The ICCM Journal | Summer 2022 | V90 No. 2
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Ian Charles William Quance FICCM: an obituary It is with great sadness that I learned that Ian had lost his long battle with cancer, and I know that I speak for all of his friends and colleagues at the ICCM when I send our sincere condolences to his wife Heather and his children Alys, Jake, Ewan, and Henry. I think some of the most accurate words I have read about Ian were posted by a friend of his on Facebook which read ‘Ian Quance lived a kaleidoscope of a thousand different lives’. Having the pleasure of being able to call Ian a friend and in speaking with him many times over the years I think this sums him up perfectly. Ian was born in Birmingham in 1958. He grew up on the boundary of Handsworth and the Black Country and within walking distance of his beloved West Bromwich Albion ground, The Hawthorns. After completing a geography degree at St David’s University College, Lampeter, he returned to the Midlands working for a local brewery as a stock taker for four years. After this ended in 1984, and after two years working in temporary jobs in factories, including in a corrugated steel factory of which he once told me he was lucky he still had all of his fingers intact, he moved to London to study for a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Goldsmiths college. He then spent three years teaching in a school described at the time as the roughest in England. The school served the mostly, newly arrived, Sylheti Bangladeshi community around Brick Lane and to any of you who knew Ian it would be no surprise to know that he got involved with several campaigns centring on housing and equality issues with the local community. After three years and five headteachers (Ian said it was a tough school), Ian left teaching to become a pioneer as the world's first gardener in the community in the London Borough of Camden. For three years, he drove around the borough in a brightly painted milk float, encouraging community gardening projects, inventing guerrilla gardening and digging wildlife ponds for schools. Ian was at the forefront of environmental issues even during the late 80’s and early 90’s improving the environment and using an electric vehicle before any climate emergency was declared. During this time, he married Heather and Alys was born soon after. The prospect of raising a child in a one-bedroom flat in North London was daunting, so when Alys was six weeks old, the family moved to Heather’s home in central Alabama, USA. Ian spent the next five years running English country gardens, growing fruit and vegetables that couldn’t be grown in the UK due to our climate. This was supplemented with jobs including counting the contents of supermarket shelves and delivering pizza for Dominos. Family circumstances led to a return to the UK in 1997 and the family, now with their second child, Jake as well and Ian’s father, settled in Kentisbeare in Mid Devon. Ian took a temporary position at Mid Devon district council helping to manage the grounds maintenance contract. Part of this covered the cemeteries in Tiverton and Crediton and Ian quickly saw that the management of these was desperately in need of review. He encountered the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, an event that changed his career and would lead to my first meeting with him. In 2004 he moved to Exeter city council where he went on to become bereavement services manager in 2007. I remember visiting the new children’s memorial garden that Ian had designed and built at Higher
