Ray Carlton obituary
My mother, Ray Carlton, who has died aged 100, worked as a pharmaceutical researcher, retailer and accounting auditor, and was a talented pianist and artist. An Anglo-American free thinker, she went on to cultivate a broad, multigenerational network of friends while living on the East Yorkshire coast.
Ray (Rachel) was born in Des Moines, Iowa, one of the three daughters of Burtis MacHatton, a Presbyterian pastor, and Norah (nee Ransom), a classical singer from an English family. When Ray was five, Norah moved with her daughters to Britain, and Ray went to Frensham Heights school, Surrey. In 1939 she returned to the US and finished her secondary education at Ferry Hall school, Illinois, before majoring in physiology at the University of Chicago.
Ray Carlton, right, as president of the Girls’ Athletics Association at Ferry Hall school in Illinois in the 1940s. Photograph: courtesy of Lake Forest Academy
At Ferry Hall it was noted that she was “a very hard worker with a passion for tea, cycling, and serious reading’’. Her interest in music took her to lectures by Stravinsky and a piano recital given by Rachmaninov. She met the composer John Cage in 1942 while practising the piano in a Chicago University music room, and she joined his ensemble, on xylophone, for the premiere of Imaginary Landscape No 3 at the Arts Club of Chicago.
Ray socialised with members of the metallurgy laboratory and the physicist Enrico Fermi was an acquaintance. As he had sequestered her favourite ice-rink to house a nuclear reactor, she turned to playing hockey, whereby she met Frances Oldham Kelsey who later, while working for the FDA, refused to license the drug thalidomide in the US. Ray joined Frankie’s pharmacology research group at the university, and the two became lifelong friends.
Ray settled permanently in Britain in 1946 and worked in pharmaceutical research and development at Boots in Nottingham. There she met Phil Carlton, back from the war, and when Phil’s training took him to London, Ray took a job as a researcher with ICI in Welwyn, Hertfordshire.
They married in 1948, and Ray quit scientific work while pregnant. In 1951 the couple moved with their baby daughter to Bridlington in East Yorkshire, where Phil joined the family shop, Carltons Ltd. Although this may have been a culture shock for both mum and her in-laws, these were happy days that saw the birth of four more children, and Ray worked at the shop as a fashion buyer.
Ray Carlton in her vegetable garden, 1977
In the early 60s Phil was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and he died in 1968. His illness and death hit Ray hard, but she continued to work in retail and then in accounting. In her spare time she became branch secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association, volunteered for the Samaritans and co-founded Bridlington’s film society. She began to garden seriously, while painting became her passion, and she assiduously maintained a large social circle.
After retirement in the early 90s, she completed an arts degree at Hull School of Art and Design. She also travelled widely, and each May for many years she went to the Spanish coast with the painter Ursula McCannell, her best friend from Frensham.
She is survived by her children, Allegra, Andy, Simon, Olivia and me, nine grandchildren, Rhiannon, Robbie-Felix, Rosemary, Sarah, Jamie, Lottie, Philippa, Rachel and Sophie, and three great-grandchildren, Jamie, Otis and Huey.