Mrs Jill Norman (1931-2018)
 
Jill Norman (neé Sharp) was born in Lewes, Sussex, and attended Lewes County Grammar School for Girls. She then read History at Bedford College for Women, London, continuing with a year at the Courtauld Institute under Professor Ernst Gombrich. After further study at the Institute of Education, she took up a position in 1955 as Assistant History Mistress at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School for Girls, Barnet.
 
Following a career break from full-time teaching, Jill was appointed Head of History at Haberdashers’ in 1973, travelling daily from Barnet to Acton for the first year. Jill  specialised in the politics of the Reformation and the art of the Renaissance, enthusing even girls from different religious and cultural traditions. For the last phase of her career, Jill transferred from classroom teaching to become the School Librarian in 1985.  In this role she was also responsible for the school’s archive and her research notes can still be found amongst the papers showing the preparation for exhibitions that she mounted for the School’s Open Days in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  After retiring in 1994, she took up study to become a Church of England Lay Reader but had to abandon the course through ill health.
 
Jill met her husband John when visiting Imperial College, where he was reading Physics. By enormous coincidence they discovered that their fathers knew each other, both working for John Christie of Glyndebourne. They married in 1956 and Jill is survived by two daughters and a son, plus four grandchildren. One grandson has achieved a First in Classical History at Leeds University and a granddaughter holds a Music Scholarship at the Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton, singing the Puccini aria ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ at Jill’s funeral.
 
Written by her husband - John Norman