Arpf

Claire Rayner, OBE (1931-2010)

Better known for her provocative journalism, campaigning and tenure as Britain’s best known agony aunt, Clare Rayner was also a prolific popular novelist.  She contributed to the family saga genre as it came to prominence in the 1970s and 80s.  Her most popular series the ‘Poppy Chronicles’ was structured about public events and collective experience exploring massive social change in women’s lives from the early twentieth century to the accessibility of birth control in the 1960s.  Trained as a nurse in the 1950s, Rayner drew upon her extensive knowledge of the NHS to write the George Barnabas series and individual novels in the 80s and 90s which featured medical professionals and transitions in health care.  One of these novels, The Virus Man (1985), was a medical thriller about how hospitals and researchers were coming to terms with an unknown fatal epidemic disease.  It was written at the time Britain had started to acknowledge HIV/AIDS through graphic public information campaigns.  It stood out from many other treatments of the same themes because of its perspective, recording the horror and near despair of those who saw increasing numbers of ordinary patients suffering from a disease that appeared to be totally resistant to treatment or cure.  Clare Rayner was a guest speaker at one of the early ARPF annual conferences, ‘Medical Fictions: The body, the profession and dis-ease’ in 1997 where she  spoke about the relationship between her campaigning and her fiction.  Several members of the association have contacted me this week, recalling her talk and expressing regret at her death.

 Medical fictions are rarely about health; rather they concern the social awareness and acknowledgement of sickness and disease.  Clare Rayner’s fiction considered hierarchies of knowledge that prevented freedom of choice and patients’ assumption of responsibility over their bodies and the health of their families.  She offered something more than the usual preoccupation of medical fiction with representing sexuality as pathological, dangerous and in need of social regulation.  Fiction in this field responds very readily to popular opinion and shifts in cultural values, and this was particularly evident during the 1990s and the regular occurrence of dramatic health scares.  Rayner used medical topics as a means of expression for experience, desires and concerns on the borders of public life which challenged their usual representation as part of a discursive practice of repression. 

 In an interview with the BBC last week her husband Des Rayner spoke of his pride in the way that she was able to save lives as well as bringing change for the better especially “ by talking frankly about the importance of safe sex in the 80s which almost nobody else would discuss”.  This is an issue that is still treated with ambiguity, with popular fiction anxious not to disrupt the discourse of spontaneity in the narrative of romantic love.  Her non-fiction addressed many different aspects of health and well being from the early popular sex manual People in Love: Modern Guide to Sex in Marriage (1968) to books about professional nursing, family health, early years development, grandparenting and her autobiography How Did I Get Here from There (2003).

 She was awarded an OBE in 1996 for services to health matters particularly for women’s health and wellbeing.  The award recognised her contribution as an activist and work as a member of many different committees and charities.  She was a commission on ‘The Prime Minister’s Commission on Nursing’ which reported in March 2010.  The commission followed the principles of Rayner’s lifelong interest in improving people’s lives through knowledge and allowing them to take a rational approach to health choices as it offered extensive opportunities for consultation.  The chair of the Commission, MP Ann Keen, stated “the debate exposed many myths and misunderstandings about nursing, perhaps above all the mistaken idea that compassion can be separated from competence”, an attitude which Rayner had striven to contest in many different forms through her journalism, public speaking and popular fiction.

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