My mother, Jill Tattersall, who has died aged 95, helped to change the face of healthcare by co-founding a clinic providing contraception for unmarried women and underage girls in the 1960s.
She qualified as a doctor in Sheffield in 1956 and started out by training in obstetrics and gynaecology, quickly moving into the new field of family planning. During the 60s, birth control supplied by the NHS was only for married women and there was still a great deal of stigma attached to premarital sex and underage relationships.
Seeing this gap in the service Jill, along with some other concerned professionals, bought a terrace house in 1966 and set up the 408 Young People’s Consultation Centre on Ecclesall Road in Sheffield. It was converted into a clinic to provide psychological and counselling services to young women, and also contraception, unavailable to unmarried women and underage girls within the mainstream health service until 1974. The centre continued until 1999.
Born in Epsom, Surrey, she was the daughter of Madge (nee Tilley) and Vic Buddin, a civil servant. They met while Madge was nursing Vic at a TB sanatorium in the 1920s. The family was evacuated to Colwyn Bay, north Wales, during the second world war, where Jill went to the local grammar school.
After the war the family moved back to Guildford. Determined to be a doctor, Jill applied to medical school at Sheffield University three times before she was eventually admitted, allegedly after her father wrote to the dean informing him of what an excellent doctor she would make.
After she graduated, Jill began working as a junior doctor in South Shields. During this time she met my father, Lawrence Tattersall, a chartered surveyor, and they married in 1959, after which Jill began working for Sheffield health authority.
She ran clinics and worked part-time at the 408 centre until Lawrence’s retirement in 1990, when they moved to Lindale, Cumbria. Jill continued to work, in Barrow-in-Furness, until she was nearly 70. Her forte and expertise were the recognition and counselling of sexual problems, later termed psychosexual medicine. She relished the opportunity to offer advice of this nature, mostly unsolicited, on a regular basis to her children and grandchildren.
Her lifelong enjoyment of travel started with a trip to the USSR in 1953 as a delegate of the British Student Labour Federation. Later in life she enjoyed extensive overseas trips including to clinics in Zanzibar and Palawan, in the Philippines, that she supported.
After my father died in 2002, she continued to live life to the full, active in the parish council and enjoying family.
Jill is survived by three children, Jane, Luke and me, and six grandchildren.
