Mary Russell obituary

The Guardian

5 days ago

My mother, Mary Russell, who has died aged 88, was a teacher, travel writer, broadcaster and storyteller. She journeyed to more than 50 countries and shared her experiences of them in print, radio and in person.
After teaching in primary and secondary schools in London and Oxford during the 1960s and 70s, Mary started writing about travel for the Guardian on a freelance basis in 1980, while she was studying for an MA in peace studies at the University of Bradford.
The following year she went to Lesotho in southern Africa and wrote a series on solo female travellers for the Guardian women's page. She was then invited to edit a nonfiction book, Survival, South Atlantic (1983), by two wildlife photographers, Cindy Buxton and Annie Price, who had become caught up in the Falklands war.
The publishers, HarperCollins, subsequently asked what else she would like to do, and so she set about writing The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (1986), which looked at the experiences of intrepid female travellers throughout the ages.
Three other books followed: Please Don't Call it Soviet Georgia (1991), an account of her travels across Georgia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Journeys of a Lifetime (2002), a travelogue bringing together many of her trips, and My Home Is Your Home: A Journey Round Syria (2011).
Born in Dublin, Mary was the last of the four children of Evelyn (nee Smyth), and Michael Russell, a civil servant. She was educated at Our Lady's Bower secondary school in Athlone and then University College Dublin, where she studied in the mid-50s.
Travelling back from an au pair job in Italy in 1960, she stopped off in London, where she met a writer called Ian Rodger. They married in 1960, after which they moved to Brill in Buckinghamshire and had three children, Deirdre, Russell and me. It was after a period of child-rearing and teaching that she began writing features for the Irish Times and for Irish radio, before hooking up with the Guardian.
After Ian died of motor neurone disease in 1984, she took herself away to France the following summer, travelling with a tent on the back of her bike, and then caught a ferry to Algeria, continuing down into the Sahara to spend time with the Saharawi, a desert people displaced by warfare in the region.
This, and other subsequent journeys, fed into the book Journeys of a Lifetime, and she continued to write well into old age. In addition, she was an election observer in Bosnia (1990), South Africa (1994) and Kyrgyzstan (2005).
A keen musician, Mary sang, played the guitar, piano and electronic keyboards, taught herself the penny whistle and the accordion in her 40s, and learned the saxophone in her 60s, performing with the Blow the Dust orchestra in Dublin.
She is survived by her three children, grandchildren Eta, Isabella, Charlie and Elizabeth, and a great-granddaughter, Lila.