Dr Jill Tattersall obituary | Contraception and family planning
My mother, Jill Tattersall, who died at the age of 95, helped change the face of health care by co-founding a clinic providing birth control to single women and underage girls in the 1960s.
She qualified as a doctor in Sheffield in 1956 and began training in obstetrics and gynecology, before quickly moving into the new field of family planning. In the 1960s, birth control provided by the NHS was restricted to married women and premarital sex and relationships with minors were still highly stigmatized.
Realizing this gap in the service, Jill and other concerned professionals purchased a terraced house in 1966 and established 408 Young People’s Consultation Center on Ecclesall Road in Sheffield. It was transformed into a clinic to provide psychological and counseling services to young women, as well as contraception, inaccessible to single women and underage girls under mainstream health services until 1974. The center continued until 1999.
Born in Epsom, Surrey, she was the daughter of Madge (née Tilley) and Vic Buddin, a civil servant. They met while Madge was treating Vic at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1920s. The family were evacuated to Colwyn Bay, north Wales, during the Second World War, where Jill went to the local grammar school.
After the war, the family returned to Guildford. Determined to become a doctor, Jill applied to medical school at the University of Sheffield three times before finally being admitted, apparently after her father wrote to the dean informing him that she would make an excellent doctor.
After graduating, Jill began working as a junior doctor in South Shields. During this period she met my father, Lawrence Tattersall, a chartered surveyor, and they married in 1959, after which Jill began working for the Sheffield Health Authority.
She ran clinics and worked part-time at the 408 center until Lawrence’s retirement in 1990, when they moved to Lindale, Cumbria. Jill continued to work in Barrow-in-Furness until she was in her 70s. His strong point and expertise was the recognition and counseling of sexual problems, later called psychosexual medicine. She valued the opportunity to regularly offer advice of this nature, much of it unsolicited, to her children and grandchildren.
Her lifelong enjoyment of travel began with a trip to the USSR in 1953 as a delegate to the British Student Work Federation. Later in life, she made many trips abroad, including to clinics in Zanzibar and Palawan, Philippines, which she supported.
After my father died in 2002, she continued to live life to the fullest, active in the parish council and enjoying her family.
Jill is survived by three children, Jane, Luke and me, and six grandchildren.
