Tributes to Prospect founder Derryck

10:54am Thursday 22nd May 2008

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THE Rev Derryck Evans, founder of the Prospect Foundation, has died at the Wroughton hospice after a battle against cancer.

The 78-year-old pipe-smoking Methodist minister, who gave up a high-powered job in industry to train for the church, leaves his wife Marian, five children and 13 grandchildren.

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At the end of April he baptised his only great grandchild, seven month-old Matteo Huw Evans Ford, at the hospice, where he had been an in-patient for several weeks.

The hospice's chief executive Vicki Morrey said: "Without Derryck Evans Prospect Hospice wouldn't have existed as we know it.

"For me and for everyone in the community he served with such distinction we all lose a true friend."

In the late 1970s, as Methodist chaplain to the Princess Margaret Hospital, his awareness of the need for all-round care of terminally ill cancer patients prompted him to seek the advice of Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement.

With PMH consultant physician Dr Campbell Drysdale, and a small voluntary committee of doctors, nurses, health administrators, social workers and clergy, he set up Prospect Foundation as a home care organisation in 1980.

The in-patient hospice at Wroughton opened in April 1995.

Last year he was appointed its honorary life vice-president in recognition of the part he played.

But Swindon owes much more than its hospice to Derryck Evans.

In the 1960s, with a team of ministers from other denominations and the support of Swindon's Church of England industrial chaplain, he welded six congregations together into the united Central Church at the Pilgrim Centre.

Known throughout the town as "the Rev Ev", he helped to save the marriage guidance council, later called Relate, from collapse.

He also helped to set up a branch of Shelter.

When the waiting list for council houses reached 4,000 in the 1970s he described the situation as a "bloody blasphemy" and accused housing chiefs of inaction.

An offer from a developer, of temporary use of empty town centre homes, was the result and Swindon's first housing association was born.

"We all helped to scrub out empty houses in Vilett Street," said his daughter Ceri Evans Ford.

He became vice-chairman of Thamesdown Council on alcoholism and helped to set up a Gamblers' Anonymous group.

He was involved with the start of Thamesdown Friendship Clubs for former psychiatric patients and of Youth Enterprise Swindon, and helped to found a social club for the gay community.

Derryck was also chaplain at Swindon College and helped to administer Casa Materna, a Methodist orphanage in Italy.

"He made an enormous contribution to life in Swindon and he will be missed," said Lord Joffe of Liddington.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon, who as David Stoddart was the town's Labour MP for 13 years, described Derryck as "a great and dedicated man" who was concerned with the interests of ordinary people.

"He had progressive views," he said. "He put religion in its true perspective."