My mother, June Simms, who has died aged 92, was one of the first people to benefit from the newly created NHS in 1948, and among the first to give back, contributing as a nurse, theatre sister and midwife.
The only child of Priscilla (nee Goodacre) and Fred Ringe, a carpenter, June was born and brought up in Rugby. She was bought ballet lessons, a rare treat in their working-class household, as a distraction from the second world war she saw overhead, living near heavily bombed Coventry; her parents could not afford the surgery needed when poor teaching deformed her feet. The new NHS came to her rescue.
Impressed by her care, June chose to leave Rugby high school for girls early and begin nurse’s training in January 1950, at the Hospital of St Cross, Rugby, where she won several nursing prizes. In 1954 she moved to London for midwifery training at the Lambeth hospital in the poverty stricken, postwar neighbourhood of Elephant and Castle.
After qualifying in Welwyn Garden City, she started work, and photographs of home visits by bicycle show a life that could have inspired the television series Call the Midwife. June went on to study in the innovative field of plastic surgery at the Churchill hospital in Oxford, gaining more qualifications. She took on the demanding role of theatre nurse, and rose to be one of few theatre sisters. In Oxford she met her future husband, David Simms, a journalist. They married in 1958 and June left full-time nursing.
After raising a family and experimenting with painting and silversmithing, both of which she found a talent for, June retrained as a textile artist. For the next five decades she would exhibit, teach and create prodigiously. During the NHS’s 70th anniversary in 2018 she featured in the Guardian’s coverage, and returned to the Churchill hospital for the first time in 60 years to exhibit her sole autobiographical work Threads in Time, based on her NHS experiences.
But nature was the dominant theme of her work. She exhibited regularly with her Chelmsford 93 Group of fellow textile artists, choosing venues carefully, such as the RHS Gardens at Hyde Hall in Essex. During lockdown in 2021 she made a giant, intricately worked banner for the Beaver Trust, whose campaigning recently helped win the reintroduction of beavers into the wild in the UK. Restlessly creative, curious and engaged, June continued making into her 90s. Her last commission was artwork for a music project with the Swedish new folk group Tree Oh!.
Among her final words were, “The NHS is the best thing that ever happened”.
David died in 2007. June is survived by a daughter, Caroline, and two sons, Richard and me, six grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
