My friend Mark Tame, who has died of lung cancer aged 61, spent his life caring for others. He worked for various charities (including Mind) in Bristol and London that advocated for mental health patients, and spent the past five years at Homerton healthcare NHS foundation trust in London as a care coordinator after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mark was born in Wivenhoe, Essex, the son of Anne Tame, a telephonist, and John Matthews, a telephone engineer, who met in the postwar period at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire. He went to several different schools, then Bristol University, where he studied social politics, which became an anchor of not only his career, but of his personal ethics.
He graduated in 1996 and started his career in healthcare in Bristol. When Mark’s brother-in-law died unexpectedly in the early 2000s, he moved to London to help his sister Lynn raise her two girls, Holly and Millie. Mark’s nieces were his pride and joy, and he was delighted to watch them blossom from childhood into successful adults. On an ideal weekend, Mark would spend time at his flat, a cafe or his local pub in Stoke Newington, catching up with his sister, nieces and friends on all things politics, food and culture.
He was also an avid traveller, having spent his adolescent years travelling to visit family in New York City and Georgia in the US. He regularly travelled to Thailand with friends and, in 2018, after finishing a decade-long stint with the Advocacy Project in London, spent a summer in Spain learning Spanish and looking after dogs.
During the pandemic, he returned to what he knew best: healthcare. He worked for the NHS in London as a care coordinator administering vaccines. He also worked as a home health coordinator for older people, and for a clinic in London that specialised in prostate cancer.
Mark had many friends, and would always be available for a crisis call at 3am, or an evening cooking, drinking wine and laughing.
He is survived by Lynn, Holly and Millie.
