My friend Gillian Guy, who has died aged 92, was a businesswoman, magistrate, school governor and Labour party activist. She had an extraordinary energy, exemplified by the range of her interests and activities.
Gillian was born in Virginia Water, in Surrey. Her mother, Doris (nee Davies), had worked for Prudential as a punch card operator, and her father, George Rowe, was a railway parcel clerk. They moved to Southfields, in south-west London, and Gillian went to Clapham County school. George and Doris later ran a toy and sweet shop in Wandsworth. The family were active Labour party members and in 1937 George was elected to Wandsworth council. By 1945 he was council leader.
With the outbreak of war in 1939 Gillian and her younger brother, Beverley, were evacuated to Marlow with their mother. Her Clapham school was attached to Eton college, where she continued her education. When the flying bombs started, Gillian and Beverley were evacuated again, this time to Dunstable, in Bedfordshire.
Leaving school at 16, Gillian found her first job as a clerk with what became the London Electricity Board. In 1951, aged 23, she landed a management training position at Lyons, the restaurant chain, developing skills in marketing. She set up exhibitions, travelling all over the country, even cooking on television.
She had met John Guy, then a journalist, at evening classes, and they married in 1952. After their second son, Jason, was born in 1960, Gillian left Lyons.
The same year, her first son, Damon, then aged three, had to go into hospital for a tonsillectomy. Parents were allowed to visit only for half an hour a day, and seeing Damon’s distress, Gillian took up the cause of restricted visiting hours with the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital (NAWCH), campaigning for five years for rules to be relaxed, with some degree of success.
Both she and John stood for Labour in the 1968 Wandsworth council borough election, though both were unsuccessful. From 1970 she was a magistrate, attached to the courts of Southwark and Lambeth, and served 13 years on the bench. She was also chair of governors of Elliott school, in Putney, for seven years in the 1970s, and did charity work with Southwark council (1977-78), teaching life skills to teenage boys in “halfway houses”.
After John died in 1978 Gillian threw herself into work for Friends of the Earth, organising a large Save the Whale event in Trafalgar Square the following year. However, she needed an income, and in 1983 set up the London branch for Group Sales, a New York-based theatre ticket marketing company. Gillian built the business into a profitable concern, but after a decade, the New York office closed, and therefore also the London branch. So Gillian started her own business from her home in Pimlico, south London, promoting and selling London theatre tickets, often two for the price of one, “Show Pairs”.
Gillian was a life member of the Magistrates’ Association. In 2000 she was awarded the freedom of the City of London.
In 2014 she moved to a retirement village in Thamesfield, just outside Henley, to be near family.
She is survived by Damon and Jason, two grandsons, Derryth and Neven, and by Beverley.
