About 1,500 people have attended a memorial service in Leeds for a teacher stabbed to death by a pupil during lessons.
Ann Maguire, 61, was killed in April by a 15-year-old boy at Corpus Christi Catholic college in the city, where she had taught Spanish for 40 years. Due to retire this summer, she was thought of as “the mother of the school”. The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is due to stand trial for her murder in November.
So many pupils and teachers past and present turned up for the service at Leeds town hall on Monday that 250 were left outside, watching a live broadcast on a big screen. The event had the air of a state funeral, with roads closed to make way for the queue of mourners – many in school uniform – which snaked around the back of the building.
Many wiped away tears as they listened to the intensely personal service, filled with anecdotes of a woman who inspired generations of children. Monsignor John Wilson described her as “this guitar-wielding, choir-conducting, Spanish-speaking, prayer-encouraging, vivacious presence in our lives and in school”.
One teacher, Sheila O’Kane, remembered Maguire strapping on roller skates and cajoling even the most reluctant children on to the rink during a school trip. She employed the same remarkable powers of persuasion to get the most unlikely pupils to join her choir, where she would strum Carole King and Beatles songs on her guitar with the rainbow strap, picking out the notes on a plectrum she had fashioned out of the lid of a margarine tub.
Another colleague, Pete Fusco, said she was always the last to leave school when the caretaker came to lock up, and would often drop pupils off at home at night, sometimes taking them for a meal on the way.
The mourners heard that despite going “way beyond the job description”, as the Leeds council leader, Keith Wakefield, put it, Maguire always made time for her family. She would stay up late into the night sewing dance costumes for her daughters, Kerry and Emma, and would bake cakes with them in the small hours if they could not sleep. When they both went off to ballet school in London, she wrote daily letters and would record tapes of herself reading Jane Austen for them to listen to if they got homesick. She went up and down the M1 to visit them, often with a pile of books in the car to mark before Monday morning.
As well as their daughters, Maguire and her husband Don looked after her two nephews, Daniel and Andrew Poole. The boys joined the family in Leeds after their mother, Ann’s sister, was killed when they were of primary school age.
They took to the stage to deliver a public tribute to the woman they thought of as their mother. The boys, now grown men, said Maguire loved writing and receiving letters, and so delivered their eulogy as a letter addressed to her.
Andrew recalled wet camping trips in the family’s 1970s caravan and all four children bundling into one bed so that Maguire could read to them – Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven and Roald Dahl. Daniel remembered birthday parties and letters from Father Christmas “written in a shakier version of your handwriting”.
Daniel added: “By far the most valuable thing you gave us was your time. There was never an occasion when you didn’t go the extra mile – and then 20 more – for any of us. There was never a time when you didn’t have time. And I think that’s why so many people are here today. Because they know you went the extra mile for them too, at some point.
“Maybe it was a five-minute chat or extra help with homework; a shoulder to cry on, some words of encouragement, an unexpected visit or a night of singing until the early hours. We all delivered our problems on to your shoulders, thinking you were an indestructible force who never let us down.
“As a child, looking at his mother, you were 10ft tall and made of steel. You weren’t, of course. You were a very content 5ft 3in with the warmth of a loving mother and the heart of a lioness.”
Current pupils and staff sang one of Maguire’s favourite Beatles songs, In My Life, which includes the lyrics “But of all these friends and lovers/ There is no one compares with you”. The school had also made a video where different generations paid tribute to their favourite teacher and colleague. One woman compared Maguire to Maria von Trapp in the Sound of Music as she gathered up “waifs and strays” in the school corridors to sing in her choir. A young woman giggled as she recalled Maguire “taking out a whole Italian ski school” by crashing into them on a school ski trip. An older, bearded man, credited her with having “taught me to actually be the person in your head”.
At the end of the video, staff and pupils were asked to sum up Maguire in one word. Wild, wacky, perfect, passionate, fantastic, amazing, extraordinary, trustworthy, magnetic, phenomenal, authentic were just some of the words they chose. One asked for two. Maguire, she said, was simply “an angel”.
