My wife, Felicity Feeny, who has died aged 78, was a physiotherapist who spent time in Canada and Nepal, as well as supporting thousands of NHS patients in the UK. Her family and many friends will remember her for her zest for life, anarchic sense of fun and conviction that pretty much any barrier can – and should – be surmounted.
Felicity (known as Flick) was born in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, to Ronald Colwill, a farmer, salesman and poet, and Doreen (nee O’Meara), herself a physiotherapist. The oldest of four children, Flick went to Holy Child convent school in Edgbaston – she hated boarding and railed against the nuns, but threw herself into tennis and hockey, which she loved, along with Angela Brazil-style “scrapes”.
Convinced by her struggle with maths that she was not academic, Flick trained as a physio at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, Birmingham (1962-65). Exhibiting one of her enduring traits, she forged tight friendships with her fellow trainees, which she maintained for the rest of her life.
After a spell at the Good Hope hospital in Sutton Coldfield (1965-66), Flick spent almost a year at St George’s hospital at Hyde Park Corner, living in Upper Berkeley Street and enjoying life as a girl about town in 1960s London. She later seized an opportunity to share a flat in Montreal with a schoolfriend who was working at Expo 67, where she polished her French on patients in the hospital she worked in.
We met through our parents and began dating after we both moved to London in 1966. Flick left Montreal after I persuaded her to come back to the UK and marry me in 1968. She took time out from physiotherapy to have four children in quick succession, and moved the family to Boston, Massachusetts, so that I could complete an MBA at Harvard.
Back in the UK in 1979, and settled in Oxford, she joined a team of physios – and soon to be steadfast friends – at the Radcliffe Infirmary.
In the late 80s, Flick decided to give education another shot, completing an undergraduate degree and an MA in development studies at Oxford Brookes University. In 2001, she became the CAHD (Community Approaches to Handicap in Development) coordinator at Humanity and Inclusion (then Handicap International) in Kathmandu. Her resourcefulness and disregard for convention were at the fore as she supported the country team and local partners to develop inclusive, community-based rehabilitation programmes for people living with severe disabilities and experiencing stigma and often extreme poverty.
Flick returned to the UK, and to the NHS, in 2003, and later became a mentor with Refugee Resource, once again building close friendships with those she encountered, in particular her mentee, Laila Abdi, herself now a nurse in the NHS.
Flick is survived by me, our children, Patrick, Emma, Simon and Thomas, eight grandchildren, and her siblings, Jennifer, Jeremy and Rosalind.
