My friend Rose Raschid, who has died aged 76, was a painter who began exhibiting in her birthplace, Myanmar, in 1969 and devoted herself full-time to art once she had retired.
In 1994 Rose, who painted under the name Tin Tin Sann, took up a studio in Camberwell, south London, from where she sold her works to private collectors and featured in various exhibitions, including at the McNeil gallery in Radlett, Herfordshire, and the Cork Street gallery in London. Her final show was with the Medical Art Society at the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 2019.
Rose was born in Thayet in Myanmar (then known as Burma) to Daw May Yu, a teacher, and her husband, U Ba Khet, a doctor who served for a time as personal physician to the politician Aung San, widely considered to be the father of modern-day Myanmar. She was a pupil at the Methodist English school in Yangon during the mid-1950s and a classmate of Aung Sann’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, with whom she remained in contact for the rest of her life.
After leaving school, Rose took a degree in botany, graduating in 1967 from Rangoon Arts and Science University (now University of Yangon), where she stayed on for an MSc before becoming head of the botany department at Taunggyi University and later teaching biology at the University of Yangon.
She married Salman Raschid, a psychiatrist, in Yangon in 1980, and after he was appointed as a visiting professor at Harvard University in the US they spent a year living in Boston. They then moved to the UK, where Salman studied and worked in psychiatry and, from 1993, Rose was employed by the Burmese section of the BBC, initially as a freelance broadcaster. After receiving some journalism training from the BBC, she later worked for the corporation’s Burmese section as a broadcaster and producer for current affairs and arts programmes, before switching to become manager of the section’s marketing and communication department until her retirement in 2004.
I came to know Rose in the mid-80s through Salman. Their tiny flat in Hampstead, north London, was packed with books and potted plants, and was the setting for many a convivial evening thanks to Rose’s warm and graceful personality. Visitors would be assured of fine Burmese cuisine and stimulating company – and also of hearing their very different points of view on Myanmar’s politics.
Rose and Salman were always a couple at ease, whether it was attending the Glyndebourne festival or as regular worshippers at the Muslim prayer room on their doorstep at the Royal Free hospital in London.
Salman died of Covid-19 just a few days before Rose also succumbed to the same disease.
She is survived by her sister, Khin, and brothers, Arthur, Al Haji and U Tin.
