Lois Bulley

Agnes Lois Bulley (1901–1995) was a British county councillor, philanthropist and political activist from Cheshire, England.

Personal life Preferring to be called Lois, she was the daughter of Harriet Agnes and Arthur Kilpin Bulley. Her father had become wealthy within his family's cotton brokerage business and later became a keen plant collector and started Bees Ltd seed company.

She was born on 2 December 1901 at Mickwell Brow, a house built for her father near the village of Ness near the market town of Neston on the Wirral Peninsula, Cheshire. She had a brother Alfred Whishaw Bulley (born 1905). They were brought up as agnostics, despite the Congregationalist and Anglican backgrounds of their parents. she was sent to the co-educational Bedales School, Hampshire and then trained as a nurse and midwife at Queen Mary Maternity Hospital in Hampstead, qualifying in 1925. She worked initially in the East End of London.

Although she was born into wealth, she became committed to the socialist principles of her parents and devoted much of her life to philanthropy and political activity through local government.

She returned to Ness and became a member of the management committee of Neston and Parkgate Housing Society that aimed to replace slum housing with new, better quality, homes. She was also a member of Wirral Footpaths and Open Spaces Preservation Society. Her father died in 1942.

In 1948, she was appointed to the Liverpool Regional Hospital Board and chaired the mental services committee, and then the board itself until 1972. In the same year she bought her brother's share of the family home and donated it and an endowment of £75,000 to the University of Liverpool which has become Ness Botanic Gardens. This included provision for her mother to live in the house for the rest of her life, and that the gardens would be open to the public. She herself lived at Birch Hey in Ness Holt, sharing it with Ellen Norman.

She was a life-long teetotaller.

In later life she was able to enjoy the theatres, concerts and galleries and particularly ballet in London where she, and a friend Mrs Nancy Kershaw, warden of the Heswall Meeting House, had a small flat. They also travelled around the UK, France, Spain and Germany in a campervan. After living in Chester they finally moved to Tarvin in Cheshire where Mrs Kershaw had a bungalow. She died there on 27 December 1995 at the age of 94.