Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Rita dedicated her life to improving mental health care
Tributes to co-founder of Umbrella Centre
A “charismatic” co-founder of a mental health charity who spent a lifetime helping others has died aged 88.
Rita Jones was one of the founding members of the Canterbury Umbrella Centre and became its first chair.
As a result of her work in mental health, she was given a Diamond Award by the hospital charity League of Friends in 2009, presented by Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace.
The St Stephen’s resident sadly died following a short illness last month, two years after Brian, her husband of 64 years.
Her daughter, Melissa Mansfield Jones, has since paid a heartfelt tribute to her mother.
“She left so many friends and colleagues who thought the world of her and, of course, us, her children and her eight grandchildren, who will never forget her or stop being proud of her,” she said.
“She was intensely interested in people. She knew how to bring people out of themselves and she made connections with people everywhere.
“Because she had had a broad life experience herself, she made no distinction between the ‘important’ people and the ‘small’ people.”
The mum-of-two had worked as the voluntary services manager of the former St Augustine’s Psychiatric Hospital in the late-70s.
During her tenure, she helped launch a Women’s Institute, a men’s club, a beautician’s and a patients’ committee.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government launched a policy in favour of closing long-stay psychiatric hospitals and replacing them with community-based mental health services.
Mrs Mansfield Jones said: “St Augustine’s started to empty the wards prior to closure.
“But what was clear to mum and Jill Butler - who by now had worked with Rita for a decade and was her ‘right-hand woman’ - was the ‘released’ patients were not being cared for by anyone.
“Many of them committed suicide and many simply disappeared.
“Rita and Jill took their book of volunteer names and started to fundraise for a centre where ex-patients could meet and be supported.”
Using “networking and browbeating”, the pair raised £350,000 to help launch the Umbrella Centre in 1992.
It was opened by the then-archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey.
“Umbrella has been a brilliant place for so many people,” Mrs Mansfield Jones continued.
“They have been given a fixed daily point of company in sometimes lonely lives, new interests such as cooking or art, some group therapy, some good food at a good price, good company and the occasional marriage.
“The whole idea was rolled out to many other towns with an Umbrella Centre in Whitstable, Faversham and Herne Bay.”
Rita continued her services to mental health, her involvement with Umbrella and also as president of the east Kent branch of Friends for Mental Health from 1995 into the 2010s.
When Rita was a young teenager, her mother developed schizophrenia.
Rita had to take on cleaning duties, cooking and trying to be
a ‘mum’ for her younger sister.
They managed to keep their mother at home rather than send her to the “dreaded” asylum - as they were called.
Rita’s parents ran a busy newsagents, which she had to work in from about the age of 14.
She was also a keen amateur actor and met her future husband Brian in a drama group in south London.
“It was as though she had been born for her role as volunteer co-ordinator at St Augustine’s,” Mrs Mansfield Jones added.
“All her personal history of the great difficulty of being a young carer to a loving mother who was almost lost to mental illness.
“All her great confidence and charisma honed by the acting and stage work.
“All her can-do work ethic, brought about by having been working pretty much since she was 14, were brought to bear.
“She had enormous empathy for the patients - each and every one of them could have been her mum.
“She had such vision - she wanted patients to have a voice and she believed in the power of autonomy and agency as a road to recovery.”
Her funeral will be held at Barham Crematorium at midday on Saturday (May 14).