My sister Clare Gittings, who has died of a stroke aged 71, was a sympathetic student from her teenage years of the way that society treats death.
At 16, she published a successful guide, Brasses and Brass Rubbing (1970), that recorded its many forms – from skeletons to the “wild man of the woods”. After an MLitt at Oxford University (1978), she wrote a pioneering study, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (1984), showing how death shifted from a social event often celebrated by “merry mourners” to a less communal approach. Clare had a wide knowledge of church memorials, and was especially interested in those verses written with genuine emotion by the widow rather than by a scholar or priest.
Her studies were offset by a lively approach to humanity. “Very splendid”, was her invariable comment on the impressive or the unusual. She was a cheerful talker with family and friends and a much-loved aunt.
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, Clare grew up in an intensely literary environment with her parents, the biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton. She went to Midhurst grammar school, then took a degree in English and American studies at the University of East Anglia, and her master’s at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
While she was often invited to lecture on death and society (she taught courses at Reading and Bath universities in the 1990s and 2000s), her full-time work from 1989 to 2013 was as education officer and later learning manager at the National Portrait Gallery. She made primary schoolchildren feel welcome, greeting them with “Hello people!” and discussing paintings on equal terms. Her scholarship, quietly but emphatically conveyed, was vast. “From Henry Tudor to Windsor Liz, your encyclopaedic knowledge is, a true treasure rare”, colleagues told her in verse when she left.
Previously Clare had some restless years, which included recruitment by the VSO to work in the Maldives (1986-88) with her partner, the criminologist Malcolm Ramsay. On returning, Clare taught at Sumners primary school in Harlow, Essex, for seven years, but chafed at the growing emphasis on learning by rote. The National Portrait Gallery became her happy and stable environment.
Retired in Hertford, Clare researched the town’s little-known links to slavery, and in her last months worked up a lecture series for a local group on “Portraiture in Britain: Highlights Across Six Centuries”. It was so well prepared that Malcolm was able to deliver it after her death.
Clare is survived by Malcolm, by her nephews Philip, Danny, Tom, Joe and Max, and niece, Katharine, and by me.
