My friend Elizabeth Bacon, who has died aged 86, was an orthoptist – an expert in eye movement disorders and visual impairment – who spent most of her career at the Royal Infirmary in Leicester, managing a children’s eye care team.
She was also a prominent figure in community activism in Leicester, including as a member of the Leicester Environmental Group (LEAG), which campaigned on environmental issues in the city, and with the local Women’s Refugee project, providing a safe place for female asylum seekers and their children.
Elizabeth was born in Leeds to Connie (nee Dyall), a housewife, and Bernard Bacon, a political agent. During the second world war, Elizabeth, her mother and her sister, Margaret, were evacuated to live with a family near Loch Lomond, giving her a love of Scotland and its landscape, although less so of porridge. When her father was on leave from war service, they all walked the hills around the loch.
Elizabeth went to schools in Beverley, Nottingham, Burton upon Trent and Uttoxeter before the family settled more permanently in Sheffield. After training at Bradford Royal Infirmary as an orthoptist in the 1950s, she started her career there, eventually moving to the Royal Infirmary in Leicester in 1966.
I met Elizabeth in 1972 at LEAG, where she played an important part in saving Leicester’s New Walk, an ancient road through the city that was threatened with destruction, and also fought to save much of the city’s Victorian civic architecture, including the frontage of the old Sun Alliance building on Horsefair Street.
A long-term member of the Labour party, she was also a CND supporter, holding an annual book sale and fundraiser in her garden and spending some time at Greenham Common.
Her involvement with the Women’s Refugee project, which was supported by local churches, began in 2000. Many of the women she helped became friends, and she was especially pleased when their children, as they grew up, went on to college and successful careers.
When she moved to Leicester, Elizabeth bought a house in the suburbs with a large but plain garden, which she cleared and replanted. It remained her life’s work, testimony to her love of plants and gardening. After her retirement in 1998 she joined the Leicestershire and Rutland Gardens Trust, becoming its events manager and arranging talks, lectures, visits and carefully curated short holidays to gardens around the UK.
Elizabeth loved walking, and spent many Sundays over the years with me and my husband, David, hiking around Rutland and Leicestershire. After the discovery of Richard III’s remains in Leicester in 2012, she devised a walk from his birthplace at Fotheringhay Castle to the place of his death, and it is now an official long distance path, called the Richard III Trail.
She is survived by her nephew, Nick, and great-niece, Edie.
