Tribute

Apr 8, 1937 – Jun 8, 2026

Jill Adams Willmott was born to Canadian parents Eric George Adams and Josepha Bowman MacKinnon Adams in New York City on April 8th, 1937. Brought back to Canada when she was just 18 months old she next lived in Toronto (where her only sibling Ellen joined the family in 1941), Ottawa, and Montreal before leaving with the family for an almost 7-year sojourn in Europe.

Jill’s post-secondary studies encompassed math and physics, anthropology, and hand-bookbinding. She dropped out of the first field after her physics lab instructor refused to answer her questions because “women should be at home looking after children”. She next spent five happy years doing two degrees in the second, but couldn’t find work in that field in the city in which the family eventually settled. Then several years later, after ten months of instruction at the Colchester Technical Institute in England she started her own bookbinding business on the family’s dining-room table in Kingston, ON, and practiced and taught hand-bookbinding for the next 25 years.

While Jill was at UBC she had met and married the late Richard Curtis Willmott in June of 1961. It was a very happy union, and together they raised three children Ian Bruce, Michele Suzanne, and Derek Ross, all creative and productive people, and she now leaves them and their partners behind.

With her family of origin and her family of procreation Jill did a lot of traveling, and over her lifetime set foot in 35 countries and lived in six of them. She was fond of rail travel and sea voyages, and her curiosity made her somewhat of an adventurer. At age 50 she parachuted from a plane at 3,000 feet, and later went hot-air ballooning on 5 different occasions. In 2014 she was the only passenger on a tramp-frieghter trip from Montreal to Casablanca, Morocco, and in her last decade of life she was trying to learn to play a medieval instrument, called a hurdy-gurdy, which her husband had made for her.

Jill was an atheist, a pragmatist, and a wanna-be pacifist. She dreamed of a more egalitarian society and worked for many years trying to better our world. The three things she was most proud of were being one of the instigators and founders of The Canadian Bookbinders’ and Book Artists’ Guild in 1983; then several years later raising sufficient donations to provide 498 Lesotho grandmothers and their numerous orphaned grandchildren with solar cookers and the know-how to use them; and after retirement starting and managing a Salt Spring non-performance madrigal- singing group called Mostly Madrigals, which met for ten years – solely for the joy of making wonderful harmonies together.

Apart from her family and friends her main loves were handicrafts, pussy-cats, Early Music, books, sweet wines, milk chocolate, flash-mobs, and spontaneous acts of kindness. Jill died June 8, 2026 on Salt Spring Island, and earlier this year was heard to say, “I had a very interesting life!” There will be no funeral as per her wishes.