Jill Alexander honoured for 50 years service to Dulwich

Jill Alexander has been awarded an MBE for services to the Dulwich community in the New Year honours. She is perhaps best known now as the ex-chair of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery, but she has been extraordinarily active in other parts of the community in the past as well.

Jill as Kate Hardcastle - Dulwich Players 1967

Support for Schools
From 1995-1998 Jill was a governor of Dulwich Wood Nursery School, Dulwich Hamlet Junior School, Hollydale Primary School and chair of the Governors of Heber Primary School.
She set up and helped run the Dulwich Village Playgroup in the 1960s and ran the PTA at Dulwich Hamlet Junior School from 1968 – 1977.
She was the conference organiser for the Boarding Schools Association from 1978 to 1998.

Acting and Quilting
An actor with the Dulwich Players since 1962, Jill became its chair in 1987-90.
She was a founder member of Dulwich Quilters in the late 80s and its chair between 2002 and 2005.

The Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery

Jill’s association with the Friends began in the late 1960s and she was Secretary of the Friends Committee for 10 years until 2008, when she became the Chairman. So central was Jill’s role in the manifold bicentenary events and activities that she was asked to stay on for the second six months of 2011 as Chairman Emeritus, a mark of the high regard in which she is held by both the Gallery Trustees and the Director, and by the Friends Committee.

Notable achievements during Jill’s chairmanship of the Friends were the success of the Big Bang Day, which opened the bicentenary celebrations, and the Appeal to restore the Gallery’s heavily damaged St Cecilia.

The Appeal, launched by Jill, achieved its ambitious targetof £30,000 through contributions from the Friends membership, which has grown to more than 6,000 people during her periods in office, and the Pilgrim Trust.

Jill and Sandy in The Matchmaker, Dulwich Players 1988

Jill is married to Sandy;  they have four children, all of whom attended schools in Dulwich, where she first moved in 1957.

James Lupton, former chair of the governors of Dulwich Picture Gallery has received a CBE.

Do you know of any other local people who have featured in the New Year’s Honours list this year? Please let us know.