My father, Maurice Little, who has died aged 75, was a dedicated and skilled paediatrician, a committed volunteer for a number of charities and a loving father and husband.
He was born near Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, during the second world war, to Emily (nee Ross) and John Little, who were dairy farmers. After attending Portora Royal school in Enniskillen Maurice read medicine at Queen’s University, Belfast, graduating in 1965 and then leaving Northern Ireland to work in Liverpool at the Alder Hey hospital.
There he met Lorna Marchesi, a medical student. They married in 1970 and moved to Canada, where Maurice took up a fellowship in paediatric neurology at Kingston General hospital in Ontario. They loved their time in Canada, which included a secondment to an Inuit settlement on Hudson Bay; Maurice was always interested in meeting people from different cultures and was keen to learn how other people thought and lived.
My parents returned to Cardiff in 1973, where Maurice took up a senior registrar post at the University Hospital of Wales before moving to Kent in 1976. There he worked at All Saints hospital in Chatham as a consultant paediatrician. He mentored many people, to whom his advice was often simple, including the mantra: “Always listen to the mother.” Many families owed him a debt of gratitude for his tireless commitment to child health.
As well as numerous teaching and advisory roles and work with the Royal College of Paediatrics, Maurice worked for various charities, including Cancer and Leukaemia in Children, with whom he created a home care service for children with life-threatening illnesses. He also travelled to Romania and Palestine to teach and offer advice on clinical services.
After his retirement he was a member of the independent monitoring board of Rochester prison, in Kent, for more than a decade. He was a keen linguist and attended Irish and Spanish classes for many years.
He and Lorna loved to travel and had friends around the globe. In later years he was a devoted grandfather, never more in his element than when calming a crying baby in his expert hands. We called him “the baby whisperer”.
He is survived by Lorna, his three children, James, Katherine and me, and two grandsons, Billy and Fergus.
