Jolly Irene was auntie to generation of youngsters (From Worcester News)

Jolly Irene was auntie to generation of youngsters

12:00pm Monday 15th March 2010 in

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THE year 1967 was famous on a number of fronts.

For starters, the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco smoked and danced and turned it into the Summer of Love; Israel fought the Arabs in the Six Day War and Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing world championship for refusing to join the US Army in protest against the Vietnam War.

Less well-known was the start of the Auntie Renee column in Berrow’s Worcester Journal.

Yet the weekly children’s page of the oldest newspaper in the world outlasted both the hippies’ hey-day and Vietnam. Although peace in the Middle East is taking rather longer.

Irene Brown, a mother of five from Drakes Broughton, near Pershore, wrote as Auntie Renee for 10 years and by the time 1977 ended, society had changed a great deal. Punk music reigned, the first home computers were on sale and Elvis Presley was found dead at his Gracelands mansion.

Now, sadly, Auntie Renee has gone, too. For Irene Brown, after a long and remarkably fulfilling life, has died aged 77 at her home in Penzance, Cornwall, and members of her children’s club all those years ago might get a bit nostalgic for the days when life was a lot less complicated.

The editor of Berrow’s back then was Philip Beck, an English gentleman of the old school, and it was to him that Irene wrote in 1967 asking whether he would like her to contribute a children’s column to his publication, for she had noticed a gap in the market. Irene had no journalistic training, but her sheer joy of life and bundles of enthusiasm soon overcame that.

In fact, Irene and husband John were a pretty gung ho couple. They met at a New Year’s Eve dance in 1952 and spent the first six months of married life living in a plane fuselage, which John had converted into a caravan. Within a few years they had climbed Snowdon and cycled to Naples and back.

In the mid-fifties they moved from Tamerton Foliot, near Plymouth, Devon, to Drakes Broughton, when John’s position with British Homes Stores brought them to Worcestershire. There, at Broughton House, their five children – three boys and two girls – were born.

Kathy Robbins, their younger daughter, said: “By 1967, with all the children at school, mum needed to do something. Noticing a lack of ‘anything for children’ in the local papers, she wrote to Mr Beck the editor of the Berrow’s Worcester Journal. She heard nothing for three months but then received a letter inviting her to submit her ideas. And so ‘Auntie Renee’ was born, a weekly column for children in Berrow’s and later a sister paper in Stourbridge, West Midlands, the County Express.

“Hundreds joined her ‘How do you do club’. She gave talks in schools about creative writing, was often asked to attend and open school events and became a good friend to St Mary’s Convent in Worcester. Each week among poems and letters submitted by club members were wonderful stories by mum, one particularly springs to mind, a serial called Professor Poppit.

“During this time mum formed a choir and with the help of St Mary’s, where rehearsals took place, she put together a programme which included a song written by her with music by dad called Come, Come to Bethlehem.

“She took this choir around to all the local residential homes for the elderly and hospitals at Christmas time. This she did voluntarily in her own time and the choir was a wonderful success. Mum kept all the paper cuttings and the hundreds of letters from children. She had the fondest memories of the 10 years she spent as Auntie Renee and even in her last years, with advanced dementia, loved nothing more than to look back through the scrap books.”

Irene Brown gave up the Auntie Renee page in 1977 when John became head of business studies in a Cambridgeshire comprehensive and the couple sold their partnership in KGJ insurance agency in Stourbridge. They moved to Hilton, near Huntingdon, where Irene opened a children’s nursery in her own home.

Kathy said: “Mum always gave the children so much to do and think about and remained friends with parents right up until recent years. In addition, always keen on exercise and health, she ran a keep fit class at the local sports centre.”

At the time of life when many people are thinking of taking life easy, John and Irene Brown went the other way. They spent a year on teacher exchange in Australia and did 18 months Voluntary Service Overseas work in Papua New Guinea running a vegetable marketing depot and Irene helped local teachers with their English.

Then, for three summers, they welcomed visitors to camp sites in France and Italy.

Finally, the couple settled in Penzance where they became regulars at both Quaker and Methodist meetings and joined a freelance poetry and writing group. Irene never stopped writing poetry until her dementia made it impossible.

Kathy said: “In her usual way, mum put on a smile and continued to write and continued to meet and greet friends and neighbours in such a natural and happy way that many had no idea for several years she had Alzheimer’s.”

At Auntie Renee’s funeral, before a packed congregation in Penzance Methodist Church, they played a recording of Come, Come to Bethlehem sung by the children of St Pats School Choir from Wollongong Blind Centre, New South Wales, Australia. She would have loved that.