LADY Winifred Spicer, wife of former West Dorset Tory MP James Spicer, has died, aged 83.

Her husband Sir James went down the stairs of their Beaminster home a minute after her and found her dead at the bottom.

A postmortem showed she died of an aortic aneurysm and also found she had cancer.

Sir James said, although it was a terrible shock, it was the way she would have wanted to go.

He said: “Thank God it happened that way. Far too many of our friends are incapable, sentenced to death but still living. She would not have wanted that.”

Lady Spicer was born in Glasgow, the only daughter of the Shanks family whose sanitary engineering company, founded in 1878, merged with Thomas Bond’s Armitage company in 1969.

After finishing her school certificate she went on to be assistant stage manager at the Windsor Repertory Com-pany – a position she handed over to Geraldine McEwan.

According to family legend Lady Spicer’s highest claim to fame was playing Mother Rabbit in Toad of Toad Hall there. She met Sir James while she was working at Hatchards bookshop and he was over from Egypt to lead the parachute regiment during the Coronation and be best man at a friend’s wedding.

Sir James said he knew immediately she was the woman for him and two weeks later was even asking a vicar he met in a pub if he could marry them.

He couldn’t, but even going abroad again didn’t deter him and a courtship by correspondence followed.

They were married in the Tower of London on January 30, 1954.

He said: “She married a soldier who became a third-rate farmer and then a politician.

“I couldn’t have lived without her, she was marvellous.

“When I made an ill-advised speech about the IRA she had to have a panic button. I don’t know many wives who put up with that.”

She soon learned the ropes and, though she didn’t relish the role of politician’s wife at first she soon became adept and happily entertained the likes of Margaret Thatcher at their West Dorset home.

She helped found the Joseph Weld Hospice and got her MBE in 2007 for her charity work.

Her daughters Clare and Gaye say she was a marvellous mother and kept the family together, even under most trying circumstances.

Her memorial service will be at Beaminster St Mary’s at noon on December 15.