Daisy Clough
DAISY CLOUGH, who has died in her 91st year, was a guide leader, school governor and former mayoress of Knaresborough.
Her late husband, George, had been the town mayor in 1980 and was a councillor of long standing and a popular local character.
Mrs Clough, known as Dee, founded the 3rd Knaresborough Girl Guides and was for three decades a children’s nurse at Harrogate General Hospital.
It was in a similar capacity that she and George had met. The war was on and she was working on a ward at Northampton General Hospital, which also employed George as a biochemistry technician.
A sufferer of osteomyelitis, he had not been given long to live. They married within six weeks and were together for 47 years.
Prevented from entering the local grammar school – educating women was not seen as a priority then – she became a nanny and then a state-registered nurse.
Moving with George to Yorkshire in peacetime, she began her guiding career and later studied for a degree in nursing, a qualification which earned her the job of sister in the new child development centre at Harrogate Hospital.
She set up a toy library and later became a school governor.
Her civic service earned her and George an invitation to the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace, though she said the encounter was less thrilling than her meeting with the politician Tony Benn.
A mother of four, she is survived by nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.