My wife, Aude Leonetti, who has died from breast cancer aged 58, was somewhat of a misfit. In career terms she peaked as executive director of learning for the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (Acca) in 2010, despite having limited numeracy herself and a tendency to clock-watch with poorly disguised boredom if ever caught in a social gathering of accountants.
Aude was born in Montreuil-sous-Bois, Paris, the daughter of Gilles Leonetti, a sales and marketing executive, and his wife, Michelle (nee Pasques), an infant school teacher. The family later moved to Rouen, where Aude attended secondary school. Yet she found France arrogant, regimented and macho, and instead fell in love with Edinburgh. As part of her degree, she had been posted to the nearby slum-clearance new town of Livingston to teach French to teenagers with no knowledge of, interest in or desire ever to set foot in France.
When Edinburgh proved too cold, she followed a budding academic to the new dawn of the Open University in Milton Keynes, and its housing co-operatives, welfare rights campaigns and collective bookshop. The relationship may have petered out, but Milton Keynes embraced with affection and tolerance Aude’s distinctiveness – and capacity to cook. However, as working in the bookshop involved obsequiousness to customers and almost no remuneration, she moved to community education and the Co-operatives Research Unit at the Open University.
The suicide of her brother, François, in 1986, and a complicated personal life delayed the inevitable take-off of Aude’s career. Yet the public sector’s capacity to over-promote offered Aude the opportunity to excel simply by being efficient and effective in her job, latterly as a director of the Open University Business School. But she never really fitted comfortably into the well-meaning, slow-moving world of university management, and jumped ship to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), the venerable professional body for old school accountants.
Despite rising quickly to become its acting executive director of education and training, her irreverent style – and did she have style! – fitted better in the less old school and more ethnically diverse and international Acca, which she joined in 2005. She was still working for them on a consultancy basis well into 2016 until cancer, with which she was first diagnosed in 2008 and which contributed to her early retirement in 2012, finally diminished her.
Six weeks before she died, she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Worcester, where she had become deputy pro-chancellor.
Aude is survived by me, her husband, counterpoint and walking and cycling companion of 22 years, three stepdaughters, and her sister, Claire, and a niece.
