Angela was born in Liverpool in 1947. In her teenage years she attended a Grammar School in the city but lived in what was then called an approved school for maladjusted boys. She lived there because her Father was the headmaster and lived in a house in the grounds. Just facing the house across the road was the gate of a now famous children’s home, Strawberry Fields. As a girl of ten she was with her Mum at the Church Fete in Woolton with a young John Lennon playing on stage and where Lennon met Paul McCartney for the first time. A few years later she watched The Quarrymen playing at the Cavern Club. She enjoyed rock-climbing and knew many of the famous climbers of the sixties like Bonnington and Haston.
She qualified as a geologist and spent a year or so in research laboratories in Glasgow but decided to take up teaching and spent a year at the College of Education in Sunderland and it was in that town that she and I met for the first time. She taught geography and mathematics at several schools in North-east England and in Yorkshire, usually at the seventeen to eighteen year-old level and became head of geography at the sixth form college in Northallerton. She was also guest lecturer at Universities in the area. In her spare time she was warden of a small youth hostel in the Yorkshire village where we lived.
Tiring of teaching (and not being a particular supporter of the new curricula of the 1990’s) she opened her first shop in the small Yorkshire town of Masham but soon moved this to the slightly larger market town of Bedale. She still taught though and was a guest lecturer at the University of the Third Age and lectured at the summer schools of the Open University. It was at her Bedale jewellery shop, Silverdale, that she was first approached by Sonicwarp to be one of the first pyramid keepers in the then new Isis treasure hunt. She soon became the most sought-after Lady in the treasure hunt, the keeper of the most popular pyramid ever, the Yorkshire pyramid adding her own special prizes for silver coin seekers.
She was diagnosed with cancer almost exactly a year ago and after a painful year of operations, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and much loving care she passed away on October 5th 2011.
Always cheerful, always busy, we shall miss her.