Roz Comins, a voice coach who worked as a consultant to the Teletubbies and founded the Voice Care Network, has died aged 99. Her daughter, Beatrice, confirmed the death.
Career in voice training
Comins was a voice teacher for nearly 70 years. In 1993 she founded the Voice Care Network, a non-profit training organisation that assists people whose work requires them to speak for long periods and who may experience strain or damage. She was appointed OBE in 2013.
She ran her final voice workshop at the age of 88, for trainee teachers in Birmingham. In the mid-1950s, she moved with her husband, David Comins, from London to the Midlands, where she lectured at Coventry Technical College for 30 years. There she introduced students to theatre and prepared others for English Speaking Board exams, with which she was involved for 40 years as a teacher, examiner and board member.
Founding the Voice Care Network
In the 1980s, assisting speech and language therapists who treated teachers with damaged voices gave Comins the impetus to found the Voice Care Network. After leaving Coventry Tech in 1989, she contributed her knowledge to tribunals recognising voice impairment as an occupational injury.
Her dynamism secured intellectual and financial sponsorship for the organisation, which helped embed voice care into training for teachers and call centre workers. In 1997, she worked as a voice consultant for Teletubbies and was awarded a University of Warwick BPhil in education for her dissertation on voice training and education.
Early life and family
Roz was born in Enfield, north London, to Dorothy (nee Midworth) and Stanley Dorey. Stanley, an apprentice marine engineer in Chatham dockyard, ended his career as chief engineer surveyor for Lloyd's Register of Shipping. After attending Princess Helena college near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Roz trained at Central School of Speech & Drama in London from 1944 to 1947.
She taught for two years in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, then returned to Hertfordshire as a freelance voice and drama teacher and to care for her mother following a late cancer diagnosis. She later moved to Kensington, central London, with her father and was his companion for several years.
Personal life and legacy
Roz met her future husband, David, in the winter of 1951 at a dance, and they married in 1955. By that time, David had completed his economics degree at University College London and taken a job with a toolmaking company in Coventry. They spent their entire married life in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. David died in 2011.
Roz was still doing pilates at 92 and lived in the family home until she was 96. She is survived by her children, Matthew, Beatrice and her daughter who wrote the obituary, and eight grandchildren.
