Gillian Ballance (CSSC 1951) died peacefully and without pain on Thursday 24th January 2019 in University College Hospital, London. She was 89. Her life was devoted to righting injustice, relieving suffering and friendship.
She lived in Hertfordshire all her life, with forays into London. Her first job soon after WW2 was in a girls’ settlement in the East End where she darned socks and chatted to the girls. After training at LSE, she worked as a social worker in Hertfordshire County Council Children’s Department, and was Divisional Children’s Officer by the time she left the department in 1970. Life long friends were children she fostered.
She then taught social work and counselling at the University of Hertfordshire (then Hatfield Poly). Without a first degree, and in the teeth of opposition which Gillian always relished, she helped establish the MA in counselling. In 1994 she didn’t retire but, after a spell with UNICEF in wartorn Bosnia Herzegovina, worked as a therapist at Freedom From Torture (then the Medical Foundation for the Care of the Victims of Torture). In the early 2010s she moved on to the Helen Bamber Foundation.
Beyond the last week of her life, her diary was packed with visits from the many colleagues and ex-clients, including refugees and asylum seekers, who loved her. As well as the Jewish Holocaust and the global nuclear threat, three of her great influences were Freud, Jung and Michelangelo. She saw private psychotherapy patients throughout her working life, pushing professional boundaries wherever possible.
From the 1970s, she spent her sparse spare time painting. She insisted she had no talent: precisely why she painted. Her holidays at the Inniemore School of Painting on Mull and latterly her classes at the Insight School of Art in Barnet gave her immense pleasure. Her art became a necessity in her life. Posthumously, she won a place in the finalists’ exhibition at the Mall Galleries for the 2019 Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize. 100 were chosen out of 2000 entrants.