IT was tipping buckets on that dreary November morning but the elderly lady in the brown sheepskin coat, her grey-white hair bundled into a patterned head-scarf, hardly seemed to notice as she trawled around Old Town, a heavy carrier bag in tow.

Indeed, she was smiling cheerfully as she approached passers-by, popped into shops and had a few words with people queuing for buses at the top of Victoria Road. In all likelihood, she was handing out peppermints. “Excuse me, would you mind signing this – it’s terribly important.”

And who could refuse such a request from 84-year-old Joan Jefferies who, with the winter of 1992 soggily setting in, hefted her petition papers through the rain sodden streets of Swindon as if 20 years younger. Her mission? To save our museum and art gallery.

Regular readers of this newspaper will know all about Swindon’s on-going attempts to re-locate the museum and gallery from cramped and creaky Apsley House in Bath Road to a spacious new cultural quarter in the town centre (see panel.)

The story has been running for years and every time I read a new twist, turn or update I always think of Joan Jefferies. Why? Because our quirky, pocket museum and impressive but insufficiently sized art gallery may not exist today but for Joan’s sterling, street pounding, one-woman crusade.

Unthinkable as it may seem, proposals had been drawn-up by our cash-strapped borough council to mothball the facility that had served the community so well for six decades as part of a £4 million package of cuts.

The nation was deep in the mire of recession and Swindon’s Labour-run authority was desperately endeavouring to maintain key services while fulfilling its obligation to balance the books.

That may be the case, reasoned Joan, but closing our museum and art gallery, depriving the community – and our children in particular – of the chance to enjoy, savour and become interested in a subject as vital as this town’s very history….are you mad?

A woman of many interests and passions (see panel) Joan’s motto in life – as her daughter Maureen Johnston later told us – was to “never sit back and leave the complaining to others.”

No, the call had come - she would launch a campaign to ham-string this short-sighted option.

Outside the museum entrance, with its familiar Doric columns on that damp November day – Friday the 13th, as it happens – Joan told us: “I couldn’t believe the council was going to close the museum and gallery.

“I was very angry at the thought that Old Town could lose all of those precious things. So many people benefit from the museum. I am determined not to let them close it without a fight.”

Drawing-up a petition, Joan, a widow, had scores of sheets printed off before she set forth to gain the support of the public at large. With no little inspiration, she also designed some snappy green Save Our Museum stickers which, after a trip to the printers, she distributed with relish.

Pubs, building societies, offices and supermarkets all failed to fall under Joan’s radar – not to mention the bells and knockers several hundred Swindon doors. She’d been at it for several days when we interviewed her and was content with her initial haul of around 500 signatures.

But this is just the start, she pledged. Over the next three weeks, right up until Thamesdown councillors met in early December to discuss their acute budgetary options, she amassed around 3,000 names on hundreds of forms.

For Joan it was a mixture of relief and elation when the hard-pressed authority decided not to shut the museum and art gallery after all. It would remain open with admission still free.

“We never seriously considered closing it,” claimed the council afterwards. Perhaps not, but they would say that, wouldn’t they, to misquote Mandy Rice Davies.

Anyhow, Joan was thrilled. “It’s wonderful news, I’m absolutely delighted. I’m so pleased when I think of all the hard work that went into the campaign.”

And so our 16ft Indian crocodile – sorry, garial – with its fearsome teeth, and Swindon’s oldest resident, a 2,350 year-old Egyptian mummy, remained in situ and on display alongside our internationally admired collection of 20th Century British Art.

Thanks Joan.

  • SHE was the kind of woman who knitted vests for seabirds and gave boiled sweets to bus drivers.

    Eccentric, certainly. Big hearted, of course. Ardent in her support of local culture, absolutely. And a True Swindon Character, without question.

    Born in 1908, Joan and husband William, a train driver, watched their Corby Avenue house being built in 1930s and lived there for the rest of their lives.

    Her knowledge of Swindon history was “encyclopaedic” and she actively supported and became involved in a wide range of literary, historical and cultural societies, not to mention a string of charities.

    She fought on behalf of everything and anything that she believed in – from restricting the weight of juggernauts to rambler’s rights and all things anti-blood sport.

  • GHOSTS, spectres, phantoms - Swindon and its environs are crawling with them. So claimed Joan Jefferies wearing another of her many hats – this time as a life-long devotee to recording spiritual energy.

    St Mary’s church, Purton was haunted by the ghost of a nun said to have been walled-up there, she insisted.

    Meanwhile 13th Century St Michael’s in Highworth, was an old haunt of a man with no face “just a featureless grey blank above his shoulders,” she once told us.  

    Swindon’s Clifton Hotel, Joan asserted in 1985, had a poltergeist that mischievously moved wine glasses.

    However, our most haunted structure was the former Brown & Plummer wine merchants located at the still sadly derelict town hall/corn exchange off High Street.

    The leader of a gang of smugglers who used to hang out there frequents in the cellars below, said Joan, who gave several talks on the subject.

    “I’ve done a lot of research locally and there are many hauntings in this town,” she stated.

    Her friend the Rev Bert Jones of Wroughton said: “She certainly believed in life after death, about the spiritual body leaving the physical body on death.”

    Joan knit bed-socks for residents of local old folks’ homes – even though many were far younger than herself.

    In 1991, aged 83, she responded to a plea for woolly vests for oil smothered cormorants plucked from a slick in the Middle East.

    The Adver found her busily knitting away in her front room. “I love birds and keep my garden wild so they can come and nest,” she told us.

    “When I read about the poor birds I thought I could knit some vests and help them out.”

    She wrote to Readicut Wool in Yorkshire for a £2.99 starter pack. “The vests must be knitted in pure wool which helps absorb the oil.

    “Ever since I told my friends they have been giving me wool to keep me going. So far I’ve knitted eight vests,” she added.

    “Sad Farewell to a charity legend,” reported this newspaper following Joan’s death at 89 in March, 1998.

    Among a raft of heartfelt tributes was Ken Franklin of the Alfred Williams Society. “She was a wonderful person who passionately loved Swindon and especially The Old Town.”

    While fellow Williams affiliate Chris Bowles remembered her “energy, enthusiasm and tenacity” that left most people half her age breathless, he said.

  • MOVES to create a new museum and art gallery at the heart of a ‘cultural corner’ in the town centre were mooted during the early Nineties.

    Economic downturns and the like continually scuppered the notion until last year the council agreed to set aside £5 million for the project.

    The rest, they reasoned, would be prised from the coffers of the Heritage Lottery Fund. A few months ago a bid for £12.5 million was rejected.

    However, lottery chiefs acknowledged that our collection of British modern art and ceramics was of “outstanding heritage importance” and that there was a “strong case” to improve its housing and display.

    A revised bid will now be made and Swindon, hopefully, will finally get a museum and art gallery to replace our good old, but sadly outdated Bath Road facility that is bursting at the seams with the exhibits it cannot display.