Obituary: Sheila Rose Agnes Sinclair, HR consultant, community council leader, charity volunteer, tireless worker

Sheila Sinclair, HR consultant, community council leader, charity volunteer, tireless worker

Sheila Sinclair’s antipathy to the term Human Resources was typical of her approach to life – she was classic people person who preferred the concept of personnel rather than reducing people to “resources”.

The tick-box culture was not in her nature but she used her considerable skills to rack up an impressive string of achievements helping others, most notably in retirement in North Berwick and Edinburgh.

She was a woman who pulled out all the stops when there was a job to be done – whether it was as secretary of the East Lothian Community Rail Partnership, leading the local community council or steering her town to glory in Britain in Bloom.

Such a life of commitment to others may well have been in the genes: her parents James and Agnes both worked in public service at Edinburgh City Chambers. Educated at the capital’s Flora Stevenson Primary and Broughton High schools, she then successfully sat the Civil Service exam and initially began her career with the Post Office. It took her from Edinburgh to St Albans and London where she enjoyed city life and became a member of the props team of Wood Green Operatic Society.

By the time the Post Office Telecommunications had become British Telecom she was working in HR and training and when BT instigated a large round of redundancies she found herself travelling around the country preparing workers for the loss of their jobs. Eventually she made herself redundant, at the age of 50, and returned to Scotland, determined to make full use of her training and counselling skills elsewhere. At BT she had been working alongside four consultancies and was offered a job by each. She chose one in Leith and remained there for a decade.

As a consultant running pre-retirement workshops, she had no truck with pomposity and some of the more ludicrous business jargon that had evolved in the 1980s. Her sense of humour, which punctured such bombastic rhetoric, also proved key in her work counselling and mentoring those losing their careers through redundancy.

From 1990 she made her home in North Berwick, where she had holidayed as a child, and once retired she was free to help others in myriad different ways: as chair of the community council where she worked tirelessly, edited its newsletter and always went the extra mile; through Friends of the Lodge Grounds, a public park in the town, and through North Berwick in Bloom. The town has now won the coastal town title nine times and in 2016 was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s rosebowl.

The previous year Miss Sinclair added to her local commitments by volunteering to work with the East Lothian Community Rail Partnership and became the organisation’s Honorary Secretary.

“During that time she proved to be an invaluable asset,” said Harry Barker, chair of the Partnership. “Her dedication to the Partnership extended to having meetings of the committee in her house where we discussed all manner of things, but in particular her desire to have public toilets reinstated at the station in North Berwick which was perhaps one of her most determined crusades, but sadly not realised in her lifetime.”

She did however reach an agreement with a nearby gallery allowing rail customers to use its facility, took a constructive part in an audit of East Lothian stations and often attended Association of Community Rail Partnership conferences, usually held in England or Wales, plus ScotRail events in Glasgow and Stirling, where her networking skills were ably demonstrated.

“Her encyclopaedic knowledge of who did what in East Lothian, coupled with her contacts and personal acquaintances, stood her well in all she did and she will be sorely missed,” added Mr Barker.

A woman who detested politics getting in the way of achieving good things, she had a real can-do attitude, earning a reputation for delivering almost anything to which she set her mind and being honoured earlier this year with Rotary International award for her special service to the town. Over the years she had raised more than £30,000 for good causes – much of it through quizzes she compiled for charity. She had also been involved with awarding grants for an education trust and enthusiastically dedicated much time to a hospice bookshop in Edinburgh’s Morningside.

Words were something that she took great pleasure from and a wall of her home in North Berwick, where she had a telescope trained on the Bass Rock, was packed with books. She also arranged for the Robert Louis Stevenson poem From A Railway Carriage, which was written on a train journey to North Berwick, to be put on display at the station there.

Clever and witty, she was a stickler for correct grammar and enjoyed the nuance and hidden meaning not only in crosswords and quizzes but in general conversation.

She used language effectively and with great influence in her many roles, fulfilling a desire she had once expressed to be remembered as someone who used words as a stepping stone.

Predeceased by her brother Ronnie, a Royal Navy captain, she is survived by her sister Norma, nephews, niece and extended family.

ALISON SHAW