My mother, Beryl Lichtenstein, who has died at the age of 94, co-founded the Bracken TrustEstablished in 1995 to provide cancer support, counseling and complementary therapies to people in Mid Wales.
Beryl believed in service to others and the importance of community. These values led her to set up a weekly cancer 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 spread across Cardiff, Hereford and Cheltenham. The radiotherapy was especially difficult.
After a fire destroyed the trust’s original site in 1996, Beryl, along with her friend Grace Lawrence, a community nurse, immediately got to work. Finally, in 1998, sufficient money was raised to buy a bungalow with a secluded garden – the Bracken Trust as it is today. My mother gave up her job 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 (née Stradling) and James Rush, who had a variety of 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 attended a local secondary school. She attended Slade School of Art on Saturdays and when she was 16 years old she became a full-time scholarship student at Hornsey School of Fine Art. However, she decided to change horses not long afterwards and became a nurse at the Royal London Hospital, followed by training as a midwife in Bristol when her family moved to Weston-super-Mare. She loved nursing and became a ward nurse in her early twenties.
In 1955, Beryl volunteered to work in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a community midwife. Hans Lichtenstein did his military service there after his medical training and served as a medical officer in the SAS. They married in 1956, returned 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 of cot death in 1960, and her son Simon died in a helicopter crash in 2010 – deeply saddened her, but exposed her extraordinary empathy for the pain of others.
Beryl’s glamour, free spirit and love of arts and crafts bore much fruit. She once spent weeks sitting cross-legged in the Indonesian embassy in Singapore learning batik. Her sketches of Radnorshire nature became unique church kneeler designs, all stitched by skilled volunteers, transforming the atmosphere of Llandrindod’s grand Victorian Holy Trinity church.
Hans passed away in 2019. Beryl is survived by four of their children, Jonathan, Sarah, David and I, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.