My mother, Patricia Dale, who has died aged 103, was a trailblazing doctor, activist and socialist who became general secretary of the Medical Practitioners’ Union and drew on her expertise in industrial health to speak out against the expansion of Stansted airport in the early 2000s.
Born in Southampton, to Clemency (nee Wharton) and Cyrus Lloyd, a merchant seaman, Pat had a childhood shaped by the loss of her mother to TB when she was nine years old. Her father then married a wealthy widow who was keen for Pat to become a debutante. However, Pat insisted on leaving home to study medicine at University College London, one of only a few women to do so at the time.
After graduating in 1945, she served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and headed to India, where she treated casualties from the war in Burma (now Myanmar). A brief wartime marriage to Keith Elliott ended in divorce, though Pat kept the name Elliott for professional use.
On returning to the UK, in 1947 she took up studies in public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she met Dr Gordon Evans, a widower with a young daughter. They married in 1949 and moved near to Chesham, in Buckinghamshire, and began working in public health, with Pat running community infant and child health clinics. They were active supporters of the Labour party and CND, with Gordon becoming the first medical adviser to the TUC.
He died suddenly in 1961, leaving Pat the sole carer of five children, four of whom were under five. She had recently qualified as a barrister and was keen to integrate legal work into her medical career, but was forced to return to work, first as a GP and then as general secretary of the Medical Practitioners’ Union. Within the year she gave a speech at the TUC conference, then, with the sociologist Margot Jefferys, undertook a survey of female doctors.
In 1962 she married Clunie Dale, then the social insurance secretary at the TUC. Pat became medical director of Harlow Industrial Health Service (now Harlow Occupational Health Service).
She was involved with Amnesty International from its first campaign in the early 60s to release two imprisoned Portuguese doctors opposed to the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, and remained an activist in retirement, joining the Stop Stansted Expansion campaign in 2002 as well as working as an occupational health consultant. Her work in industrial health meant she was an expert on environmental hazards and pollutants, and she gave evidence as the campaign’s air quality expert at the 2007 inquiry.
Throughout her life she remained a keen traveller – driving her children across communist eastern Europe in a large caravan in the early 1970s – an avid theatregoer, and a great host of dinner parties.
Clunie died in 2006. Pat is survived by her five children, Anthony, Julie, Robert, Andrew and me from her marriage to Gordon, and Jane, from her marriage to Clunie; four stepchildren, Rosemary, Anna Clare, Richard and Diana; 18 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
