Obituary: Maureen and Dennis Gardener who died within three weeks of each other

The couple, who both grew up in Carshalton, were married in 1951 at St Barnabas Church in Surrey and spent their honeymoon in Bournemouth.

Lifelong visitors to the town, they later retired to West Cliff.

Maureen first visited and lived in Bournemouth as a young girl during the wartime evacuations from London as a result of her father, a civil servant working for the Board of Overseas Trade, being posted to an office in a hotel on the West Cliff. Maureen and her younger sister, Shirley, attended school at the Catholic Convent of the Cross, Boscombe Park.

Maureen had a varied career, with early work for Lloyd’s Register summarising losses at sea, and later becoming a secretary of Harrogate High School. A subsequent career as a primary school teacher saw her working at Nightingale County Primary School, Eastleigh and Northcliffe School in Grove Place, Nursling. A final occupation as an accountant placed her in good stead for the picture postcard business she ran with Dennis: Merrygoround Postcards.

During recent years Maureen had been a keen member of the Tea & Meet Group of the West Cliff Green Association, run by the Revd Chris Colledge, giving bridge lessons and talks to the group at the Savoy Hotel.

Dennis was brought to Bournemouth on holiday by his parents as a young boy, where he sailed his model yacht in the children’s boating section of the Bourne Stream in the Lower Central Gardens. His uncle, Theo Smith, was a Trinity House Pilot and sailed his motor yacht, Allonby, to Dunkirk for the 1940 evacuations on more than one occasion, also taking Dennis sailing in the vessel around the English coast.

After completing his schooling at Whitgift Grammar School, Croydon, and following National Service in the RAF – for which he was posted to India where he contracted typhoid fever – Dennis became a Clerk of the Supreme Court in London. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Grey Gardener, who rose to become Head Clerk of the Action Department in the Supreme Court of the Royal Courts of Justice.

However, Dennis decided in 1962 to apply for a position that led to him becoming Acting Clerk of the Assize on the North Eastern Circuit of the Assize Courts.

When the assize courts were replaced by the Crown and County Court system, Dennis became Chief Clerk of Winchester Crown Court, where he invented a new administrative system which helped improve the efficiency of listing cases, and was subsequently adopted elsewhere throughout the court service. His final posting was as Chief Clerk of Southampton Crown Court, where he established and ran a new court centre until a merger was proposed with the County Court in the Civic Centre.

When he retired in 1986 the local press described the occasion as the ‘End of an Era’.

Maureen and Dennis, following 67 years of marriage, died within three weeks of each other, both aged 90, on Wednesday, October 17, and Tuesday, November 6, respectively.

Very unexpectedly, Maureen was found dead at home in her bedroom, having succumbed to bronchial pneumonia after being in good health only a few days earlier. Dennis had spent the last three years enduring a debilitating leg condition. His last four months were spent in the White Lodge Care Home at Boscombe.

Their two funerals at St Andrew’s Church, Boscombe, were conducted by the Revd Chris Colledge, on November 6 and 20, with interment at Bournemouth East Cemetery, Boscombe. The funerals were managed by Alan Rice & Tapper, and donations in the couple’s memory are being made to The National Coastwatch Institution at Hengistbury Head.

Maureen and Dennis are survived by their two sons, Clive Grey and Alastair Quinn, granddaughter Theresa Florence and grandson Stuart Alastair Edward.