Our mother, Pauline Phillips, was a health service administrator, translator and historian who went on to make her home in the Languedoc, France, and died there aged 86.
Born in Highbury, north London, to Caroline (nee Potter) and George Hammant, she was toughened by poverty, the blitz, and evacuation to Huntingdon with other pupils from Highbury Hill high school. She strove for an education and career when this was difficult for women of her class. She became fluent in French via friendship with a young French teaching assistant with whom she travelled to France straight after the war. She then taught herself Italian to earn money translating books.
Pauline joined the NHS in 1969, applying skills gained in the civil service, working at the Crown Agents for the colonies. She had met our father, Arthur, though the local youth club, and they got married in 1949. We were raised in Tottenham, north London, while Pauline worked part-time in translation, teaching English as a foreign language, and transcribing House of Commons proceedings.
Initially personal assistant to the group secretary of Enfield hospitals, she became administrative officer for Enfield and Haringey Health Authority before eagerly taking up the role of secretary to East Herts Community Health Council, Ware, by now living in Enfield Wash, following her divorce.
Community health councils (CHCs) were established to represent the interests of NHS patients, and as secretary Pauline supported volunteer members from local authorities and the voluntary sector. She was the first CHC secretary to win a hospital malpractice case without recourse to solicitors, righting a wrong and proving the CHCs’ value.
In 1986 she moved to Mount Bures in Essex, as development officer for physical disability services at North-east Essex regional health authority. Even after her retirement in 1990 she headed a health authority project to research and develop services for young chronically sick and disabled people, including the disposal and recycling of foot supports.
Writing was important to her. She founded, edited and wrote much of Bleep, an NHS staff magazine, and wrote newsletters, pamphlets and poems. In retirement she lived in France, where she was to receive excellent care in her final weeks. Her popular Letter from Languedoc featured in the Mount Bures newsletter. In 2010 Edmonton Hundred Historical Society published her painstakingly researched paper Upon My Word, about the trials in 1753 of the maidservant Elizabeth Canning.
She also translated into English Guy Rouanet’s Félinités ou Pour l’Amour des Chats, as Falling for Felines, and undertook several fine-art translations from French and Italian on subjects including Manet, oriental lacquer, Chinese art, oriental rugs and carpets, Islamic metalwork and Japanese arms and armour.
She is survived by us, by her grandchildren Alessia, Daniel, Emeka, Agnes, Sam and Ben, and a great-grandson, Jayden.
