Mary Parker was a schoolteacher and local councillor in Bourne whose warmth and friendliness became known to many people who she stopped to talk to in the street.

She was born Lilian Mary Graham in 1926 at North Shields, Northumberland, where she attended Newsam Primary School and Blyth Grammar School before completing a BA general degree at Leeds University and it was here that she met her future husband, William John Scott Parker. The couple were married at St Anne's Church in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where her father, the Rev Thomas Graham, was vicar and who conducted the wedding service.

In 1948, she took up a teaching post at St Peter's Junior School in Newcastle and several similar appointments in the city followed before she moved to Bourne in 1966 with her husband and three children, where she took up a teaching post at the Abbey Road School [now the Abbey CE Primary School] but later moved to Morton Church of England Primary School where she remained until retirement 14 years later.

She became a town councillor in 1984, serving as Mayor of Bourne in 1989-90, and after the death of her husband in 1990, was responsible for the formation of Bourne Cruse, an organisation providing bereavement counselling and advice. Mrs Parker was also involved with the Children's Society, the Council of Churches, the Mother's Union and the Bourne Twinning Association. Her husband, a retired electrical engineer, affectionately known as Scottie, died after being admitted to hospital in January 1990, aged 72.

She died at the Cedars Retirement Home on Monday 19th July 2004, aged 78, when a former vicar, Canon John Warwick, returned to the town to assist with the funeral service at the Abbey Church, conducted by the present vicar, the Rev Christopher Atkinson, which was followed by cremation at Peterborough. The church was packed with mourners including her son and two daughters, Michael, Anne and Kate.

See also

Signing the twinning oath with Doudeville