A FORMER York Methodist local preacher, church steward and children’s work volunteer has died in York Hospital after a fall at home.

Wyn Lawrence started up a youth club at Southlands Methodist Church in South Bank with her husband Bob and a number of volunteers, which ran for 29 years.

The couple also started a junior club at Southlands and for many years they also helped to run the Southlands Parent & Toddler Group, and Wyn also worked as an infant teacher at Stamford Bridge Primary School,

Bob, who is a former news sub-editor at The Press, said that Wyn had retired in 1996 and he had retired 10 years later. In recent years, she had been having problems with her legs, which were exacerbated after she had suffered a fall early in January.

He paid tribute to his late wife, saying: “Wyn was an amazing lady and a loving wife and I feel privileged to have been able to share the last 48 years with her.”

He said Wyn was a Cockney, having been born within the sound of Bow Bells.

“Her parents were of German descent and the butcher’s shop where her father worked was smashed up at the beginning of the Second World War,” he said.

“As a child, Wyn twice suffered rheumatic fever which damaged her heart. Later she was turned down for training as a Wesley deaconess in the Methodist Church because of her heart condition, but accepted for training as a teacher.

“She had previously worked for a big insurance company and later in the Methodist Home Missions Department, then based at Westminster Central Hall.”

Bob said he and Wyn met at Ordnance Road Methodist Church, Enfield, when he moved to London to take up a job as Chief Reporter with the Enfield Gazette and started attending the church where Wyn was already a member.

He said she volunteered to help in the youth club and junior club he set up there and they were married at Ordnance Road on October 28, 1972, and many Junior Club members were present.

At the time, she was already in her second teaching appointment, teaching English to secondary school immigrants in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, and he was assistant editor with the Gazette.

He said that in 1976, he took up a position of senior news sub-editor on what was then the Yorkshire Evening Press and at the end of the term Wyn ‘willingly left her beloved London’ to join him in York.

He added that Wyn’s sister, Margaret, who lives near Oxford, was a member of a Baptist church, and her late brother, Alan, was a pastor in the Elim Pentecostal Church.