Lesley Rower

Newbury, Vt. — Lesley Rower, of Newbury, teacher and artist, died at home Monday, Nov. 20, 2017, aged 74. Born Lesley L. S. Hibberd to Sylvia Aston and Geoffrey Hibberd in Portsmouth, England, on June 4, 1943, she grew up in Singleton, Sussex, and in the Wye Valley near Tintern Abbey. She was a graduate of the Monmouth School for Girls and the Froebel Institute of the University of London, and she taught in the Leicestershire Experiment and Plan (1964) before coming to the United States in 1965 to teach at the Reservoir Street School, an experimental preschool and kindergarten in Cambridge, Mass. In 1967 she was a founding teacher at the Fayerweather Street School nearby, which continues. She moved to Vermont in 1970, where she mentored new teachers in the Upper Valley Teacher Training Program (now The Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, N.H.). In 1976 she acquired Nature’s Fibres, a supplier to handweavers of fine wool upholstery yarns and Italian silk yarns. In 1987 she joined the Early Childhood team at the Orange East Supervisory Union in Bradford, Vt., retiring in 2012. 

Lesley was an expert weaver of yard goods and original tapestries, and later a watercolorist of woodland and garden scenes, studying with Kaji Aso in Boston and Aidron Duckworth of Meriden, N.H. In her late years she studied printmaking with Terry Downs in Plymouth, N.H., and produced a series of woodcuts and etchings employing her distinctive drawing style.

During their childhood, she took her two sons to England, Scotland, France and Italy to supplement their education. After retirement and despite a diagnosis of incurable cancer, she undertook walking tours with her husband of the Auvergne and Alsace (France) southern Umbria (Italy) and the Dorset Coast (England).   

She is survived by her husband of 47 years, Kenneth; two sons, Jacob (Stephanie Danforth), of Seattle, and Tobias (Sharifah Taqi), of New York City; one grandchild, Frieda Madeleine Rower, born in June, of New York City; a sister, Gilda Hibberd, of London; a brother, Guy Hibberd (Patricia Williams), and niece Eleanor Hibberd and nephew Thomas Hibberd, all of Shrewsbury, England. 

Lesley Rower will be remembered by friends and colleagues for her kindness, her unfailing assumption of goodwill in others, her wit, her remarkable dinner parties, her persistent English accent (heard in England as an American accent), and her elegant self-made jewelry. Lesley was a fast walker and a good birder. A memorial service will be held in Newbury in the spring. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.