THREE sisters who set up a charitable fund with Dorset Community Foundation in memory of their parents are celebrating ten years of giving.
Bridie Collier, Anne Burge and Janet Hart set up the Joy and Lance Collier Fund after the Bournemouth couple’s deaths to honour Joy’s support for charities around the area.
Bridie said the tenth anniversary has come as a surprise. “You don’t really count the years, you just look at each one as it comes along so it’s rather nice to think it’s been there such a long while,” she said.
“I think mum would be really pleased to see that her money is helping so many people.”
The couple were married two days before VE Day in 1945 after Lance had been demobbed. They had met at a dance during the war but, says Bridie, “she didn’t really want to go out with a soldier”.
But Lance didn’t give up, and in the end they were happily married for almost 60 years. The same determination led him to open his own newsagents after being unfairly dismissed from his job at a news kiosk in Bournemouth. “A customer lent him £1,000 and he opened a shop called Collier’s Corner in Tuckton,” said Bridie.
“He was quite an entrepreneur because he eventually bought all the shops in the row and let them out. It’s amazing when you think he grew up without a father, had to be fostered because his mother was ill and left school at 14.”
I think mum would be really pleased to see that her money is helping so many people
Joy showed promise of her own after earning a scholarship to Talbot Heath School in Bournemouth. She went on to teacher training college and eventually specialised in helping children who struggled with their reading.
“In those days there were no special arrangements so she ended up teaching them in cloakrooms surrounded by coats,” said Bridie. “But she loved it and the children loved her.”
Lance, who loved music, cricket and trips on the paddle steamer Waverley, died aged 85 in 2004. Joy died aged 93 in 2014 and while dealing with her estate, Bridie and her sisters discovered she had been supporting 33 charities.
“Mum wanted to give a large proportion of her money to charity and we found out about Dorset Community Foundation’s funds, so we used her money, and some that dad had left us, to set it up,” said Bridie. “We wanted their fund to support education and aspiration in young people and people who are visually impaired or hard of hearing for mum, and villages and rural communities and conservation for dad because he loved the countryside.
“The good thing is that DCF does most of the work, looking after investment and the admin and all we have to do is choose who receives the money it generates from a list of applications they provide. We’re all in our seventies now and still take an interest, but later on we know they will continue to support the causes we care about.
“We’re not a well to do family, we’re very down to earth but because the community foundation is so flexible and easy to work with it shows anyone can support their community in this way.”
Since being set up, the fund has awarded thousands of pounds to charities and voluntary groups including Read Easy in Poole and Bournemouth, which supports reading for adults, Dorset Dolphins Visually Impaired Cricket Club, Townsend Youth Partnership, Purbeck Youth and Community Foundation, Dorset Deaf Children’s Society and many others.
“We get a funding report every year and it is lovely to read about the impact mum and dad’s money has made,” said Bridie. “We set up the fund because we wanted to reflect how fortunate they were to have their life together and how fortunate we are as children to have had them as parents, and I think they would be very pleased.”
Find out more about how we can help families and individuals with setting up a legacy fund here.
Pictured: Top left, Lance and Joy Collier in July 2023, top centre, Lance and Joy with daughters, Anne, left, Bridie and Janet in November 1987 , top right, Lance and Joy aboard the paddle steamer Waverley in Scotland in 2001
