My friend Joan Bershas, an art restorer, paper conservator, gilder, historian, local conservation activist and cat lover, has died aged 66 of cancer. She has been buried, as she wished, at sea.
Her idiosyncratic style, once neatly summed up as “Victorian hippy”, made Joan instantly recognisable in her home town of Gateshead. Tall, slim and striking, channelling Virginia Woolf in appearance, she wore only black, combining ankle-length Edwardian-style garments with dramatic black hats and a string of pearls. Her green Morris Traveller became something of a local landmark.
Joan’s cut-glass English accent concealed the surprising truth that she had been born in Detroit. Her father, Henry Bershas, was a professor of Romance languages, her mother Rosaline (nee Kane) a teacher. Of Russian and European Jewish heritage, Joan developed a strong sense of her identity as European rather than American, and at 18 she left the US to study medieval history at Newcastle University. Thereafter she made her home in the UK, although she only renounced – or “denounced”, as she put it – her American citizenship towards the end of her life.
After two degrees in medieval history, Joan retrained in art and paper conservation, learning from experts in the field and becoming one herself. By the time formal qualifications for conservators had been introduced, Joan had been restoring for years and her high reputation was enough to secure her work. Referred to by John Anderson of the auctioneers Anderson and Garland as “the best gilder in the north-east”, her legacy also includes countless paintings, prints and posters conserved and saved from decay, and now hanging in private and public collections all over the local area and beyond.
Joan travelled widely in the course of numerous historic wallpaper conservation projects, including many for the National Trust. A highlight of her career was her involvement in a Royal Geographical Society project in Zanzibar, aimed at conserving British administrative archives, particularly correspondence from and about early explorers.
Although often uncompromising, Joan was first and foremost a generous listener and a loyal friend to many. She had a lively intellect and an irreverent sense of humour, and was a committed socialist and cultural aficionado. Her cats, Nero and Claudius, brought her much joy.
In later years Joan worked from home in Claremont Place, Gateshead’s oldest street, dating from 1819. Through her work with its residents’ association she returned to her first vocation and began to research the history of the street, a challenging task she relished, but was sadly unable to complete.
She is survived by her brother, Jim, and two nephews.
