‘Miss Taylor was the apple of our eyes, she was a great teacher.’

‘Josie first came into my life at 11 years old. She was my teacher who directly inspired me as an athlete and indirectly fuelled my wider academic studies. Throughout her life she wrote me letters that stimulated my ambitions and hopes.’

These touching tributes are among many made by former pupils of Josie Hine, who invested much time and energy in her young charges while a PE teacher at Bradford’s St Edmund Campion Secondary School.

Josie’s enthusiasm and encouragement inspired one girl, Beryl Moore, now Beryl Burkitt, to go on to compete in international athletics.

As those who knew Josie, who died recently from leukaemia, will testify, this enthusiasm extended to every aspect of life.

Born in Bradford in 1942, Josie Taylor graduated as a PE teacher from Lady Mabel College near Rotherham in 1965.

She was eager for new experiences: while teacher training she became a voluntary instructor at the Plas-y-Brenin Mountain Centre in Wales, teaching climbing and canoeing. She gained her Mountain Leadership certificate, succeeding in a then male-dominated environment.

This was just the start of a life of adventure: two years later Josie bought an old Bedford Dormobile and set off to drive around the world on the ‘hippy trail.’

Says Josie’s husband Rod: “She teamed up with another girl and they spent nine months in Greece and then set off via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and Nepal." They found work acting as decadent Western girl extras in dubious Hindi films, to earn enough cash to ship the Dormobile to Kenya.”

In Kenya both girls found work teaching. Among her many activities while there, Josie climbed Kilimanjaro three times and scaled Mount Kenya. She also fulfilled an ambition to learn to fly.

It was at the Aero club she was introduced Rod, who was in Africa building satellite earth stations. “It was love at first sight for me,” he says. “When I met her I knew within a few minutes that something special had happened.”

They returned to West Yorkshire to marry, tying the knot in January 1972 at Calverley Church, before returning to Kenya where they worked until late 1976.

Expecting their first child, they decided to return to the UK and bought the house next door to Josie’s parents in Bolton Woods.

After focusing on raising their three children, Daniel, Jason, and Jessica, Josie returned to teaching, initially as supply teacher in many Bradford schools and then later as a home tutor for the unit that handled children who had been excluded or couldn’t attend school for health reasons.

Says Rod: “Josie also ran the Shipley Swimming & Lifesaving Club for around 20 years, taught hundreds of Bradford children to swim, ran the London Marathon twice, appeared on ‘The Krypton Factor’, sailed on two tall ships, did a tandem skydive aged 72 and walked many of Britain’s long-distance footpaths.”

A force to be reckoned with, Josie has over the years been an outspoken campaigner for various environmental causes in Bolton Woods, in particular noise and dust from lorries travelling to and from the former quarry.

Says Rod. ““We had a DIY celebration service at the Tarn Moor Woodland Burial Site near Skipton. We were only allowed a small number for the actual graveside ceremony but we could have invited at least a couple of hundred were It not for the Covid-19 restrictions.”

Josie’s happy life and times have been mapped out by family and friends on the Josie Hine Memorial Group on Facebook.

Adds Rod: “She was a truly remarkable 'Bratford lass’.”