SALLY FOORD-KELCEY - ILLUSTRATOR, HORTICULTURIST, ADVENTURER

Sarah April Foord-Kelcey was born in London at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Hammersmith in 1949; a younger sister for Cherry, who was then two and half. Our parents rented a house in Eaton Terrace in London at that time. In 1953 the family moved to Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, to occupy our father Jim's mother's home, built in the 1930s. (A smaller house was built on the same property for "Granny Pop"). The land had paddocks for horses and both Sally and Cherry rode from a young age. Anecdotes from their childhood usually involve adventures on ponies, roaming the surrounding farmlands and beech woods.

Sally attended the local village school and then Berkhamsted School for Girls from pre-prep right through until school leaving age. She was not considered academic and in fact once told me she did not even look at her A-level results until decades after leaving school (they were much better than she had thought). Sally made several friendships at school that lasted all her life; a group who would later call themselves "the gargoyles". Olivia Harvard-Watts from six and then Katy Ede and Meg Amsden from age eleven. When Katy died unexpectedly in the 1990s, Meg, Sally and Lolly set up an art prize at the school in her honour, which was awarded for five years.

After school, Sally spent a year at Harrow art school then followed Cherry to Trinity College Dublin. She shared a flat with three women who would also become life-long friends: Pat Mernagh, Patricia Cuenot and Sheila Corr. She also met Joe Kearney who would play a major role in her life years later. Sally left Dublin in 1972 with a degree but more significantly a large collection of distinctive pen-drawn illustrations of Dublin life which were much admired.

That winter Sally flew to southern Africa, where she travelled for two years, working intermittently as a TEFL teacher, primarily in Mozambique, but she also spent a period in Angola. (Both these countries suffered civil wars shortly after, which were the first recorded incidences of the "Sally effect": that countries she visited would suffer turmoil of some kind subsequently). My parents and I plotted Sally's travels with pins on a map. I came with them to Heathrow to welcome her home. I remember her appearing in arrivals with a wild afro haircut, multiple animal skins and an enormous hunting bow - a present for me.

On her return to the UK, my parents suggested to Sally that she move to London and take over the lease on 16 Edge Street, a property owned by my father and his nephews which had been occupied by an unwanted tenant for several years at below-market rent. A loophole in the very restrictive rental laws in the UK at that time allowed a family member in need to dislodge a tenant. In London Sally marked time, working occasional jobs and sub-letting rooms at Edge Street, while continuing to draw. At a pub in Islington she met Charles Gordon, who would be her partner for the next two decades.

In the mid-1970s Sally and Charles concocted a plan to move to Tehran in Iran, which was booming on the back of high oil prices and the shah's open economy. Sally was offered a job by the British Council's Tehran office, illustrating TEFL books. She often said she really enjoyed life in Tehran. Expatriates were paid well. However this life came to a halt in 1979 when the shah was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini. Foreigners were not welcome. Sally left before Charles, who stayed to attempt to sell furniture and close their bank accounts. Apocryphally he left on the "last flight out" on a British military transport, dodging gunfire on the runway.

Back in the UK Sally took a job as an art editor at the Oxford University Press. She would maintain a home in Oxford for the next forty years, owning three houses in succession, first by the canal in Jericho in central Oxford then in Iffley Fields, south of the centre near the Thames. However the publishing business was predominantly based in London and eventually in 1989 she moved from OUP to Walker Books, a children's book publisher where she was able to transition to commissioning editor work. Her enthusiasm for art editing had waned, not least as she found that employing other artists had eroded her confidence in her own work.

Commuting to London proved arduous for Sally and for several years in the early-1990s she experimented with living in London during the week. She rented a room from me in Shoreditch from 1992 to 1994, then moved spectacularly to the other end of London's property ladder: a mews house in Knightsbridge (not far from where she had first lived as a child) owned by a friend of Cherry.

Sally continued travelling to adventurous destinations during the 1980s and 1990s (and, as usual, presaging revolutions in those places). For example, communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1980s, El Salvador around the same time and Syria (with our mother, by then in her 70s) in the 1990s.

In the late 1990s Sally took a job with BBC Worldwide. Her main role was to work with the notoriously difficult Anne Wood, creator of the Teletubbies children's TV show. Apparently Sally was recruited because it was thought she had grown-up in a similar counter-culture milieu to Anne and so might be able to work effectively with her. Sally produced Teletubby books for several years. Thanks to merchandising of that kind, the franchise is now regarded as the most lucrative in the BBC's history, though Sally was only paid a regular salary. One benefit of the BBC job was the White City location in west London on the A40. She was able to resume living in Oxford during the week and commute by car.

Charles died in 2001. Over the next few years Sally decided to transition away from publishing. She moved to part-time hours with the BBC, studied for the Royal Horticultural Society's Certificate in General Horticulture and spent ten months as an apprentice gardener for the Women's Farm and Garden Association (on which she later served as a director). She left the BBC completely in 2004 and set up in business as a garden designer.

Sally never seemed short of work in her new role. I once helped her prepare a pitch for a contract with an Oxford college in which she wrote: "My career as a gardener developed entirely by word of mouth, and after an initial slow start my client base for maintenance and creative gardening grew quite rapidly. I gained a reputation for being both competent and artistic in my approach to gardening, and although most of my work was in Oxford I began working further afield, in Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, East Sussex, Leicestershire, London, Dublin, even in France." A notable client was "Watchmen" author Alan Moore.

Joe and Sally had remained in contact since their TCD days. Joe was widowed in 1998. Joe helped Sally with her gardening contracts and they gradually began a dual-home life, moving between Dublin and Oxford. Sally wound down her gardening business from 2010 so that Joe and she could enjoy retirement. They travelled extensively over the next few years, to South America, the Middle East, South East Asia and all over Europe. In 2019 they made a giant loop through the western US: by train from Chicago to California to Vancouver, then back to Denver by car.

Sally and Joe's happiness was abruptly interrupted in February 2021 when she was found to have inoperable gall bladder cancer. She died in a Dublin hospice in March.

"No eulogies" was Sally's guidance to us before her death; I will try to respect that here even though there is so much to say about her creativity, her humour, her loyalty to her friends and her robust approach to life. Suffice to say she was dearly loved by many people.

Toby Foord-Kelcey, May 2021