LIVES IN BRIEF

THIS week: a legendary poppy seller and a pioneer of mobile health clinics

THE veteran charity worker Rosemary Powell, pictured. who has died aged 103, was Britain’s longestserving poppy seller and died just nine days after being presented with her MBE.

She began selling poppies when she helped her mother for the Royal British Legion’s first Poppy Appeal in 1921, aged six. She spent the next 97 years collecting for the charity, but announced earlier this year that she would be hanging up her tin for the final time.

The great-grandmother, from London, was included in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List for her remarkable service to the Legion.

Her family said she knew the cost of war – four of her uncles died in the First World War; another was a lifelong invalid from Afghanistan in 1914; her fiance was killed in a plane crash in Scotland during the war, and her brother, who won the MC for bravery in Egypt, died of cerebral malaria or possibly suicide; two godfathers died and her father was badly wounded at the Somme.

Mrs Powell lived close to where poppies were made in Richmond for the first Poppy Appeal, and sold them on Richmond Bridge with her mother, Evelyn. Earlier this year, she recounted how the poppies were so popular that they ran out in no time, and her mother made more out of red crepe paper.

Her father, Charles Ashton James, served with the 126th Baluchistan Infantry and was left wounded after being shot in the head during the Battle of the Somme.

Mrs Powell’s first fiance, Robin Ellis, a commander in the Royal Navy, died in 1944 when the Lancaster bomber he was flying in crashed near Inverness. Her younger brother Peter, a major in the Army, also died during the Second World War.

During that conflict, Mrs Powell trained as a voluntary aid detachment nurse providing civilian nursing to the military, including soldiers wounded on the beaches in Normandy.

She lived in Africa for a year in the 1950s but made poppies out of paper to give to local people during Remembrance.

She is survived by survived by three sons, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. has died aged 82, was a pioneer of mobile medical clinics that bring health care services to people in remote areas around the world.

Brock started the first RAM clinic in the US in 1992 and since then, more than 740,000 people have received free dental, vision and medical care from his clinics and the group’s volunteers.

RAM also responds to natural disasters, such as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, Hurricane Matthew in Haiti in 2016 and the Nepal earthquakes in 2015.

Mr Brock was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1936, but moved to the former British Guiana — which is now Guyana — in 1952 to become a cowboy, cattle ranch operator and aircraft pilot.