My sister, Ann Hatswell, gave a lifetime of service to others. She has died of cancer, aged 77, in the hospice that she founded, St Luke’s, in Kenton, north London.
Working as a district nurse in London, in the area of Harrow and Brent, in the late 1980s, she was aware of a compelling need for a local hospice, and was stung into action when she had to take an elderly, blind patient to spend the rest of her life in a hospice in Hackney, far away from family and friends. Sublimely unaware of what was entailed, Ann nonetheless set about and galvanised others into getting one for Harrow and Brent.
Her first begging letter in December 1995 to the bishop of Willesden asking for a gift of land beside the Church of the Annunciation bore no fruit. Undaunted by that and other early disappointments, a board of trustees formed from members of her church and headed by their experienced chairman pressed on. Their campaign was boosted when the local paper, the Harrow Observer, took up the cause and both borough councils showed a lively interest.
Sufficient funds came in earlier than expected to open a day centre for cancer patients and their families in Harrow View. Ann was its first nurse, in charge of a small team, and when St Luke’s opened in 2000 in what had been a very large Edwardian house in Kenton, she worked there. The day after she retired, on 31 March 2004, Ann was a guest at a civic lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to mark the golden jubilee of the borough of Harrow.
The third of four children, Ann was born in Donnington, Shropshire, to Charlotte (nee Smith) and Charles Smith. Our father had been the saddler quartermaster of a cavalry regiment but became a civil servant when tanks replaced horses. On leaving Newport high school for girls, Shropshire, Ann trained as a nurse at Queen Elizabeth hospital, Birmingham, and then specialised in paediatric nursing at St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, in London. She married Bernard Hatswell in 1969 and after raising their three sons she returned to work in 1987, as a district nurse in Harrow and Brent.
In retirement she helped now and again in a local care home and was still calling on old friends less mobile and alert than herself and taking them shopping or visiting.
The Rev “Tubby” Clayton, the first world war army chaplain, described service to others as “the rent we pay for our room on Earth”. Ann paid hers in full.
Ann and Bernard divorced in 1995. She is survived by her sons, Daniel, Guy and Tom, four grandchildren and her three siblings, Mary, Graham and me.
