PHYLLIS Jackson, who was honoured this month for services to the community in Ramsey, has died aged 79. Mrs Jackson, who lived with her husband, Dennis, in School Lane, Ramsey, was joint winner with him of a Hunts Post Volunteer of the Year Award for deca

PHYLLIS Jackson, who was honoured this month for services to the community in Ramsey, has died aged 79.

Mrs Jackson, who lived with her husband, Dennis, in School Lane, Ramsey, was joint winner with him of a Hunts Post Volunteer of the Year Award for decades of community work by the couple. They were to have celebrated their diamond wedding next January.

Mrs Jackson had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. She died last Wednesday.

The couple met during the war when he was 21 and she was 17. Mr Jackson was home on leave after serving in the Far East for three years. He had joined the Navy on his 18th birthday.

Mr Jackson also served in West Africa. They married in 1948.

Both Londoners, the couple had grown up in Willesden, North London. Mr Jackson said: "We both liked boating holidays and we used to come to Ely and take the same boat every year on the River Ouse. We always said we would retire to Cambridgeshire.

However, a job change in 1981 brought the couple here sooner. Mr Jackson worked as a consultant engineer for Peterborough Council and they decided to live in Ramsey.

Phyllis, who had worked as a recruitment consultant for Alfred Marks and Brook Street Bureau, was key to the success of the town's JobSearch scheme, now based at the Ramsey Community Centre in The Great Whyte. She also worked for Ramsey in Bloom. She supported her husband in his community work which included becoming a councillor and mayor of the town, founding the Ramsey Town Centre Partnership, reviving the carnival committee, starting the Ramsey branch of the Fenland Crime Prevention Panel and beginning a miniature steam engine society.

Mr Jackson said: "Phyllis would like to be remembered as somebody who had concern for the community and whom people found helpful, kind and cheerful. She was delighted with the Hunts Post award and we were very glad that she could be there to receive it. She was very ill and in a wheelchair, but she was there."

A service to celebrate the life of Phyllis Jackson will be held at the Church of St Thomas à Beckett in Ramsey tomorrow (Thursday) at 2.45pm. The family have asked for no flowers but donations, if wished, to Thorpe Hall, the Sue Ryder Home in Peterborough, where Mrs Jackson spent her last days.