My mother, Suzanne Dore, who has died aged 90, shrugged off the drawbacks of an education disrupted by the second world war. Her older siblings, Judith and John Fay, both went on to higher things, while mum was left with a job in the kitchens after serving as a Wren during the war. She went on to become a qualified teacher, published author, restaurateur and championship-winning breeder and exporter of rare horses.
The daughter of Stanley, a journalist, and Muriel (nee Nicholson), Suzanne was born in Chelsea, south-west London. Muriel took her own life when Suzanne was four, and she was raised by her stepmother, Jo. She went to Brickwall school, a progressive private school in Northiam, East Sussex, which closed just before the war, then the Grove school, Hindhead, Surrey, as a weekly boarder. She met and married Vic Baker, a demobbed Royal Navy petty officer turned agricultural labourer, in 1947, and their son, Nicky, was born later that year. The marriage ended in the mid-50s and my mother, a single parent whose well-heeled family had disapproved strongly of the match, ended up on her uppers.
She met Philip Dore while she was working in the kitchens at Long Dene school, Chiddingstone, Kent. He was a music teacher there and they married in 1956. Philip encouraged her musical abilities and she became an accomplished oboist. It was during this time that she struck up a warm correspondence with the poet laureate John Masefield. My parents proposed turning his children’s novel, The Box of Delights, into a musical, an idea welcomed by Masefield, but the plan was never realised.
They moved to North Yorkshire in the late 1950s after my father took over as director of music at Ampleforth college. Four children – Ben, Cecilia, William and me – followed in quick succession. During this time, apart from her role as a wife and mother, my mother also set up the first village playgroup, of which we were enthusiastic founder members, and with Judith co-wrote Hook, Line and Sinker, a murder mystery, which was published in 1966 under the pen-name Kate Nicholson. As my father neared retirement, Mum trained as a teacher at St John’s College, York, obtaining a first, before working in local primary schools.
The 70s and 80s saw hectic change, first with my father’s death in 1974 and Mum’s move to live with Judith at her donkey stud at Williamscot, north Oxfordshire. This was followed by a shared enterprise at the Manor House in Kineton, Warwickshire, which my mother ran as a restaurant/B&B, winning a Michelin star. When this folded in 1982, she moved to Broughton Poggs, a village on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border that would be her home for her final 32 years, and where she took up her interest in Caspian horses, a miniature rare breed. She was a leading light in the Caspian Horse Society and also played an active role in village life. She served as parish council clerk for many years, and was famed for the props she made for plays in the village hall or the fancy dress contest at the fete.
She was an immensely practical and perceptive woman – something of a polymath in her way. As a mother, she was liberal, supportive and non-judgmental.
She is survived by her younger sister, Jane, and her children.
