Avril Masters

Our dear sister Avril Masters ascended peacefully at home on 9th April at the age of 96. She was surrounded by her 3 children Rosalind, Priscilla, James, and friends. Avril lived a long and blessed life exemplifying, together with her beloved husband Henry, a lifetime of total dedication to Heaven and its providence.

Avril's faith and love of God was always part of her life, starting as a young child growing up in the village of Stanton Fitzwarren and joining in all the activities of the local church and community. Raised on a farm, she always had a love for nature, animals, and flowers. Her house was always spotless, clean, and tidy. Avril liked to cook and invite friends and family over for a meal or tea.

On August 23rd, 1952, Avril married Henry Masters who she had known since childhood. The young couple moved to London where Henry finished his architectural training and then returned to Stanton Fitzwarren where their 3 children were born. She continued to be involved in the activities of the village and became President of the Women's Institute for a while and a Magistrate as well.

In 1973, Henry and Avril joined the Unification Church and 3 years later received the Blessing. They dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to True Parents and God's providence giving up everything including their wealth. Avril was like a mother to all those who came to see her looking after everyone in whatever way was needed. She travelled around the country visiting the parents of our members giving them reassurance regarding their children. Around this time, True Father visited the farm and planted the oak tree consecrating this as a holy ground.

In 1983 Avril went to America to join Henry, who was already there designing boats, and to look after the Belvedere house. She took great care of the house and guests and had some wonderful experiences meeting with members of the True Family. The following years, because of Henry's work with the boats, they moved to various places in the United States. Wherever Avril went she always took great care of the house where she lived, creating a beautiful atmosphere through her high standard of cleanliness, her wonderful flower displays and her special touch. People also remember her for her popular and delicious homemade shortbread.

Later Henry and Avril were selected as national Messiah for Cuba. They were unable to move there because of the situation at the time so they moved to Miami, Florida to work with other members for Cuba. Eventually they managed to visit Cuba twice.

In 2007, Henry and Avril returned home to England, to Stanton Fitzwarren, where they lived together at South Farm Barn until Henry's ascension on 23 May 2020.

Avril was a small woman with great faith and determination. She lived a long and fruitful life. She will be remembered for her sincere love and desire to help and understand others. Thank you, Avril, for your love and dedication.

Avril Masters was born on the 8th of April 1926, the daughter of Reginald and Lucy Rose Geach, and she grew up at North Farm in Stanton Fitzwarren, the Wiltshire village where her father took over the farming after his own father's death. With her older brother Desmond she had a happy farm childhood, drawn from her earliest years to nature, to flowers, and to the cats and dogs that seemed forever to wander up to the door and decide to stay. She remembered as a small girl the shire horses her father worked, immense beings whose harness and hooves filled the green lanes with sound, and that early intimacy with land and creatures never left her. The village school closed for want of pupils, and she continued her education at Highworth and, when war broke out, at a London school evacuated to the area, where she was one of only two day girls; her mother, determined that she should finish, paid the fees out of the sale of chickens and eggs from the farm.

On the 23rd of August 1952 she married Henry Masters at St Leonard's Church in Stanton Fitzwarren, the wedding reception held in the tithe barn at North Farm. They had known each other since childhood, for Henry would come with his mother and sisters to the old schoolhouse opposite, and young Avril had watched enviously from her window as he climbed onto the roof and played the wild games her own parents would never permit. After a spell in London, where Henry completed his training as an architect, they returned to the village expecting their first child Rosalind; Henry designed their home in Hyssle Lane, where Priscilla and later James were born.

A small woman of great determination, Avril threw herself into village life. She arranged flowers for the church, presided for a time over the Women's Institute, sat as a magistrate, took meals on wheels to neighbours, and kept a house famous for the smell of polish and freshly cut blooms, with a little posy set even in the children's bedrooms. She sewed clothes, curtains and chair covers, bottled and jammed the fruit from her garden, and welcomed friends and family to her table. Family holidays were spent camping, caravanning, or drifting along the Thames and canals working the locks.

Faith had shaped her from childhood, stirred by Canon Harman's teaching about the spiritual world and by Reverend Perry's tearful sermons on the suffering of Jesus. In 1973, after her daughter Rosalind introduced them, Henry and Avril joined the Unification Church, and on the 22nd of December 1976 they received the Blessing at Belvedere as part of the 35 Couples group. They gave away their wealth, their farm, their home and their assets with what one friend called "a beautiful grateful heart." Through the seventies Avril travelled the country meeting the parents of young members on the Martha witnessing team, mothering whoever came near her. In 1983 she joined Henry in America, keeping the Belvedere house and earning a lasting reputation for her shortbread, which followed her through Moss Point, Mobile, Little Ferry, Beaufort, and later Miami, where the couple worked toward their mission country of Cuba and eventually visited it twice. Wherever she went, climbing roses bloomed against the walls and the cookie tin was never empty.

She and Henry returned to Stanton Fitzwarren in 2007, settling in the converted stable they called South Farm Barn, on the very ground where Reverend Moon had planted an oak in 1974. She nursed Henry devotedly to the end, having taken a pacemaker near ninety so that she might outlive him as his carer; she was still driving at ninety, terrifyingly fast. Henry ascended on the 23rd of May 2020, and Avril, who had said plainly that she did not wish to linger long without him, died peacefully at home on the morning of the 9th of April 2022, one day after her ninety-sixth birthday, her mind alert to the last and still fretting that her daughter should get enough sleep. She left three children, five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren named Oscar and Ella, and an enormous extended family of those she had simply loved. A friend's poem put it best: she dressed herself, from head to toe, in love.