My friend Sarah Foot, who has died aged 75 after a short illness, was a Cornish writer, social worker and much-loved member of the celebrated Foot clan. She was the daughter of the diplomat and politician Hugh Foot (later Lord Caradon), niece of the former Labour leader Michael Foot and sister of the campaigning journalist Paul Foot. She wrote 10 evocative books on the West Country. Her loving memoir of her grandfather Isaac Foot, a Plymouth builder’s son who left school at 14 but became a crusading lawyer, Liberal MP and Methodist preacher, revealed the radical influences that shaped his distinguished dynasty.
Sarah was born shortly after the outbreak of the second world war, in Bath: her mother, Sylvia (nee Tod), had been evacuated from London and was on the way to Cornwall. She spent part of her childhood in Jamaica, where her father was governor. She formed lifelong ties with the country, befriending the children of her father’s driver, before going to boarding school, aged eight, at Hanford, Dorset.
When her father was made governor of Cyprus, the teenage Sarah became the toast of the island’s social set, but she rejected the traditional debutante “season” and instead joined the Evening Standard, London, as a trainee journalist, charming interviewees including Cliff Richard and George Best with her warmth.
She featured regularly in Harper’s Bazaar and sat for the society photographer Tom Hustler, then married her father’s aide-de-camp, Timothy Burbury, a Guards officer. She worked for the Africa Bureau before postings to Aden and Germany and the arrival of their two children, Camilla and Charles. Timothy retired early, traumatised by his experiences during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and often slept with a gun under his pillow.
The family moved to St Mellion in Cornwall, where Sarah became women’s editor of the Western Morning News. She championed local writers and artists, and interviewed those who represented the last vestiges of “vanishing Cornwall”, including Joe Halls who, at 80, still farmed high on Bodmin Moor, cutting his own peat and shepherding on horseback.
In her first book, Following the River Fowey (1979), Sarah described a lost era of poverty, Methodist picnics, boat trips on the reputedly bottomless Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor, and Wesleyan hymns. “The secret of Sarah’s success was that she caught the spirit of place and people’s personalities so perfectly,” said her publisher, Michael Williams. In 1988, she started a degree course in social work and then became a popular social worker at Derriford hospital and St Luke’s hospice, Plymouth.
Despite developing Alzheimer’s, she remained gracious and charming, and was nicknamed “the social butterfly” at her Saltash care home because of her many visitors. Tim died in 2013 and Sarah is survived by her children and four grandchildren; a fifth grandchild, Hannah, predeceased her.
