Betty Willsher

Career

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.

In retirement Willsher embraced the social scene in St Andrews, joining various local clubs and became an active conservation campaigner, fighting to protect the built heritage of the town, spearheading the campaign for the Crawford Arts Centre and as a stalwart of the local preservation trust. This keen interest in conservation would also be expressed nationally as she and her friend Bunty Mould travelled across Scotland recording, photographing and interpreting historic graveyards and the unique memorials within.

Writings and graveyard research

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.

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!"

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 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.

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 told the journalist that her passion for the subject came "from a passion for archaeology rather than any religious perspective" adding:

"I was fascinated by the whole subject, I found the 17th and 18th-century carved stones in Scotland were better than any other country I have visited. They are carved on both sides, they are very ornate and they have a wider range of emblems. There isn't the same variation in England."

The precarious condition of many of Scotland's graveyards and the monuments therein was a primary motivation for Willsher's research, telling Woods:

"I think it's really important that people record their local graveyards and take photographs of the stones before they are lost to us, which I think they will be in the next 50 years.”

Death

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."

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.

Honours and awards

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

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