; and in her inspirational work as a teacher.
Jenny was born in Radlett, Hertfordshire, to Donald Baynes, a businessman, and Marjorie (nee Stephens), a model. Educated at Queenswood, an independent girls’ boarding school, she was living in Conservative heartland, but soon said goodbye to all that.
She took an external degree in English from London University, and in 1973 plunged into teaching at Kidbrooke school, an early comprehensive in what was then a deprived area of south-east London. She was passionate about education, particularly for inner-city children, and her later career in further education encouraged disaffected teenagers to engage with Shakespeare, poetry and drama.
Often up against management, in 1997 she was sacked from Southgate College in north London for refusing to sign a new contract, unhappy at the working conditions it proposed. Her chosen epithets for managerial thinking generally were “risible”, “ludicrous” and “outrageous”.
Jenny’s final teaching post was at the City Lit in Holborn: from 1998 she taught adult students for more than 20 years: they enrolled in her classes year after year. Always given “excellent” in her end-of-term reviews, she was outraged by one “very good”. She continued to work through the Covid-19 pandemic on Zoom, which she hated, and thereafter back at the college until her health declined.
In 1994 she and Jonathan bought and restored a holiday house in Umbria, where they welcomed many friends. After his early death in 2005, she hated living alone, but took herself off on travels and painting courses; returning from one at Tate St Ives, she stopped at a country hotel. Still in bespattered old clothes, she was looked up and down by the staff until she told them she was from Michelin, and looked forward to sampling their menu.
She is survived by Kate.
