I first got to know Betty because she was my patient. I operated upon her in 2004 to solve a problem she’d had for a while. We weren’t really in contact after that until we set up the David Nott Foundation in 2015. We had an opening event for it at the Royal College of Surgeons and Betty came along to that. She took me to one side and said: “David, I really think this is a very, very good idea, and I’d like to help you a lot.” She contacted me shortly afterwards and liked the idea of being our patron. She was absolutely fantastic, instrumental in giving me and my wife, Elly, who is the chief executive of the foundation, direction on all sorts of things.
One thing about Betty was that she was invariably right. And she really got the foundation, what we were trying to do – which is to give the best surgical training to doctors on the frontline of wars and conflicts, so they can then do the best for their patients. Betty loved the idea of this big family of doctors and nurses around the world talking to one another, supporting one another. She said that being patron of that was the best thing she could imagine doing at that stage of her life. One of the best things she did as patron was to introduce us to Baroness Frances D’Souza, who was the first chair of trustees at the foundation and who led our board with diligence and warmth. We were so lucky to have her.
To all her friends, Betty was an incredible source of wisdom. Because of all her experience in life before she went into politics – and after - she knew a lot about a lot of things. I used to tell her where we were working around the world and she would sometimes say: “No, I wouldn’t go there,” because of this or that thing. She knew who was in charge of a country, and about who to trust, so would be very helpful in guiding us. Along with her warmth, she had amazing resilience. Gosh, was she resilient. She had that unusual quality that if she thought something was the right thing to do, she would go straight for it and not take any crap from anybody.
We started meeting regularly. And then it became more of a friendship between me and my family and Betty. When she started having more medical issues about five years ago, she would call me once or twice a week to talk both about the work of the foundation and sometimes about her health. During Covid, we started to speak every single day. She was keen for news about our children and would sometimes talk to them on the phone, becoming like their “grandmother in Cambridge”, inviting us all up for lunch or perhaps to swim at her friend’s pool. She was part of a wonderful community in Thriplow and we were privileged to meet some of her lovely friends there.
I’m quite busy with my hospital work and travelling for the charity, but I would always make time for Betty’s calls – and wherever I was in the world I’d know it was from her, because she always called from her landline; she never had a mobile. She was talking about retiring from the House of Lords sometime last year, and she would tell me about the farewell speech she was going to make – about how angry she was with the state of our politics. She was passionate about reforming the Lords so it could include the best possible people from whatever background. That speech had to be postponed because she had a significant medical issue that took us a long while to work out – but eventually we got her into St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, at the end of 2022. She lost a lot of weight but was on the road to recovery at Christmas time and called me to tell me about the wonderful Christmas meal she’d had – the first proper meal in a long time. In January, she was really firing on all cylinders again, but then she fell and broke her hip.
I spoke to her three days before she died. I had just come back from working in Ukraine, and I had pneumonia, so I was in hospital myself. She was in typically good spirits, but very concerned about me, much more than she was for herself. To visitors in the next couple of days, she apparently kept wondering if there was anything she might be able to do to help me recover – her first thought was always how she might make things better. That was Betty right up to the end.
