It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our dear friend and colleague Janice Cawthorn.

Janice has been a member of our U3A for 10 years and a committee member for 2 years – taking on the role of speaker co-ordinator to ensure we had a varied array of speakers at the monthly General Meetings. Her love of literature, travel, cinema, performing arts and music was always in evidence and readily shared with anyone and everyone.

In her working life, Janice was a Tax Inspector in the Inland Revenue Plymouth Tax Office situated in Pearl Assurance House Royal Parade. As you all may know Janice was afflicted with a very rare condition, this was made worse as result of an operation that was meant to improve things, however there were complications and so resulted in things being made worse.

She was a fervent supporter of causes and would often put pen to paper to support them. Janice also had a great talent for languages and could converse in several different ones – including Russian. I know those in attendance of the Marina Litvinenko interview in Feb 2019 would recall how we all sat in wonder as Janice conversed with Marina in fluent Russian, when offering Marina our thanks.

We can all only admire the tenacity, selfless attitude and relentless independence of someone who, despite of adversities that would have driven others to seclusion continued to be a very active, vibrant and lovely person to know and work alongside.

She will be very sadly missed by us all.