Felicity Whittaker obituary

The Guardian

27-06-2025

No one who met my friend Felicity Whittaker, who has died aged 96, could ever forget her. Not the dozens of disadvantaged and often troubled children whom she cared for, nor fellow protesters from Ban the Bomb days to Extinction Rebellion marches. And certainly not the many friends who enjoyed her lively and engaging company in Highgate in north London and later in Bedford.
Felicity was born in London to Lydia Bilbrook, an actor, and George Harrison Brown, a journalist. Her parents separated when she was a small child, and she and Lydia moved to Santa Monica Canyon, near Hollywood, where Lydia was part of the British actors' community and appeared in several films. Felicity played a minor role in National Velvet (1944), which starred Elizabeth Taylor.
After high school in Santa Monica, Felicity worked as a secretary. Through a mutual friend she met her future husband, Chris Whittaker, a young British naval officer and Oxford graduate who was touring the US after service in the Fleet Air Arm.
Felicity never felt she really belonged in America and in 1948 followed Chris to the UK, where he began studies at the Architectural Association in London. They married in 1952, and like many young progressives of their generation they joined the Communist party, hoping to build a better, fairer world after the devastation of the second world war. Felicity loathed pomposity and bourgeois prissiness in equal measure.
After a brief stay in Basildon, Essex, in the early 50s, Chris and Felicity bought a rundown Georgian house in Barnsbury, north London, and the first of their seven children was born shortly afterwards.
In 1961, they moved to Highgate. Felicity gained a social work qualification at the London School of Economics, and then worked at John Keats school for 'delicate children' in Swiss Cottage, as a family liaison and social worker. In 1976 she and Chris decided to move out of London and bought an old manor house in Bedford, Bromham Hall, a substantial property with medieval origins.
It lay at a convenient distance for Chris to continue to work in London as an architect with Camden council, and was large enough for Felicity to set up a private residential home where she could help children in need of assessment and respite. She offered accommodation and support, and provided the responsible local authorities with her assessment of the best long-term solution for the children, who were often teenagers. Felicity called time on the project in 1988 at the age of 60 and then they rented out parts of the estate to help fund the never-ending repairs and building work.
Chris died in 2015, but Felicity continued to live at Bromham, where she kept sheep, dogs and chickens, and had recently acquired two peacocks.
She is survived by her children, Clio, Adam, Polly, Meg, Ben, Kit and Yasmin, 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.