My friend Clare Thomson, who has died aged 58 after a cardiac arrest, was a journalist who specialised in writing about the Baltic states – especially Estonia, with which she had familial connections. Later she trained as a primary school teacher and then became a private tutor in English, music and French.
Clare was born in London and grew up in the south-east of the city in Greenwich, before moving to Notting Hill in west London. Her mother, Ingrid (nee Haugas), was a nurse who had escaped from Estonia as a child ahead of the advancing Red Army in 1944 and reached Britain via refugee camps. Her father, John, was a Scottish businessman who worked as finance director of the Brooke Bond tea company.
After attending St Paul’s girls’ school in Hammersmith, Clare read English at Cambridge, then worked as an assistant to Jane Kramer, Paris correspondent of the New Yorker magazine, before temping at the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, which arranged school exchanges.
Harnessing her great interest in her Estonian background, she then spent time as a freelance writer travelling solo around the Baltic states, a period that culminated in the publication of The Singing Revolution: A Political Journey Through the Baltic States in 1992. The book documented the attempts by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to extricate themselves from Soviet occupation.
In 1991 Clare became a staff writer on the Bulletin, an English-language magazine in Brussels, writing on diverse subjects from culture to little-known Belgian customs, but also on the most challenging stories in the EU capital – health issues, asylum seekers, homelessness.
Her regular columns included Cheap Eats, where she introduced to readers her new dinner companion, Matthew Davis, the magazine’s production editor. They married after moving back to London in 1999, where Clare worked as a freelance, producing travel articles for the Independent, the Times and the Sunday Times, and writing Footprint travel guides to the Estonian capital, Tallinn (2004), and to Antwerp (2006).
In 2008 she retrained as a teacher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and after two years working in primary and nursery schools she became a self-employed piano teacher as well as a private tutor of English, French, history and music theory. She encouraged nervous music students to perform in her local church and her kindness gave them the confidence to do it.
She is survived by Matthew, her daughters, Rosa and Ella, her mother and her brother, Ian.
