Ellen joined the Customer Services team in Library Services as a Library Assistant shortly before the coronavirus pandemic in February 2020. Despite the difficult circumstances, they persevered, and a welcome boost to the team’s morale, comradeship and knowledgebase was felt by all. Colleagues reflected that "Ellen was obviously a person of many parts: extremely bright and competent as well as humorous and unusual. Both hardworking and fun, they injected energy into the library".
They took to the Library Assistant job brilliantly, picking up the various aspects of the role quickly, but more than this, you could tell they had a genuine ambition to better the experience of any student or colleague they talked with. "They were full of such warmth and wit, and they brought this to every conversation, whether it be with colleagues or students. I always had such fun working alongside Ellen". Their kindness, humour and peculiar distinctiveness endeared them to us all, and they are greatly missed.
Ellen’s passion, intellect, character and care had such scale and breadth that the linear limitation of text is a little daunting for me to try and represent even a fragment of what their relatively short but overflowing life contained. Those who were touched by Ellen’s influence in their own lives will have experienced the uncanny web of intense attention, powerful love, and idiosyncratic zeal that emanated throughout all of Ellen’s connections. People, facts, animals, plants, fungus and ecosystems – all were honoured and enriched by their inquisitive interest and energy. Only capitalism, borders and bigotry escaped Ellen’s compassion.
Born in Marlow, High Wycombe in 1988 to Kate and Martin, Ellen’s incredible capacity for plant identification, remarkable memory recall, outrageous laugh and love of animals and music were present from the beginning. The family moved to The Hague in the Netherlands in 2000, and it is in reference to this period that Ellen would, later in life, recount a transformative story. In the back garden one day Ellen came across a toad on the family’s lawn. Moved by curiosity, Kate and Ellen investigated and discovered that this toad’s life cycle included traversing the urban environment, between impassable walls, dense traffic, and deserted industrial districts, to reach a water source it historically reproduced at. Kate carefully introduced Ellen to this phenomenon with a critical eye to the anthropocentrism of our lives and systems and the impact this had on other organisms. Kate encouraged in Ellen an understanding of, and care for, the niches occupied by, and value inherent in, all living beings that contribute to and share in the richness of our world.
This vein of countercultural, dominant-narrative-challenging perspective pervaded throughout Ellen’s life, in their identity, relationships, actions and efforts in the world. It informed their persistent political and environmental activism, educational pursuits and staunch devotion to biological recording and mycology. It extended into their spiritual conviction deepened by entheogenic experience, and fertilised their love and connection to witchcraft, folklore and Zen Buddhism. It also made them a great person to have a party with, with the rare quality of being able to relay dense tracts of highly detailed information on the dance floor whilst being a laugh at the same time. Ellen finessed juxtaposition in so many contexts.
Returning to the UK in 2004, Ellen tentatively began their career with books, starting the first of several spells with Oxfam Bookshops over time. Onwards to studying Anthropology at UCL in 2007; it was during this period at Holloway Road and Camberwell Grove that Ellen launched into the experiences, friendships and connections that would continue to enrich their life for years to come. Squat raves and DJing, protest activism and bin diving; Earth First gatherings and gardening, travelling around the U.S. and coaxing their way into the COP15 climate camp in Copenhagen with an expired ID card and some creative persuasion using their (previously acquired) Dutch language skills – memories which would make Ellen visibly glow at the retelling of. These events and encounters were saturated with the kindness, care and hilarity commonly experienced by those who were lucky enough to make their acquaintance.
With newly burgeoning friendships in tow and an increasing desire for environmental symbiosis, Ellen moved to Totnes to study Sustainable Horticulture at Schumacher College in 2012. Bunking in a friend’s tiny van and getting involved in rural life, Ellen emersed themselves in seed catalogues, vegetable variety data, regenerative farming techniques and imaginatively frugal culinary explorations. It was not long before they moved into their own caravan, with the idiomatic slogan ‘LOVE BUGS HATE HUMANS’ scrawled over the external panelling. It was here during solo candlelit vigils on cold windswept nights, blasting Black Metal from their hillside sanctuary, that Ellen recounted seeing visions of the future, rolling towards them like the wind. It was an experience they described as numinous and hinting at the subtle movements and mechanisms of the cosmos beyond their grasp.
In the summer of 2016 Ellen met and rapidly bonded with a new group of friends working in festival welfare with the organisation PsyCare UK. They felt that they had found a calling that resonated with their skills and interests, quickly becoming a team leader for the volunteers and a font of knowledge on harm reduction and substance interactions for anyone who would lend their ears. Encouraged by these connections, they moved in 2017 to Bristol, where many of these new friendships were based. Building on earlier forays at SoundArt Radio in Totnes and after years hogging the decks at friends’ parties, Ellen committed to the grind and emerged as the self-described mobile disco service, DJ MOONCUP. Making their mark on the Bristol music scene, Acid Morris parties and beyond, they landed a monthly resident’s slot at Noods Radio that they would regularly fill with an eclectic mix of techno, field recordings, sludge metal and readings of rare and obscure folklore pamphlets that Ellen would whisper over occult drones.
In 2018 Ellen was aggrieved to lose their mum, Kate, to cancer. This tremendously painful loss would continue to reverberate through the years to come, given poignancy and weight by the sheer abundance of creativity, love and insight that Kate had imbued Ellen’s life with while she was alive.
Never one to pause when there was important mycology to be done, Ellen began their MSc in Biological Recording with Manchester Metropolitan University in 2019, focusing their personal research efforts and final dissertation submission on the distribution data and species indicators for the native psychoactive fungus, Psilocybe Semilanceata. Passionate about contributing to increasing the academic understanding of the species as a means of highlighting the importance of protecting the ecological niche it occupies and indicates, Ellen was sincere in their belief that the value of the entheogenic compounds such organisms synthesize is the profound phenomenal experience of symbiotic consciousness unlocked in those individuals that encounter them, promoting a non-extractive, co-operative relationship with the natural world that we inhabit.
In 2019 Ellen began their burgeoning relationship with their partner Oli, a truly cherished connection that bought much security, warmth and love to Ellen’s life, moving in together, adopting their cat Arthur and further solidifying their commitment by recently buying a house together. The sudden death of Ellen’s close friend Jay Goulding in October 2020 was a bitter blow. Ellen’s one consolation at losing their beloved friend was a conviction that Jay would “do quite well in the eternal, ethereal realms”, a speculation that many of us who were close to Ellen equally derive some comfort from.
Ellen loved their job at the Library: they were excited to be completing their research and submitting their dissertation, were preparing to take on a tutorship position for plant-identification students and were in the midst of organising collective efforts to supply medicines to Ukrainian refugees with Ukraine Herbal Solidarity. Ellen’s father, Martin, reflected that though the best was yet to come, we can only be grateful that what had already come had been heard, felt, and appreciated by so many. The Earth has lost an advocate; but it has gained a compassionate shift of consciousness among a whole community of individuals who have been moved by Ellen’s voracious lust for life.
Ellen passed away on Friday 6 May 2022, in the Ribble River watershed bioregion. They are survived by their father Martin, uncle David, aunt Suzzanah, and cousins Lucy and Alice.
The funeral and celebration of Ellen’s life was held on 24 June at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, where they are reunited with their mum Kate once again. Befitting Ellen’s passionate support of collective efforts to care for those experiencing vulnerability and dispossession in our society, donations to the following three organisations that were important to Ellen are welcomed and encouraged: PsyCare UK, Ukraine Herbal Solidarity and the Cats Protection League.