My aunt, Patricia Battye, who has died aged 96, said it was her upbringing in India that first made her aware of the consequences of race barriers and of prejudice towards women.
She was born in Rawalpindi, daughter of Elsie and Thomas Battye, into an archetypal Indian Army family. Her childhood and that of her brother, Ian (my father), and sister, Vivien, was redolent of excitement and privilege: hill stations, jackals, siestas, muslin dresses, rug markets, camels, a pet panther cub, governesses, games of mahjong, curry in the servants’ quarters and elephant treks in the forest. But this exotic childhood, in which Pat initially spoke Hindi and Urdu better than English, embedded lifelong values of social justice in her.
Pat and her siblings were sent to school in the UK. After she graduated from Bedford College, London University, with a degree in modern languages, Pat joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a conscript but was soon dispatched to the codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. In 1943 she was moved to the now famous Hut 6 and described the work as “very serious and tedious … I worked the whole winter alone in a corridor outside a roomful of 40 men … Stacks of boxes were discarded by them as unbroken data but, because I knew no German (which they all did), I could only look at what was there and every few weeks worked out sequences.”
In the postwar years she gained a social science qualification from the London School of Economics. In 1956, having applied to be a social welfare officer in Bulawayo, Pat set off for Southern Rhodesia, a country and people she grew to love, and which became her home for 25 years.
Given a completely free rein, she set to work: creating an employability programme for girl school-leavers, establishing the first preschools, leading occupational therapy sessions for men with TB. She went on to help set up Bulawayo Home Industries, which continues to produce and sell the craftwork of local people.
Post independence, Pat returned from Zimbabwe, and her later years were spent in Suffolk, close to her family, where she quickly became a leading light in the Suffolk Village Spinners’ and Weavers’ Group. A fellow weaver succinctly summed up my formidable and indomitable aunt: “She was a very determined, very accomplished, and extremely generous woman.” These words harked back to those Pat had written of her very young self: “We went on treks of up to 17 miles, down and up, never on the level. I wouldn’t be left behind and I wouldn’t be carried.”
Ian and Vivien predeceased her. Pat is survived by two nephews and four nieces, 12 great-nieces and great-nephews, two great-great-nieces and a great-great-nephew.
