The life of my grandmother, Eileen Noakes, who has died aged 96, changed course radically in its second act. She fled her role as a home counties housewife to become a peace activist, community organiser and alternative therapist, and to run a charity funding development programmes in Tanzania.
Born in Benoni, South Africa, Eileen was sent to live with relatives near Pretoria following the death of her father, Henry Cooper, an engineer, in a mine explosion when she was three. She saw her mother, Elizabeth (nee Carter), rarely in the following years and sought all her life for the belonging and attachment she was denied in childhood.
After leaving Cambridge girls’ high school and training as an accountant, and a short first marriage in South Africa, Eileen travelled to Europe in 1951 and, “dazzled by the glamour of London and Englishmen”, met Jack Noakes, a businessman, at a bar in Sloane Square. They married later that year. She and Jack had four children and settled in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, to a social life of tennis parties, sailing, horses and golf.
When in the 1970s the marriage collapsed, Eileen moved to Devon with the children, starting a conference and healing centre in Sidmouth in 1973. With Sir Kelvin Spencer, a former government scientist, and Patrick Shackleton, the dean of medical studies at the University of Southampton, who became her companion, Eileen launched the Scientific and Medical Network to investigate alternative healing from a scientific basis. She trained at the Centre for Transpersonal Psychotherapy in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
After Patrick’s sudden death in 1977, Eileen moved to the Totnes area, where she turned a field near her farmhouse into native woodland, known as Harmony Wood. Eileen became co-chair of the World Disarmament Campaign in the 80s. In 1983 she attended a peace conference in India, and then trekked for 17 days in the Himalayas, spending the final night lying with broken ribs on a narrow ledge after plunging over a cliff.
In her 70s, Eileen took the reins of the charity Friends of Nzega, and visited Tanzania several times to coordinate nursing and textiles training, water storage, and school and hospital equipment.
Back home in the South Hams, Eileen developed a community mediation service and organised a financing scheme to help homeless young people find housing and employment. In later years, Quaker friends remember her presence at the Totnes Meeting House, and her resonant voice emerging from the silence to deliver poetry or original wisdom.
She is survived by her children, Chris, Beth, Carol and David, and five grandchildren.
