Gillian Mary Pulzer née Marshall (HH 1950)
19 July 1933 – 9 February, 2024

Written by Gill’s sons, Matthew and Patrick Pulzer

Our mother was born in Chislehurst on 19 July 1933, at home – the magical sounding address of Willow Bank, Willow Vale, Willow Grove. Her sister Nancy, who also attended St Swithun’s, described it like this: ‘[my brother] Geoff and I had been taken for a walk, and returned to be told that Mummy had gone to bed and we could go and see her as she had a surprise for us. She looked tired but pleased, and on the other pillow was a very small baby, awake but quiet, with blue eyes. I couldn’t imagine how it had got there, and thought it a bit odd that my mother had undressed and gone to bed in the afternoon just to look at the baby, but everyone seemed very happy so we had a good look and then had to go and have tea. I learned that this was a sister who would stay with us always; so we were all pleased, and
enjoyed watching Gill being bathed, fed and generally played with.’

Gill learnt to sew, knit and mend from her mother and this may be where she got her lifelong love of making and doing with her hands – upholstery, joinery, stained glass, repairing cane chairs and of course cooking and gardening – she was always active.

During the war, her family moved to Clevedon to live with their maternal grandmother. Clevedon was not a target, but was close enough to Bristol to get the odd stray bomb, all of which Gill slept through.

Tragedy struck in 1942 with the death of her mother, resulting in Nancy and Gill being sent to boarding school – first a prep school in Devon and then St Swithun’s in Winchester – a city to which she formed a lifelong attachment. She left school with a love of poetry (she would write to and receive letters from John Masefield) and a detailed knowledge of English Church architecture.

After school she trained at a London cookery school and gained a job as a chef in Oxford, and it was now that she was to meet our father, Peter Pulzer, who remembered it as “… the most important event of my life and certainly the one that has brought me the greatest happiness… On 3 December 1960 my friend John Lemmon and his wife Pat gave a party at their house. At some stage of the evening

their lodger, a young lady in an elegant long dress came slowly down the stairs surveying the gathering, rather like Arabella in the last
act of Richard Strauss’s opera. We began talking and she introduced herself as Gillian Marshall – Gill for short – a chef at the renowned Tudor Cottage in Iffley (listed in the Good Food Guide). By the end of the evening we had arranged to go out to dinner the next
evening. From then on we met as often as Gill’s unsocial hours allowed, drove round the countryside, went for walks in Blenheim Park
and enjoyed meals out. We were married on 8 December 1962.”

60 years later, they were still married and celebrated their diamond anniversary at home in North Oxford.

Their son Matthew was born in June 1963, and Paddy followed in February 1966. It was a home full of Gill’s antique glass and ceramics, music, books and entertainment –parties for Oxford undergraduates and huge Christmas parties for our extended family. She taught both of us to cook – indeed some of our earliest memories are chopping parsley or making crumble.

Once we were at secondary school, she returned to restaurant work at The Cherwell Boathouse and then worked at The Museum of Oxford until retirement when she volunteered at The Ashmolean and Oxfam.

Our parents managed to stay in their home surrounded by the things they loved right to the end of their lives. In particular, our mother loved the humour in Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse which, as her memory began to fail, she found she could re-read again and again with equal pleasure. ■

Published in the OGA Chain 2025.