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Bill Scott’s ministry took him from the
back streets of the Gorbals to the corri-
dors of Buckingham Palace.
He occupied several ecclesiastical
roles in the royal household, including
that of sub-almoner, overseeing the
annual royal Maundy service in which
the Queen distributes purses of spec-
ially minted silver coins to pensioners.
His other royal roles included sub-
dean of Her Majesty’s Chapels Royal,
deputy clerk of the closet and domestic
chaplain to the Queen from 2007 to
2015, reinstating the Wednesday ser-
vice of Holy Communion in the chapel
at Buckingham Palace and attending
the Queen each year at the Cenotaph
on Remembrance Sunday. He was the
only full-time clerical member of the
household which, he said, meant being
“a sort of ‘vicar’ in the London palaces”.
Scott was a man of deep prayer and
spiritual wisdom, the daily offices of
the church being the bedrock of his
life. He was a trusted confessor and
spiritual director, and countless priests,
nuns and lay people sought his counsel.
He knew his way around the most com-
plex liturgy, yet was equally at home in
the simplicity of an early Mass in a
country church or convent chapel and
had a simple, direct style from the
pulpit.
Firmly embedded in the Anglo-
Catholic wing of the Church of En-
gland, Scott found a comfortable home
at St Mary’s Bourne Street, the high-
profile church near Sloane Square that
was once described in a Times headline
as “More Roman than Romans”.
Soon after his arrival as vicar of St
Mary’s in 1991 the Church of England
decided to ordain women priests, a
move opposed by the congregation.
Some wanted him to lead them into the
Roman Catholic Church, an idea to
which he was not unsympathetic, but
he eventually concluded that it was not
the right thing for him or for the parish.
Scott was no administrator. Curates
would be alarmed to find a family turn-
ing up for a private baptism that Scott
was convinced he had asked them to
take. It was all written down, illegibly, in
a little black diary that only he saw. One
curate lent him a book on time manage-
ment and organisational skills, but
when the curate asked for it back a
month later, Scott had misplaced it.
Despite his high-church leanings,
Scott was never liturgically fussy; “de-
cently and in order” was what mat-
tered. When arranging the requiem for
a former vicar he asked a colleague to
keep an eye on the bishop, who was in-
clined to be unpredictable in the sanc-
tuary. Scott instructed: “Sit next to him
and if it looks as if he’s going to wander
off, just stand on his cope.”
William Sievwright Scott was born in
Glasgow in 1946, the son of David Scott,
a marine engine fitter, and his wifeAmelia (née Sievwright). He told how
his vocation was sparked by standing in
the pulpit of the local Presbyterian
church to give a reading at the school
carol service. He was educated at Har-
ris Academy, Dundee, studied for holy
orders at Edinburgh Theological Col-
lege and in 1971 was ordained priest in
the Scottish Episcopal Church.
His first curacy was at St Ninian’s
church, in the Gorbals area of Glasgow,
which he recalled being rather wild.
“The police went round in threes, but I
went out alone,” he said. “The Catholic-
Protestant divide was still very alive,
and I was often asked if I was a priest or
a minister, to which I always replied,
‘a little bit of both’, before retreating
quickly.”
After a couple of years it was decreed
that he would benefit from a taste of the
Church of England and he was sent to
be the first curate of St Francis of Assisiously blend fact and fiction. Cole was
recruited and the first in the series, The
Magic School Bus at the Waterworks,
was published in 1986, with detailed
illustrations by Bruce Degen, who be-
came her longtime collaborator.
A chipper teacher, Ms Frizzle, takes
her students on fantastical field trips,
leading them inside the human body, to
outer space, and to meet dinosaurs. The
flame-haired, flamboyantly clothed Ms
Frizzle, an unabashed eccentric, is part-
ly based on one of Cole’s childhoodteachers, who made her students do an
experiment each week. The books gar-
nered acclaim for their dexterous blend
of education and entertainment. A
critic for The New York Times Book Re-
view wrote in 1988 that they do for
science education what Sesame Street
did for teaching letters and numbers,
“by making it so entertaining that
children had no idea they were actually
learning something”.
Joanna Reid Basilea was born in
Newark, New Jersey, in 1944, to Mario,Joanna Cole
Prolific children’s author whose enduring Magic School Bus series made science entertaining and easy to understand
Where her fellow New Yorkers saw
vermin, Joanna Cole spied opportunity.
Living in a low-rent apartment building
in the notoriously pest-infested city, the
aspiring author was used to sharing liv-
ing space with six-legged flatmates.
A Wall Street Journal article piqued
her curiosity about cockroaches. After
some digging, Cole determined that —
unsurprisingly — no one had yet writ-
ten a children’s book about the much-
loathed insects. She closed that gap in
the market in 1971 with Cockroaches,
launching a prolific career chiefly
known for the multimillion-selling
Magic School Bus series that made her a
trailblazer for science education, espe-
cially for girls.
Thorough research was one of the
hallmarks of Cole’s approach. This was
evident from the very start, when she
kept a container of cockroaches in her
apartment to study them.
“One of them she became very fond
of,” her daughter, Rachel, told National
Public Radio. “Her name was Grace
because her antennae were so graceful.
And Grace became pregnant. Then,
one day, the container tipped over, and
the roaches ran out. And my mother
couldn’t bring herself to stomp on
Grace, so she let her go, and then her
apartment became infested with cock-
roaches.”
In the mid-1980s an editor at the edu-
cational publishing house Scholastic
sought an author and an illustrator to
develop science-led stories for primary
school-age children that could humor-
a house painter, and Elizabeth, a stay-
at-home mother, and was fascinated by
science and nature from an early age.
She graduated from the City College of
New York with a degree in psychology
and took a job as an elementary school
teacher but found it too gruelling. She
then worked as a librarian and had a
stint at Newsweek magazine, where she
had to respond to letters to the editor
that were deemed unsuitable for publi-
cation. “It was tremendous fun,” she
told the Ottawa Citizen. “We wrote on
old manual typewriters.”
In 1965 she married Phil Cole, a thera-
pist who also co-wrote a couple of her
books. In her later years they moved to
Iowa to live near Rachel, who is married
with two children. Phil also survives her.
They first met when she was 14 and
began dating a few years later when they
encountered each other again at a civil
rights march.
In the 1970s she worked as a book edi-
tor while writing stories of her own. The
success of the Magic Bus tales spawned
a collection of video games, merchan-
dising tie-ins including McDonald’s
Happy Meal toys, and an animated se-
ries that debuted in 1994 with a theme
song performed, implausibly but with
characteristic zest, by a 62-year-old
Little Richard (obituary, May 11, 2020).
Ms Frizzle was voiced by Lily Tomlin,
urging her charges to “take chances,
make mistakes and get messy!”. And, of
course, to wear their seatbelts.
The potential of “The Friz” as a fe-
male role model attracted fresh atten-tion in the United States two decades
later when the Obama administration
announced a drive to increase the par-
ticipation of girls and women in
science, technology, engineering and
maths (Stem) subjects. Tomlin also fea-
tured in a reboot, The Magic School Bus
Rides Again, released on Netflix in 2017.
It was reported in June this year that
Elizabeth Banks will star as Ms Frizzle
in a live action-animation hybrid film
adaptation. A book finished shortly
before Cole’s death, The Magic School
Bus Explores Human Evolution, is
scheduled to be published next year.
Cole was content to lead a far less
adventurous life than her characters.
Away from work, she cared for her pets
— dogs, guinea pigs and cats — or used
her hands to garden, knit, crochet and
draw pictures of animals. She wrote
more than 250 books and the Magic
School Bus series has sold in excess of
93 million print copies in 13 countries.
She was stunned by the popularity of
her creations.
“I wanted to write children’s books
and be successful at it but this is some-
thing else all together. This is a once-in-
a-lifetime experience. And I have a
sense of amazed pride that these books
will attract kids to science,” she told The
New York Times in 1994. “A friend of
mine said this is a dream come true, but
it’s beyond any dream I had.”Joanna Cole, children’s author, was born
on August 11, 1944. She died of lung
disease on July 12, 2020, aged 75Joanna Cole with Bruce Degen, the longtime illustrator of her acclaimed booksSCHOLASTICin Bridgwater,
Somerset, a new
church on a large
housing estate with
its fair share of social
problems. He then
enjoyed a village curacy
before briefly testing his voca-
tion as a Benedictine monk at Nash-
dom Abbey, Buckinghamshire.
It was not to be and he returned to
another rural West Country parish
before in 1984 being appointed chap-
lain at the Community of All Hallows,
Ditchingham, in the depths of the Nor-
folk countryside.
The first step towards royal prefer-
ment came with his appointment as
vicar of St Mary’s. In 1996, during the
80th anniversary commemorations of
the Battle of the Somme, he preached to
the Duke of Gloucester and other dig-
nitaries at a solemn service beneath SirEdwin Lutyens’s great Thiepval memo-
rial, telling his congregation: “It has
been said that never have so many men
walked so confidently to a certain
death.”
The unflappable Scott, who retained
a distinctive burr that rarely rose above
mezzo forte no matter the calamity, was
unmarried but soon discovered, partic-
ularly at St Mary’s, there was no short-
age of clergy widows who perceived a
vacancy. He observed of one: “Her
problem is she wants to be the mistress
of the manse and while I am here, she is
not going to be.”
He was a candidate in the 1997 elect-
ion for Bishop of Brechin, back in the
Scottish Episcopal Church, but was not
chosen. Instead, he became addition-
ally priest-in-charge of St Barnabas,
Pimlico, area dean of Westmin-
ster (St Margaret) and, from
2000, prebendary of St Paul’s
Cathedral. From 1991 to 2007
he was also chaplain to the
Priory of Our Lady of Wals-
ingham in Norfolk.
Already baffled by how he
came to be chosen for a
London living, Scott was even
more confounded to be invited
in 2002 by the Duchy of Lancas-
ter to serve as chaplain of the
Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, an ancient
chapel that nestles at the side of the
Savoy Hotel, before serving in the royal
household. He retired in 2015.
Scott was a great reader of novels and
poetry, and loved convivial dinner par-
ties, whether as host or guest. One of his
biggest was the bash he organised for
his 70th birthday at the Savile Club
where, even in a venue that large, there
was not room for all his friends.The Rev Prebendary Bill Scott, CVO,
former chaplain to the Queen, was born
on February 1, 1946. He died of liver
cancer on July 17, 2020, aged 74Scott, far left, welcomes the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to Westminster Abbey in 2011The Rev Prebendary Bill Scott
Unflappable Anglo-Catholic clergyman and popular, thoughtful chaplain to the Queen in a variety of royal preferments
ARTHUR EDWARDS/GETTY IMAGES; HARALD JOERGENSr,
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