My mother, Beryl Lichtenstein, who has died aged 94, was a co-founder of the Bracken Trust, set up in 1995 to offer cancer support, counselling and complementary therapies to people in mid-Wales.
Beryl believed in service to others and the importance of community. These values led her to start a weekly cancer support lunch group in Llandrindod Wells, the small mid-Wales town where she spent most of her adult life. Beryl’s meals combined ideas about food from Bristol Cancer Care with her own loving presence. The springboard was Beryl’s cancer experience – treatment, surgery and consultant specialists were fragmented between Cardiff, Hereford and Cheltenham. Radiotherapy was especially gruelling.
After fire destroyed the trust’s original venue in 1996, Beryl, with her friend Grace Lawrence, a district nurse, got straight to work. Eventually, by 1998 enough money had been raised to buy a bungalow with a secluded garden – the Bracken Trust as it is today. My mother gave up her position at the trust when she turned 76. Now the Bracken Trust is staffed by Macmillan nurses and local volunteers.
Born in Edmonton, north London, Beryl was the youngest of the five children of Ethel (nee Stradling), and James Rush, who had various jobs including running a shop and later working for the water board in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. Beryl was evacuated to Cornwall during the second world war, and had fond memories of that time.
On her return from Cornwall, Beryl went to a local secondary school. She began attending the Slade School of Art on Saturdays and when she reached the age of 16 she became a full-time scholarship student at Hornsey School of Fine Art. However, she decided not long afterwards to change horses and become a nurse at the Royal London hospital, followed by midwifery training in Bristol when her family had moved to Weston-super-Mare. She loved nursing and became a ward sister in her early 20s.
In 1955 Beryl volunteered to work in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a community midwife. Hans Lichtenstein was completing his national service there after his medical training and served as medical officer in the SAS. They married in 1956, returning to Britain by boat in 1957, and later settled in Llandrindod, where Hans worked as a GP.
Beryl’s own losses – her daughter Ruth died a cot-death in 1960, and her son Simon died in a helicopter crash in 2010 – made her profoundly sad, but exposed her extraordinary empathy for other people’s pain.
Beryl’s glamour, free spirit, and love of arts and crafts bore many fruits. She once spent weeks cross-legged in the Indonesian embassy in Singapore learning batik. Her sketches of the wildlife of Radnorshire became unique church-kneeler designs, all stitched by skilful volunteers, transforming the feel of Llandrindod’s large Victorian Holy Trinity church.
Hans died in 2019. Beryl is survived by four of their children, Jonathan, Sarah, David and me, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
