1. Claire Rayner's father was a tailor and her mother a housewife.
27 Facts About Claire Rayner
1. 2.
Claire Rayner's father had adopted the surname Chetwynd, under which name she was educated at the City of London School for Girls.
3.
Claire Rayner intended to become a physician; while training as a nurse she met actor Desmond Rayner, whom she married in 1957.
4.
The couple lived in London and Claire Rayner worked as a midwife and later nursing sister.
5.
Claire Rayner wrote her first letter to Nursing Times in 1958, on nurses' pay and conditions.
6.
Claire Rayner then began regularly writing to The Daily Telegraph on themes of patient care or nurses' pay.
7.
Claire Rayner began writing novels soon after her marriage, and by 1968 had published more than 25 books.
8.
Claire Rayner left the Sunday Mirror shortly after the appointment of Eve Pollard as editor, and joined the Today newspaper for three years.
9.
Claire Rayner was named medical journalist of the year in 1987.
10.
Claire Rayner was probably best known as an agony aunt on TV-am in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
11.
Claire Rayner made it her personal aim to reply to every letter she received.
12.
Claire Rayner was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1989, when she was surprised by Michael Aspel.
13.
Claire Rayner became president of the Patients Association, and through her extensive charity work and writings was appointed OBE in 1996 for services to women's health and wellbeing and to health matters.
14.
Claire Rayner had a very personal reason for supporting Sense's Older Person campaign, wearing hearing aids in both ears, and had age-related dry macular degeneration, a sight loss common in older people.
15.
Between 1993 and 2002, Claire Rayner was one of the patrons of the Herpes Viruses Association and chaired a Press Briefing in June 1993 aimed at destigmatising genital herpes.
16.
Claire Rayner was appointed to UK government committees on health, and consequently authored a chapter in The Future of the NHS.
17.
In 1999, Claire 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.
18.
Claire Rayner was a prominent supporter of the British republican movement, although admitted her dual standards on accepting her OBE in 1996.
19.
Claire Rayner was Vice-President of the British Humanist Association, a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society Scotland and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
20.
Claire Rayner's views are so disgusting, so repellent and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him.
21.
Claire Rayner had queried parents' decision to have a disabled child:.
22.
Claire Rayner met her husband, actor Desmond Claire Rayner, at Maccabi in Hampstead; the couple married in 1957.
23.
Claire Rayner was found to have breast cancer in 2002 at the age of 71.
24.
Claire Rayner became a breast cancer activist to promote the work of the charity Cancer Research UK.
25.
Claire Rayner suffered from Graves' disease and became a patron of the British Thyroid Foundation in 1994.
26.
Claire Rayner never recovered from emergency intestinal surgery undertaken in May 2010, and died in hospital on 11 October 2010.
27.
Claire Rayner was a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction.