In 1988 she appeared in a BBC Two 40 Minutes documentary on grief called \u201cWomen in Black\u201d in which she recalled a \u201csort of turning point\u201d in 1984, when she\u200b went climbing in the Himalayas with one of her daughters: \u201cThe combination of getting away, the hardness of the climb, the pushing oneself to extremes and of seeing local people so happy with so little, gave me the feeling that I was going forward, and that I was finished with looking back, and was now spiritually free. And yet the oddest thing is, if [Gordon] were to walk into this room today, I would still look at him and say: \u2018What took you so long?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n
She was born Daphne Vera Hillier-Holt in London on April 5 1931, the third daughter of Geoffrey Hillier-Holt and his wife Vera, n\u00e9e Samuel. During the war the family moved to Sussex, where they took in evacuees from East London. Although Daphne\u2019s formal educ\u200bation suffered, as many teachers were away on active service, she was a talented sportswoman, winning several trophies in tennis.<\/p>\n
It was on a skiing holiday that Daphne, then aged 17, met a young Australian, Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a medical student at Oxford. Before they married in 1953, with his encouragement she trained as a speech and language therapist at the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square, then worked in clinics in north-west London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1988 she appeared in a BBC Two 40 Minutes documentary on grief called \u201cWomen in Black\u201d in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[847,59,5686,102,33689,3879,2285,206549,50211,5438,11296,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-606015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-cancer","tag-gb","tag-grief","tag-health","tag-ira","tag-obituaries","tag-obituary","tag-politics-obituaries","tag-special-educational-needs-and-disabilities-send","tag-standard","tag-terrorism","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}