Jilly Cooper made everyone feel special – and her memorial was the perfect tribute | Zoe Williams

2026-02-03 - 11:15

It featured the queen, Rupert Everett and horses paying their respects, amid a combination of romance, absurdity and delight at Southwark Cathedral last week Jilly Cooper’s memorial last week started with the dean of Southwark Cathedral telling a story from her funeral last year: as the congregation made their way to her final resting place, five horses ambled majestically across a field, and came to stand in formation, looking at the grave. They would not be budged and their intention was crystal clear: they were paying their horse-respect (this is not verbatim by the way) to an author who did as much for equine-kind as she did for humans. The story was pitch perfect; you could imagine Cooper laughing at it, at the same time as believing it, at the same time as thinking no funeral was complete without five horses. The combination of romance, magnitude, absurdity, delight and animals could have come straight off the pages of a Jilly Cooper novel, but how would a dean know that? Did they also, back in the day, pass a bashed-up copy of Riders around dean school? (My friend who is a librarian expressed some professional irritation that, at her school, they couldn’t get it together to buy more than one copy of a book in such demand. She said by the time they’d all finished it, it looked like Magna Carta.) Continue reading...