Obituary: Phyllis Glick

Twice crowned the junior tennis champion of Wales, Phyllis Barnett — as she then was — later branched with almost equal success, as Phyllis Glick, into bridge and golf.

She was the only daughter, with three older brothers, of Isaac and Ellen Barnett who ran a successful business in South Wales until hit by the effects of the 1926 General Strike. This started with a miners’ strike and led to a depression. Both parents died soon after, while Phyllis was still at school.

She excelled at school and twice won the Welsh junior championships in the 1930s. She also quickly learned to play bridge to a high standard, in order to make up a fourth with her brothers.

She could not afford to take up a mathematics place at Cardiff University, but a scholarship and a Jewish women’s charity paid for her training at Chelsea College of Physical Education.

In 1939 she was a PE teacher in Wakefield, Yorkshire. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she assisted in children’s evacuations and was unit commander in the Women’s Junior Air Corps, training girl cadets. By 1945 she was a teaching inspector for the West Riding.

In the immediate postwar years she won many laurels in Leeds Parks Tennis Tournaments and was part of the winning four at the 1946 Killarney Bridge congress. Her favourite bridge victory was over Iain Macleod, an international standard player and future Tory government minister.

She met her husband, Dr Louis Glick, a consultant physician in Halifax, at a bridge party. They married at the New Synagogue, Leeds, in 1947. Settling in Halifax to run a home and bring up her two children, she still enjoyed sport. She was captain of Queen’s Tennis Club and singles champion for many years.

She then graduated to golf and was a first team member and then captain of the Lightcliffe Gold Club. A born teacher, she ran bridge classes, despite failing eyesight, until nearly 90. She was also an active volunteer, helping to run the town’s meals-on-wheels service and charity clothing shop.

On Louis’s retirement they travelled and “golfed” the world until his death in 1989. She spent her last years in Hammerson House, North London, following tennis and golf on TV.

She is survived by her son Ian, daughter, Ruth, and five grandsons.