A Highland Welcome for ‘una pionera’ wheresoever she lies
We were sad to learn of the death of Dr Sheila Wilyman (later Bowyer) (PhD 2006) in June 2024. We are grateful to her daughter – Professor Susan Edwards of the University of Northumbria – for sharing the story of Sheila’s extraordinary life with our alumni community.
The Highland Welcome
When Death’s dark stream I ferry o’er,
A time that surely shall come,
In heaven itself I’ll ask no more
Than just a Highland welcome.
Robert Burns (1787)
My mother, Sheila Wilyman, graduated with a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2006 at the age of 78. She personified life-long thinking, learning, creating and determination, and was someone who always looked to the mountain top.
Her funeral service included Robert Burns’ A Red, Red Rose and concluded with A Highland Welcome – a fitting tribute for Sheila, who had adopted Scotland as her home. In her casket she held heather from the Scottish Borders and a thistle from the banks of the Clyde.
From London to Scotland
Sheila was born in Harrow, London in 1928. In 1946, as a young bride of just 18, she arrived in the parish of Tulliallan, Fife, and so began the first chapter of her Scottish journey.
These would be challenging years both on a personal level and more widely as Fife faced a time of austerity and rationing. Workers struggled to improve pay and conditions in the shipyards and collieries. During this period, Sheila contracted an ear infection which spread to the bones of her inner ear, endangering her life and requiring a mastoidectomy.
Sheila aged 18
Tuberculosis overshadowed this time, as Stephen Patterson’s thesis The control of infectious diseases in Fife, c. 1855-1950 demonstrates. Sheila’s husband contracted the disease and her young son – my brother four years senior – was sent to England to be cared for by her parents while I, an infant, remained with her at home (the tuberculosis vaccine was available to infants and close family members).
Sheila with her daughter Susan
The road to recovery
Visits to her husband in the Ochil Hills Sanatorium near Milnathort meant a challenging trip of some 20 miles, including buses and a ride in a milk truck up a track. It was a day-long journey all to be able to wave to her husband at the window from the garden of the sanitorium. Spatial segregation was essential to contain the spread.
On such visits Sheila left me in the care of her kindly Scottish neighbours and became known with great affection by them as their ‘English lassie’.
Her husband made a full recovery. Many were not so lucky.
Following the National Assistance Act of 1948, the families of those affected were granted national assistance. Sheila would recall receiving what was called ‘sanatorium benefit’ of two pounds, two shillings.
Ochil Hills Sanatorium, where Sheila’s husband recovered from tuberculosis
Quiet socialism
The dire economic circumstances of her friends and neighbours became the formative ground for Sheila’s ‘quiet socialism’. She was not an activist, but her ideals were passionately held, and she had her moments, including telephone calls from her home in Dumfries to a US prison to protest against the death penalty. She ‘loathed’ privilege and power, class inequalities, race, religion and gender discrimination and lived her life according to precepts of equality, compassion and dignity for all.
My mother drew inspiration from Willy Gallacher, MP for West Fife (1935 -1950), having attended a political meeting which he addressed and for whom she cast her vote. His ‘maiden’ speech in the commons in 1935 was of the same passion and principles we were to hear from Nelson Mandela in the 1960s.
Gallacher’s The Revolt on the Clyde was a book in her voluminous library, as was a Spanish copy of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist (Los Filantropos en harapos). Spanish would later become music to her soul.
A career in nursing
Sheila left Scotland for the West Midlands in 1956 to be near her parents, and raising her three children on her own began her nursing training. She was inspired to pursue this by her own earlier health challenges. On completion in 1959, she cared for patients in ‘Dickensian’ hospitals in the West Midlands, then in industry as an industrial nursing sister. She later cared for cancer patients and was part of a team that won a national award for maxillofacial reconstructive surgery at Wordsley Hospital near Stourbridge.
Nursing was always paralleled with her love of languages. Sheila attended evening school where she studied Russian at O and then A level. Her dynamic, inquiring mind and desire for an intellectual life led her in 1969 at the age of 42 to embark on a degree in Russian Language and Literature and the History of Art of the Kremlin at the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Sheila aged 42, when she embarked on a degree at the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies
A love of language and literature
Sholokhov’s Quiet flows the Don and the works of the Russian masters Chekhov and Dostoevsky, the composer Shostakovich, and the artist Chagall became her companions. After graduation, Sheila joined the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Geriatric Medicine under the directorship of the late Professor Bernard Isaacs, who hailed from Glasgow. As a researcher there, Sheila set about improving the lives of an aging population and helped fulfill the Centre’s innovative vision by managing one of the first day care centres for the elderly.
Upon her retirement in 1985, Sheila returned once more to her love of literature, language and philosophy. She embarked upon a path that would lead her back to Scotland – first to Dumfries and Galloway – and ultimately to the University of St Andrews. She always described this as ‘the best of times’.
She enrolled on a London External programme and graduated with a degree in Spanish language and literature at the age of 72. Foucault and Althusser, Jamieson, Williams and Butler by her side, aiming again for the mountain top and not letting age discourage her she proceeded to a PhD supervised by the late Professor Nigel Dennis in the School of Modern Languages.
Sheila pictured with the late Professor Nigel Dennis at her PhD graduation from St Andrews
The St Andrews years
Travelling to St Andrews with her then-husband, Tony, Shandon Guest House in Murray Place laid out a red carpet for her graduation in 2006. Sheila completed her thesis at the age of 78, entitled Metaphors of suffering : the representation of the homosexual and the lesbian as social and discursive constructs in Spanish peninsular narrative texts, 1970-2000. Her achievement gained her some celebrity status in national and local media including the Times Higher Education supplement, the Daily Mail and BBC News (BBC NEWS | Scotland | South of Scotland | Graduation for great-grandmother).
Sheila at St Andrews
Sheila was regarded as a pioneer in her field. In 2018, author Alfredo Martínez-Expósito, Professor at the University of Melbourne, dedicated the second edition of his book Los Escribas Furiosos to her, describing her as ‘una pionera’.
Sheila with the author Alfredo Martinez-Expósito
Sheila had met Martínez-Expósito – as well as the author Eduardo Mendicutti – during the course of her studies at St Andrews.
Sheila with the author Eduardo Mendicutti
‘150 Great women’
In 2019, Sheila was recognised as one of the 150 great women of the University of London from the last 150 years as part of their ‘Leading Women’ campaign. She was celebrated alongside the likes of Virginia Woolf and Baroness Helena Kennedy, and the Presidents of Ireland Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, for her contribution to lifelong learning achieving for herself far and beyond what Professor Issacs (of the University of Birmingham) had envisaged.
Sheila featured in the University of London’s ‘150 great women’ campaign. She is pictured third from the left, third from the top
Looking to the mountain tops
Throughout her life, Sheila let no problem discourage her from conquering life’s challenges. She continuously sought to learn, to discover and to achieve more. Her courage and audacity in embracing all of life – personal, political, intellectual – continues to inspire.
She wore a necklace, always, with an engraving of Don Quixote and bearing the inscription ‘Nuestra suena se realito’ (‘Our dream was realised’). Sheila certainly realised her dreams, and St Andrews – with its intellectual community, loving people and compelling and complex skies and seasons – played a huge part in that. In St Andrews, she found a home.
With thanks to Sheila’s daughter Susan Edwards. In memory of alumna Sheila Wilyman Bowyer 26 April 1928 – 16 June 2024.