| Claire Rayner | |
| Birthname: | Claire Berenice Berkovitch (later Chetwynd) |
| Birth Date: | 1931 1, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Stepney, London, England |
| Death Place: | Harrow, London, England |
| Occupation: | Journalist, broadcaster, novelist, nurse |
| Children: | Jay Rayner, Amanda, Adam |
| Nationality: | British |
| Years Active: | 1949–2010 |
Claire Berenice Rayner, OBE (; Berkovitch, later Chetwynd; 22 January 1931 – 11 October 2010) was an English journalist, broadcaster, novelist and nurse, best known for her role for many years as an advice columnist.
Rayner was born to Jewish parents in Stepney,[1] London, the eldest of four children. Her father was a tailor and her mother a housewife. Her father had adopted the surname Chetwynd, under which name she was educated at the City of London School for Girls. Her autobiography How Did I Get Here from There? was published in 2003, and revealed details of a childhood marred by physical and mental cruelty at the hands of her parents.[2] After the family emigrated to Canada, in 1945 she was placed in a psychiatric hospital by her parents, and treated for 15 months for a thyroid defect.
Returning to the UK in 1951, Rayner trained as a nurse at the Royal Northern Hospital and Guy's Hospital in London. She intended to become a physician; while training as a nurse, however, she met actor Desmond Rayner, whom she married in 1957. The couple lived in London and Claire worked as a midwife and later nursing sister.[3]
Rayner wrote her first letter to Nursing Times in 1958, on nurses' pay and conditions. She then began regularly writing to The Daily Telegraph on themes of patient care or nurses' pay. She began writing novels soon after her marriage, and by 1968 had published more than 25 books.[3]
The birth of her first child in 1960[4] meant that she found full-time nursing difficult, and so focused on a full-time writing career. Initially writing articles for magazines and publications, in 1968 she published one of the earliest sex manuals, People in Love, which brought her to national attention. Despite the "explicit" content, the work was commended for its "down-to-earth" and "sensible" approach.[3]
By the 1970s, writing for Woman's Own Rayner had established herself as one of four new and direct "agony aunts", alongside Marjorie Proops, Peggy Makins (aka Evelyn Home) at Woman and J. Firbank of Forum.[3] Her advice in the teenaged girls' magazine Petticoat caused controversy. In 1972, she was accused of "encouraging masturbation and promiscuity in prepubescent girls".[3] Her direct and frank approach led the BBC to ask her to be the first person on British pre-watershed television to demonstrate how to put on a condom, and she was one of the first people used by advertisers to promote sanitary towels.[3]
The year after beginning to appear on Pebble Mill at One, Rayner started an agony column in The Sun in 1973,[4] but left to join the Sunday Mirror in 1980, when she also made her second television series of Claire Rayner's Casebook. She left the Sunday Mirror shortly after the appointment of Eve Pollard as editor, and joined the Today newspaper for three years. Rayner was named medical journalist of the year in 1987.[3]
Rayner was probably best known as an agony aunt on TV-am in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She made it her personal aim to reply to every letter she received. This was an unfunded project by the station.
She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1989, when she was surprised by Michael Aspel.
Rayner became president of the Patients Association, and through her extensive charity work and writings was awarded an OBE in 1996 for services to women's health and wellbeing and to health matters. Rayner had a very personal reason for supporting Sense's Older Person campaign, wearing hearing aids in both ears, and also had age-related dry macular degeneration (AMD), a sight loss common in older people.[5]
Between 1993 and 2002, Rayner was one of the patrons of the Herpes Viruses Association and chaired a Press Briefing in June 1993 aimed at destigmatising genital herpes. When tendering her resignation, she cited the fact that she was patron of 60 organisations as the reason for trimming the list.[6]
Rayner was appointed to UK government committees on health, and consequently authored a chapter in The Future of the NHS.[7] Despite being president of the Patients Association, Rayner used private health care.[8] was a member of the Prime Minister's Commission on Nursing; the Labour government's Royal Commission on the Care of the Elderly. In 1999, Rayner was appointed to a committee responsible for reviewing the medical conditions at Holloway Prison, London, at the direction of Paul Boateng who was then the Minister for Prisons. The recommendations of this committee led to far-reaching changes in the provision of medical care within Holloway.[9]
A lifelong Labour Party supporter, she resigned in 2001 and joined the Liberal Democrats in fear of the proposed changes to the NHS from the administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair.[3] Rayner was also a prominent supporter of the British republican movement, although admitted her dual standards on accepting her OBE in 1996.[10]
Rayner was Vice-President (and formerly President) of the British Humanist Association, a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. In the weeks leading up to her death, Rayner had the following to say about Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the United Kingdom:
Rayner's position as a patron of the Down's Syndrome Association was promptly terminated in 1995.[11] She had queried parents' decision to have a disabled child:It was a response to the decision of journalist Dominic Lawson and his wife not to have a test determining the health of the foetus during a pregnancy and thus, following one potential result, rejecting outright the option of a termination. It was published shortly after the birth of the couple's disabled daughter.
Rayner met her husband, actor Desmond Rayner, at Maccabi in Hampstead; the couple married in 1957.[12] They had three children together: writer and food critic Jay Rayner,[2] electronics reviewer, angling and motoring journalist Adam Rayner and events manager Amanda Rayner.
Rayner was found to have breast cancer in 2002 at the age of 71. She became a breast cancer activist to promote the work of the charity Cancer Research UK.[13] She also suffered from Graves' disease[14] and became a patron of the British Thyroid Foundation in 1994.
Rayner never recovered from emergency intestinal surgery undertaken in May 2010, and died in hospital on 11 October 2010.[1] She told her relatives she wanted her last words to be: "Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him."[15]
Rayner was a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction.[16]