Man donates van to hospice which cared for wife

A man whose wife was given end-of-life care by a hospice has donated a van to them as he said they "were there for us when we needed them most".

Severn Hospice cares for patients from Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin and mid-Wales, and the van will be used by its retail operation and maintenance teams which support its 31 charity shops.

Jeff Court met Barbara in London in the early 1960s, and went on to co-found a business together and have two children.

The pair were married for 59 years before Barbara died just before Christmas in 2025.

She was referred to Severn Hospice in October 2022 after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) which was later complicated by frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

Barbara was supported at home by the community nursing team, as well as attending specialist clinics at a centre in Bicton, Shrewsbury.

"She lost the ability to speak the 18 months before she died," her husband said.

"So we had no meaningful conversations, really, for the last eight, nine months.

"We learnt sign language, but that really doesn't give you any deep amount of communication - but it did help us to understand yes and no."

Court said the hospice was always there for he and his wife, particularly in the final months of her life when she was particularly unwell.

"That was really important, that I got some advice on what to do," he said.

"I'd never been there before, it was all very new to me, but they were great and I felt that I really wanted to see if I could do something for them going forward."

It was in January this year that Court started to think about how he could help Severn Hospice.

"I'd got another vehicle which I was trying to pass on to the hospice, but they explained that they wanted something particular," he said.

The van, grey with flashes of yellow and blue from the hospice's logo, also bears Barbara's name.

"I know she'd [Barbara] love the idea - we used to love going to the charity shop in Oswestry, and I'm sure she'd be pleased to see her name travelling around Shropshire, hopefully doing a bit of good for the hospice."

Kay Britton from Severn Hospice said the van was "so important".

"Our 31 charity shops bring in £1.5 million of the money that we have to raise, so it's a huge chunk of what we have to bring in and as everybody knows, costs are rising heavily all the time."

The vans mean that instead of hiring external companies to do maintenance on the charity shops, it can be done in-house, with the team able to travel around the county to its various sites.

"If we haven't got our shops open, it has a huge impact on us," said Britton.

"Now that we actually have our own dedicated van for our maintenance team to go out and about we just know we can keep our shops open for longer.

"If we didn't have this vehicle now we could have shops that are having to close for two or three hours of the day, or having to close for full days to wait for contractors.

"That could literally mean that our income that goes directly into our patient care is down significantly."

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