Theresa Quinn, who worked ceaselessly for the National Association of Memorial Masons (NAMM) for 20 years, 11 of them of as its National Executive Officer, died in a car crash on the A5 at Leighton Buzzard on Thursday, 31 October.

Theresa was taken to Milton Keynes Hospital, but died shortly after the collision, which also involved a red Peugeot 306, a silver VW Polo and a white MANN lorry. People in the other vehicles were only slightly injured.

Theresa Quinn was the guiding hand of NAMM up to the point she resigned in 2000 saying she had been thinking about leaving for a year or so. "I'm very tired," she said after the annual conference in September 2000, during which she tendered her resignation but was asked to reconsider.

As well as managing NAMM she had been looking after her mother, who died in October that year, and her son Damian.

"It's not an easy decision, but it's one I felt I had to make," she told NSS at the time. "I will miss the members and the interest of the work very greatly indeed. However, I have no doubt that other people can pick it up and I have said I will be available for as long as they want me to be to help with the transition. I want NAMM to survive and survive well."

Andrew Hawley, NAMM's President in 2000, said: "We are very sorry to see Theresa leave. They don't make them like that any more. Nobody else would devote the amount of time to NAMM that Theresa has."

When Theresa took over the administration of NAMM it was £50,000 in the red and not making much of an impact. She and Moya Harvey, of Ross Stonecraft, Slough, and a memebr of the Executive Committee of NAMM worked together to repair the finances and keep NAMM alive. In her final year as National Executive Officer, Theresa had a recruitment drive and increased the organisation's membership by 10%.

When Theresa took over as National Executive Officer in 1989, the organisation was called the National Association of Master Masons. It was Moya and Theresa who persuaded the members to change the name to include the word 'memorial' in the title in order to make it more immediately obvious to the public and other interested parties what it represented.

After Theresa's appointment, NAMM grew in stature and importance within the death care industry in general, developing its Code of Working Practice that was increasingly adopted as the standard required by cemeteries and turning NAMM into the contact point with memorial masons for cemetery authorities, funeral directors and government.