My mother, Jean Stafford Smith, who has died aged 96, was a college admissions manager, biographer and amateur pilot. She lived in a world in which paths for women were restricted but always insisted that she was a “lucky” person.
Jean was born in Kettering in Northamptonshire to Jack Thomas, who worked in road haulage, and his wife, Vera (nee Newport). She went to school at Saint Felix school in Southwold, Suffolk. In 1942, aged 15, she decided that she wanted to do her bit and that her excellent grade in written French was a good enough qualification for joining the resistance. She took a train to London and presented herself at the Foreign Office, offering to parachute into France. She was told to come back when she was 18.
At 17, the war came to her. She vividly recalled Sunday, 18 June 1944: she was at her secretarial college in Birdcage Walk in Westminster, London, when a V1 flying bomb hit the Guards’ Chapel across the street, blowing out the college’s windows.
In 1946 she met Dick Stafford Smith, who had finished his wartime service in the RAF, on the golf links at Newmarket. They married in 1955. During the 1950s Jean worked as a secretary for the Russian linguist Dame Elizabeth Hill, and later edited Hill’s memoir, In the Mind’s Eye, which was published in 1999.
After some happy early years, Dick developed increasingly extreme bipolar disorder, and ultimately drove himself and Cheveley Park stud farm, his family’s inheritance, into bankruptcy. Jean, throughout the chaos and with no child support, lived off eggs from the family’s chickens for months to ensure her children were properly provided for. Meanwhile, she was convinced that helicopters would soon replace cars, and in 1970 obtained her pilot’s licence.
Forced to re-focus her life, she moved to Cambridge in 1975 and took on the management of the admissions office at King’s College. She continued to work there until her retirement in 1986, when she moved to the East Anglian village of Fordham.
She had the good sense to divorce Dick in 1969 when we children were still young, and protected us from the storms that raged around him while supporting him and encouraging us to have a relationship with him.
She is survived by her children, Mark, Mary and me.
