They had been together for fifty years and bid farewell quietly as she took her last breath at his side. Joan TemplemanWife of a British billionaire Richard Branson (75 years old), he died in London on Tuesday the 25th, at the age of eighty years, and a few hours later, while still in shock at the departure of his great love, he recounted how that painful last moment was.
“Fate works in a strange way,” Branson says in a touching message he posted on his Instagram account. He talks about destiny because, on that day, he was a businessman A fortune estimated at $2.8 billion The owner of Virgin Group, a conglomerate that includes the record label Virgin Records and the airline Virgin Atlantic – was not planning to have lunch with his wife. He had just arrived in England from India with an injury to his shoulder after falling from his bike during an event, and he was transferred to a London hospital to receive treatment. He then discovered that in a room a few feet away Joan was receiving treatment for a back injury.
“We laughed about how used it was to end up on the same floor, like love-struck teenagers happy to meet again,” Branson recounts. “We had a lovely lunch that day. She was in good spirits and getting stronger. She smiled at me with a radiant smile that lit up her face; the same smile I had loved the first moment I saw her, half a century ago. Then, suddenly, she was gone, quickly and painlessly. Fortunately, I was by her side.”
Life together
Richard met Joan in the late 1970s when he visited an antiques and antiques shop where she worked and they fell instantly in love. As he recounted years later, he had to return several times to buy things that did not interest him just to attract the attention of Joan, a Scottish woman with wild curls. “She was unlike any other woman I’d ever met. She was beautiful. She was gorgeous. She was witty. She was simple. She was funny. She had a magical look,” Branson wrote on his blog.
His plan worked out perfectly because not only did he conquer her, but they became inseparable and formed a happy family with their children. Holly (44) And Sam (40) –ClaireThe firstborn died a few days after giving birth prematurely – and to her five grandchildren.
“Joan was everything to me, the shining star around which our family’s world always revolved. This light did not leave, but simply took a new form. It will lead us forward and we will always carry it with us,” says the businessman now that he is facing the first days without his wife.
In July, they celebrated her 80th birthday at Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco, and after that there was little doubt that this would be the last birthday for Joan, her partner. Your rock — as he called it — allowed him to maintain balance if business storms worsened (in 2023, for example, his space company Virgin Galactic went bankrupt).
“Life will never be the same without her,” he says, looking back. “But it was a wonderful 50 years of memories, years filled with tears, laughter, kindness and love that shaped our family more than words can capture.” “It was a successful relationship. We laughed a lot. We were very lucky.”