the times | Saturday June 11 2022 81
Readers’ Lives
who had died 30 years earlier. In 2010
she was presented with an MBE
by Princess Anne, the patron of
Dorothy House.
Yet Dorothy House was not Irene’s
only commitment. There was alsoIrrepressible hospice volunteer and bodysurfer into her nineties
her voluntary work at Bath Abbey,
along with the Samaritans and several
other organisations.
Born in 1918 in Nottingham, Irene
was the sister of two older brothers.
Her father George Cooper was a vicar
and her mother Dorothy (née Rigby-
Jubb) ran the home. Her father was
assigned new parishes every few
years, including to Sidmouth in south
Devon, where Irene was devoted to
her horse, Robin, after whom she
named her oldest son.
At 13 she went to Clarendon School
for Girls, a boarding school in
Malvern, Worcestershire, that catered
for daughters of clergy, and confessed
to being “disastrous” in every subject
apart from English. In any case the
school viewed academic rigour as a
side issue, the stated aim of the
headmistress being that girls should
leave knowing the Bible and how to
hold a conversation in their parents’
drawing rooms.
Nonetheless, Irene got into Great
Ormond Street Hospital for Childrenand after five years qualified as a
sister. At Great Ormond Street she
engineered an introduction to a
junior doctor, Stanley “Sam” Weller,
the son of Baptist ministers who had
been raised in China until the age of- Sam asked her out for a series of
dates over the course of a week,
including Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
and Friday. On Saturday he proposed.
When she asked him why he had not
seen her on Wednesday, Sam replied
that he could tell it was getting
serious and he needed time to think.
They were married by Irene’s father
in 1941, and shortly after Sam was
called up to serve in the Second
World War, seeing action at El
Alamein, Sicily and Normandy. He
was wounded twice, but returned to
Great Ormond Street as a registrar.
They had four children: Robin, a
retired anaesthetist; Patrick, a
professor of political science in
Brisbane; Jane, a former GP; and
Judy, a nurse. Sam died in 2005.
In the late 1950s Irene returned to
nursing, caring for newborns at the
maternity unit of Farnborough
Hospital, Bromley, on the outskirts of
London, where the family lived.
By 1964, when they had moved to
Bath for Sam’s position as a
consultant paediatrician, Irene was
involved in Sunnyside, a nursery for
the children of unmarried mothers
awaiting adoption. She also worked at
Avonside, an approved school for
teenage delinquents, provided
pastoral care for the congregation of
Bath Abbey — where at the age of 88
she started a widows’ support group
— and signed up with the Samaritans.
Her benevolence continued into
her late nineties and her lust for life
found expression in singing, which
she would do all day, and at church,
usually out of tune and at the top of
her voice.
Yet for all her helpfulness she liked
to stay away from the limelight. The
MBE came as a surprise. “I don’t
think I have done anything to deserve
that,” she said.When in her nineties Irene Weller
happened to break her arm, she asked
the doctor, “I suppose this means I
won’t be able to surf?” It was a
practice that she had picked up
during family holidays to Harlyn Bay,
north Cornwall, and had maintained
for 50 years.
An inexhaustible energy combined
with a deep well of kindness drove
much of what Irene did. For 35 years
— until she was 93 and could no
longer drive — she worked for
Dorothy House, a hospice in Bath
that she had known since its
beginnings in the mid-1970s.
As a domiciliary nurse, caring for
the terminally ill and their families at
home, she made herself available
seven days a week and was on call
day and night. It was a workload that
did not necessarily cease with the
death of a patient. In her eighties she
was still visiting the parents of a child
Irene Weller, 103
Irene Weller liked to spend family
holidays at Harlyn Bay, north CornwallAssociation (ARA), a position he kept
until his retirement in 1995. Key to his
contributions at the ARA was the
development of its transonic wind
tunnel into a world-class facility. It
enabled the association to bid for and
win international business while
providing a one-stop shop for design
information and testing.
In retirement John became
president of the Royal Aeronautical
Society, known for expressing his
views even when he knew they would
be unpopular, and was on the
International Council of the
Aeronautical Sciences as well as part
of Nato’s advisory group for aerospace
research and development.
Concerned by climate change, in
his sixties he helped to form the
Greener by Design Group to examine
the effects of aviation, particularly
with regard to vapour trails that did
not quickly disperse, and long-haul
travel. He took the view that long
journeys would be less detrimental to
the planet if the route could be
broken up, as in the past, into
short “hops”.
John had a reputation for being
very funny and was a good raconteur.
In 1959 he married Gillian Jackson, a
knitwear designer whom he had
known from school, and they had two
children: Imogen, a civil servant and
former maths teacher, and John, a
former Red Arrows pilot who flies for
British Airways.
John liked to complete the Times
crossword daily and, in the belief that
it kept his memory strong, would not
fill it in before he had solved every
answer in his head. He and Gillian
were enthusiastic concert-goers to the
Proms, as well as the Aldeburgh and
Dartington festivals.
When the couple were not
travelling around the world for the
International Council of the
Aeronautical Sciences, they spent
every holiday in the Highlands
bagging Munros, the Scottish
mountains over 3,000ft. Completing
about 50 between 1975 and 1994, they
finished their last, Meall a Bhuiridh,
near the top of Glen Coe on their
35th wedding anniversary, celebrating
at the summit with 42 friends.ensued, where he was the minister
counsellor and deputy head of the
British Defence Staff. It was during
Ronald Reagan’s presidency and
enthusiasm in the US for the missile
defence system, known as Star Wars,
was running high. Unlike many of his
compatriots, John, too, saw its
advantages — particularly in
providing the British with jobs in
research and manufacturing.
In 1985 he returned to Britain as
deputy director of aircraft at the RAE
and three years later was made chief
executive of the Aircraft ResearchJohn Green with his wife Gillian climbing their last Munro
and, left, in the Cambridge engineering laboratories in 1963School and was a
student apprentice
at Bristol Aircraft in
1956 before winning a
scholarship to study
mechanical engineering at St
John’s College, Cambridge.
After heading the noise division at
the RAE, John’s rise to the top was
rapid. He was made head of the
aerospace department and in 1981
became a director for the
procurement executive at the
Ministry of Defence. A post at the
British embassy in Washington DCA concept that came to the
aeronautical engineer John Green
during a coffee break in the 1960s
would have longer-lasting
repercussions in wing design than he
thought at the time.
Now known as “Green’s lag
entrainment method”, it was a way of
predicting the behaviour of thin
layers of air around a plane’s wing
during turbulence, and was eventually
developed to predict wing stall. It
took Britain into the lead on wing
design internationally and was used
in every model of the Airbus since its
launch in 1974.
John’s theory owed much to his
1966 doctorate on air flows. He
subsequently took his findings to the
aerodynamics department of the
Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE)
in Bedford and made fundamental
contributions to wing design,
including the angle at which the wing
swept back from the fuselage.
John stayed on at the RAE for the
best part of 20 years and in his early
thirties was given a management role.
He was then made head of the wind
tunnels division and three years later
promoted to head of noise.
Particularly pertinent in the 1970s
were the noise levels of Concorde. A
flight test programme that monitored
the effects of Concorde’s double
supersonic boom — a noise that
sounded like distant thunder — was
in place along the west coast of
Britain. Among the more bizarre
Aeronautical
engineer who
specialised in
wing design
complaints from the ground was the
effect of the droop-nosed aircraft’s
vibrations on mink production in
Scotland, the behaviour of dairy cows
and the structure of buildings. After
the findings were announced, one
Welsh cathedral was relieved to
hear that the property’s foundations
were affected more by the top
note played on the organ — an
issue that the organist immediately
sought to remedy — than the airliner
flying above.
Born in Tunbridge Wells in 1937,
John Green was the only child of a
ship’s engineer in the
Merchant Navy, also
called John, and
Nellie (née
O’Dowd). The
couple, who had
been raised in
Liverpool, both
lived through
the First World
War — Nellie
worked in the
Women’s Forage
Corps, a precursor
to the Women’s
Land Army. They had
been married for 20
years when Nellie, who had
assumed she could not have children,
found out aged 47 that she was
pregnant with John.
He was raised in Rotherfield, a
village in East Sussex, but the family
returned to Birkenhead on the Wirral
when John was 11 and his father took
a job at Cammell Laird. He went to
the Birkenhead Institute GrammarJohn Green, 84
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who had
dnothavechildren,If you would like to commemorate
the life of a relative, friend or
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