My mother, Ray Carlton, who has died aged 100, worked as a pharmaceutical researcher, retailer and accounting auditor, and was a talented pianist and artist. An Anglo-American free thinker, she went on to cultivate a broad, multigenerational network of friends while living on the East Yorkshire coast.
Ray was born in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the three daughters of Burtis MacHatton, a Presbyterian pastor, and Norah (nee Ransom), a classical singer from an English family. When Ray was five, Norah moved with her daughters to Britain, and Ray went to Frensham Heights school, Surrey. In 1939 she returned to the US and finished her secondary education at Ferry Hall school, Illinois, before majoring in physiology at the University of Chicago.
