Helen Major passed away peacefully on the evening of Sunday March 24th. RIP
Helen was well known in the mill world and much loved. She will be remembered as an active volunteer at the Mills Archive and earlier at the Mills Section in London. She and her late husband, Ken, attended most TIMS and SPAB functions as well as touring the country, largely by public transport, to measure and record mills.
Her work at the Mills Archive made use of her precise attention to detail; she has provided our family history researchers with a database of more than 20,000 names to add to similar databases from the Yowards and others. Her later career as a proof reader in the Civil Service ensured we had a resource to check all our publications; our editors will have their work cut out now to avoid stylistic and grammatical errors.
I was fond of her dry wit and ability as a mimic; I only recently discovered what a lovely singing voice she had and her ability to write irreverent poems was an open secret.
Her friends will know that she never really got over Ken’s death in 2009, but it was her last 15 months with a fractured hip, followed by a broken arm earlier this year, that meant she had at last to stop working.
We will miss her.
