Betty Willsher

Willsher died, aged 96 on 25 February 2012. Her obituarist in the Fife Free Press described her as a “much Loved and respected St Andrean” who spent six decades at “the heart of the community” and who “was to the end a storyteller.”

She was awarded an MBE in the 2000 New Year Honours list “For services to the Recording of Scotland's Graveyard Monuments”.

Interviewing Willsher about her life and works for The Scotsman in 1996, following the recent publication of Scottish Epitaphs and Images from Scottish Graveyards, journalist Judith Woods was taken by the “evangelical enthusiasm for the emblems of death and the accompanying words which cast an epigrammatic light on mortality as it was perceived in centuries past” that infused Willsher’s writing on graveyards.

Willsher curated exhibitions of her photographs and would visit heritage groups and societies across the country and overseas to share her accumulated knowledge of these monuments and sites. In June 1993 she delivered a lecture on Scotland’s graveyards to the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for Gravestone Studies at Connecticut College in New London.

In 1989, the Association of Gravestone Studies awarded Willsher the Harriette Merrifield Forbes Award for outstanding contribution in the field of gravestone studies.

Beginning in 1978, she wrote, co-authored and edited a series of books on Scotland’s graveyards, drawing considerable attention to these much-neglected historic sites. She took special interest in trades symbols and Green Men. Probably her most famous work, Understanding Scottish Graveyards, ran to 20 editions by 2006.

Willsher established and operated another small nursery school in the Fife town before completing a part-time Diploma in Education at Dundee. The following years were spent teaching emotionally troubled children in the Stratheden Hospital, in Cupar in Fife with child psychiatrist Douglas Haldane and for a spell in Vancouver. Returning to Scotland Willsher spent four years teaching story-telling, drama and creative arts to primary school in Fife before becoming a senior lecturer in Child Development at Stevenson College Edinburgh and retiring in 1977.

Her collected papers, covering the period 1970-1999, are held at Historic Environment Scotland Archives in Edinburgh. The archive includes photographs and manuscripts relating to her survey work of graveyards across Scotland and a collection of her own and others’ books on graves and graveyards.

Her early books were intended either for young children or those that care for, raise and educate young children. In the introduction to her 1964 book, The Flying Jacket, Willsher clearly described the motivation behind and purpose of her book ““Let’s not underestimate the appeal of nonsense, the delight of laughter, the fostering of a sense of humour!”

Willsher published her first book in 1959 and a dozen more would follow over the years, writing and publishing her final book aged 95, just two years before she died.

She studied at the University of St Andrews from 1933-36 where she graduated with a degree in psychology and philosophy, before going on to complete a one year certificate in nursery education at the Rachel McMillan Nursery Training College in Deptford. Her first teaching post was at a nursery in London’s East End dockyards. She married Rex Willsher in 1937 and gave birth to Penny in 1939. Persistent air raids over the family home in London persuaded the Willshers to move rural Suffolk where she gave birth to her second daughter, Susan, in 1941 and would run a small children’s nursery. The Willshers separated in 1949 and Betty returned to St Andrews taking her daughters with her.

Elizabeth "Betty" Cameron Willsher MBE, (12 December 1915 - 25 February 2012) was an early years child psychologist and educationalist, lecturer, children’s author, historian, preservationist and noted Scottish Gravestones researcher, recorder, authority and writer.

Elizabeth Cameron Anderson, known throughout her life as Betty, was born in the village of Coundon in County Durham, England on 12 December 1915 to Scottish parents William Grieg Anderson, a general practitioner, and his wife Mary Gordon Adam.