When my mother, Jenny Cox, who has died aged 86 of cancer, was admitted to hospice care, she told staff of her passions: her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, plants and the great outdoors – and her concertinas.
She also brought up an old injustice. An adventurous botanist, in her Jenny had planned to do a PhD on the flora of the inhospitable island of South Georgia, in the south Atlantic. However, the British Antarctic Survey vetoed it: no unmarried women. A feminist fire was lit. Jenny’s marriage to my father, Peter, lasted more than 60 years. A hands-on mother of three sons, she retrained as a teacher and worked in primary schools in Bristol.
In their 40s, Jenny worried that she and Peter shared no hobbies for retirement. She suggested that Peter try the concertina. They were hooked and soon found joy playing with others. Jenny’s energy, can-do attitude, and her teaching and organisational skills were soon deployed. Peter and Jenny hosted many gatherings and lent their many instruments freely.
At her primary school, Jenny founded two concertina bands and brought the country’s leading player, Alistair Anderson, to inspire them. She was a founder of the West Country Concertina Players - still going strong after 40 years. Jenny organised the first of many Halsway Manor weekends.
They played in the Butleigh Court concertina band, in Somerset, and she later helped develop weekends in Witney, Oxfordshire, and at Hawkwood, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, with her concertina teacher, Dave Townsend. Remarkably she persuaded the Bristol community ensemble the Redland Wind Band to admit her and toured Europe playing oboe parts on the concertina.
Latterly, she supported the J25 Concertina Band and gave her blessing to the creation of its Banding Together concertina weekends. Jenny inspired many individuals in the music world, and she also created a model of “learn, practise and perform” events that will outlast her.
Jenny was born in Liverpool, to Vera (nee Wiles), a history of art lecturer, and Keith Brumby, a French teacher. During the second world war she was evacuated to Wales and her later childhood was spent in Chatham, Kent, where she attended Chatham grammar school for girls. She then went to Birmingham University to study botany, gaining a master’s.
At Birmingham she met Peter Cox, a chemistry PhD student, and they married in 1960. After he won a Fulbright scholarship they went to Harvard, where Jenny worked in the botany department, before returning to the UK in 1964 and settling in Bristol. Jenny did her teaching training at Redland College, and then taught in primary schools including Mangotsfield primary in Emerson Green, and Cutlers Brook, St Werburgh’s.
Jenny left the Anglican church in the 1960s over its failure to condemn bombing in Vietnam; Horfield Quaker Meeting, in north Bristol, was a loving community up to the end.
She had an adventurous and progressive spirit, joy and humour, and an enormous capacity for love and friendship. In her mid-80s, she climbed mountains to enjoy the flora.
Peter died in 2022. She is survived by her sons, Danny, Trevor and me, by eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
