A message from Sam, November 3, 2025: "I am sorry to inform you that Irene died, sometime last week, while staying with her son near Oxford."
Irene was interviewed by Gemma Geldart for the "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children" project in September 2010. There is a selection from that interview on the website here: Gemma Geldart interviewing Irene Hill.
Irene also appears in a number of Pat Mitchell's letters home from 1958-1960: Summer 1958, Autumn 1958, Spring 1959, June 12 1959, June 28 1950 to end of term, Autumn 1959, Spring 1960, Summer 1960.
Belinda Swift writes:
I’ve been visiting Irene over the last years and shall greatly miss our conversations. Inevitably we talked of Wennington and her notable pupils. Yes Vivian, you definitely featured - when being asked by a piano examiner to play C# minor melodic scale- saying ‘ no way’! Irene had fond memories of the Lake District, which we shared. Being fond of reading and surrounded by books Irene was a member of a local book club until relatively recently.
Ruth Smith (Cass Beggs) writes:
Irene was my piano teacher for a couple of years and I think, like everyone else, we all adored her. With some piano teachers one was sometimes scared to go to the next lesson, but with Irene it never mattered if you had not practised that week or not, she always found something to teach you. She also taught my brother Michael (Cassy) the violin. He was very serious about it and she was good for that. She always had a smile and always seemed pleased to meet you in the corridors, outside or anywhere one bumped into her. I think of all the teachers, I have my best memories of her.
Vivien Laird writes:
I was lucky enough to receive piano lessons from Irene from the age of eleven to seventeen. I was one of her first pupils at Wennington. I went to her as a poor and poorly taught pianist, and from her, to The Royal College of Music, on the piano, at just eighteen.
I have been a piano teacher all my working life and the foundations for this were laid in those early years. Aged eleven, I used to come out of my lessons and teach my friends, one of them Grace Hindle, a clarinetist, who went on to The Royal Northern College of Music, all that I had just learned.
She was an inspirational teacher. Piano lessons were always the high spot of my week. I remember clearly that at the age of fourteen, I was only able to survive double science, maths in the morning, with the knowledge that my piano lessons were in the afternoon!
In those early years I was also taught music to O level by Irene and I sang in the choir and played in the orchestra, both conducted by Irene. She was an accomplished musician.
Later I went on to visit Irene regularly in Boston Spa. In the early years we always discussed piano teaching and I spent some time looking over her current teaching music.
In later years she always wanted to know about my work - both as a teacher and an examiner. On one occasion she came to stay with me in Ely, and we went up to London to see Guys and Dolls at The National Theatre. We did everything by taxi as she didn’t like escalators. . .
I owe the inspiration of my musical life to Irene. I would never have gone on to a career in teaching and examining, if I had not been taught by her.