Next Monday (31 March) Jan and I will be in Manchester for the funeral and celebration of the life of my cousin Professor Margot Brazier (née Jacobs). Margot was quite a character: her stature (she was truly tiny) belied the size and strength of her character and the power of her intellect, and (not least) her capacity for love and empathy.
Our Jacobs family had its roots firmly dug into rural Suffolk from at least the 18th century (and surely much earlier). My great-great-grandfather Charles Jacobs was a higler (an itinerant small-scale trader), as was his father. His son Charles was a journeyman blacksmith and Primitive Methodist lay preacher (Methodism was strong in Suffolk) at the chapel in Melton. His son Edwards George, born in Bredfield in 1879, became a gardener to the well-to-do in Bredfield. Edwards Married Mabel Rosetta Jackson, a servant in Westerfield Hall near Ipswich and daughter of a worker on the new-fangled railroads who lived in Rushmere.
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| St Mary's Grundisburgh (apologies for the smiling couple in the forground) |
Edwards and Mabel settled in Grundisburgh a quintessential Suffolk village: a village green with a stream sunning through it. Village shops on one side, a splendid church on another and, conveniently across the green from the church, The Dog, one of two pubs (the Barley Mow was the other). There was a blacksmith’s forge around the corner. The church of St. Mary has elements from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Its claims to fame are its 18th-century brick tower (perhaps the finest in Suffolk – a county of fine churches) and its double hammer beam roof (also outstanding), complete with angels. The rolls of honour in St. Mary’s record the military service of Jacobs men: Jacobs, E. G., a trooper in the Norfolk Yeomanry in WWI; his sons Jacobs, G. E. (Uncle George, in the RAOC: Royal Army Ordinance Corps; an error I think, since my father served in the RAOC); Jacobs, D. C. (RA: Royal Artillery); Margot’s father Jacobs, L. T. (Uncle Leslie) Royal Air Force.
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| St. Mary's double hammer beam roof with angels |
My father Douglas Charles was born in Grundisburgh. He stayed in Suffolk (apart from military service in Palestine, France and Belgium) but his younger brother Leslie married a Lancashire lass, Mary Pickering and moved to far away (250+ miles) Preston where he was a senior figure in local government.
Leslie and Mary were Margot’s parents. They paid an annual visit to Mabel (Edwards died in 1952, the year I was born) with their children Margot and Bill. This visit was the occasion for us to join them watching the cows walk down the hill past Grandma’s cottage to their pasture, playing Poo Sticks/Leaves in the stream, and country walks. I must have met Margot in the summer of 1952, since a photo, taken in Grundisburgh’s sports field, shows my mother holding me, a new baby, in her left arm, and Margot’s hand with her right hand. My sister Tricia holds Margot’s other hand and my eldest brother Antony squats, pulling a long face. Our Suffolk Jacobs family also occasionally visited our far away Preston relatives.
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| Grundisburgh 1952: Alice Jacobs holding her new baby Ian in her left arm and Margot's hand witht her right hand. |
Margot was a born scholar. Aged 17 she had special permission to enter the University of Manchester to study law. She was, by all accounts, a brilliant student. She became a lecturer in law aged 21 and, I am told (although I have not been able to confirm the date), was (and still is) the youngest professorial appointment at Manchester. My cousin was a pioneer of, and an internationally renowned expert in medical ethics and law. Margot Chaired the Animal Procedures Committee (1993-98), led a review into surrogacy for UK Health Ministers (1996- 1998), Chaired the Retained Organs Commission (2001-2004) and Chaired a Working Party ‘The Ethics of Prolonging Life in Foetuses and the Newborn’ for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2004-2006). She received numerous honours and awards of distinction. No less importantly, she was also, her former students have said in tributes, a caring and inspiring (though no doubt acute and demanding) teacher.
Our lives took us in very different directions in adult life, so those annual play dates in Grundisburgh gave way to occasional family gatherings, and perhaps an odd lunch in Manchester if business took me there. We last met (at her request, since Parkinsonism was making her life ever more difficult) at a family lunch in Buxton in 2024. We Suffolk cousins were aware of her outstanding career and achievements, but my memories have been of idyllic days in a Suffolk that still stands in a material sense (although the Barley Mow has closed and the Dog is a gastropub) or rare visits to her family home in Preston while Uncle Leslie and Aunty Mary were still alive.
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| The Lancashire and Suffolk branches of the Jacobs family in Buxton, March 2024. Margot is seated at the rear between her husband Professor Rodney Brazier and my sister Tricia. Margot's brother Bill is seated left wearing a white shirt. |
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| The Crescent at Buxton, built by the Duke of Devonshire in 1780. The domed building behind is now the University of Derby Buxton campus. It was originally the stables for the residents of the Crescent. |
