Former Mayor of Crawley dies, aged 84

Sally, who represented Gossops Green and Pound Hill North during her time with the borough council, was the town’s first Conservative mayor and only the second to serve two consecutive terms of office.

It was during her time in office that she welcomed the Queen to Crawley in 2006. Sally and her husband Keith – another former mayor – were a well known and popular couple. He died in 2017, aged 72.

Keith’s work for Rediffusion at Gatwick took him on frequent trips to the US. It was on his return from one of those trips that he first met Sally.

Speaking following his death, she said: “We went out for a drink and we had this rapport right from the start.” The couple were married for almost 40 years.

Sally was a Crawley girl through and through. Her grandfather moved to what was then little more than a village in the 1890s and Sally herself was born shortly before the start of the Second World War.

She was a former trustee of the Courage Dyer Recreational Trust. A council spokesman said: “Our thoughts are with Sally’s family at this sad time.”