Tania Witter

WHAT was so remarkable about Tania Witter – because it is so rare – was her radical acceptance of so many different kinds of people and situations. She didn’t waste energy on making judgments, instead responding open-heartedly to whatever was unfolding. Which didn’t mean she was a softie – a less sentimental person (except about dogs) you’ll rarely met.

She was kind to bores and the self-pitying. She knew they were bores and consumed by self-pity, but like the Maker in whom she trusted, she loved them anyway.

A physically slight woman, she had a clear voice that didn’t command – but for 30 years she led change around Christ Church Highbury, in Highbury Grove, as an unpaid priest. When she was ordained as the curate in 1996, she was already in her 50s.

Here, she worked with three male vicars and never stopped pushing them and the congregation for the church to widen its loving role in the whole community: out of that came the Night Shelter, part of a wider Islington church effort to provide dinner, bed and breakfast for those who found themselves homeless in the coldest months; and then the Memory Café, a weekly get together over tea and cakes for people suffering from dementia, their families and carers.

Born in the UK in 1937, she grew up in Ceylon. She married interpreter Nick Witter, who specialised in translating atomic energy conferences for the UN, in the 1960 and had four children (one died as a baby) and seven grandchildren. When Nick retired from his job in Vienna, where they had lived for 27 years, he and Tania moved to Arvon Road, Highbury, in 1992 and then Highbury Grove around 15 years ago.

She ran Bible study groups, was the pillar of Christ Church’s commitment to visiting members of the congregation confined to home or hospital, and was also a member of the raucous and sceptical Christ Church Ethics Group.

Priest Martine Oborne said: “She was kind but tough. She didn’t always tell you what you wanted to hear, but what you needed to hear.”

While she has a memorial in the community centre, what is much rarer is how she’s remembered by almost everyone who knew her.

Knowing Tania Witter expanded all our notions of what’s possible in a life.

She died of a stroke on January 11, 2023. She leaves behind three children; Simon, Sophie and Danny; and six grandchildren; Sam, Danny, Alfie, Emily, Sasha and Lara.