CAVERSHAM HEIGHTS Methodist Church (CHMC) was packed for a memorial service led by Rev Rosemary Fletcher, a former minister, to celebrate and honour the life of Linda Dudley on 20 June. That so many people should attend was a mark of the love for Linda of the many people whose lives she had touched in some way.
Linda was born in 1947 and grew up in Maidenhead where she attended a convent school. On leaving school, she spent two years working with The Ockenden Venture, a charity founded to support displaced children and young people, many of them survivors of concentration camps or post-war refugees.
Following this, she applied to the Hammersmith Hospital in London to train as a nurse. It was one of the most prestigious teaching hospitals in the country. Gaining a place there was not easy, but they saw something in her – potential.
In 1973, she came to Reading to train as a midwife at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. By 1976 she was an experienced midwife, described by a junior doctor at the time as being “confident, capable, and wonderfully kind”. In 1977 she met John Dudley, and they were married in 1983. By then, Linda had moved from midwifery into practice nursing, based at Emmer Green Surgery, where she proved to be an important member of the team, turning her hand to anything that was needed. She had an almost magical ability to make people feel safe – and she did this without being condescending or clinical. She’d explain procedures with clarity, listen carefully, and — at the right moment — drop in a comment to make someone laugh and feel human again.
Her family was her greatest joy. Their daughter Fiona lives close by with husband Andy and their son. Linda loved being involved in caring for her grandson as he was growing up. Outside of work, Linda threw herself into life with a joy and openness that inspired everyone around her. She sang in barbershop harmony groups. She played badminton, walked with friends and swam. For more than 35 years she was part of the Methodist church community, working with children, and later as a steward, and supported husband John in his second career as an Anglican minister. In all of this, she always found time to connect with people.
Because that, more than anything, is what Linda loved to do; talk, listen, engage. She was curious, she wanted to know people and was interested in their lives. She was, in every sense, a caregiver. Not just by profession, but by nature.
Linda has gone but her legacy lives on. Not just in her family, whom she adored, but in the lives she touched, the patients she comforted, the colleagues she supported, and the friends she made.
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