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Sonja Brain obituary

Sonja Brain obituary

My wife, Sonja Brain, who has died aged 84 of cancer, remained proudly Dutch for the more than 60 years that she lived in the UK, having arrived in the country in her 20s at the end of a travelling expedition.

Sonja was born in Rotterdam to Johannes Strijbos, who worked in a bank, and his wife, Maria (nee Wervers), and spent much of her early childhood there under German occupation during the second world war. Although she did well at school in Rotterdam and was a talented swimmer, from an early age she loved the idea of travelling and, rather than continuing her education, set out at the age of 17, with a supply of her favourite cheese, to see Europe.

Eventually she arrived in Britain, having met and married Dudley Hollingsworth, a photographer, in Rotterdam in 1954. They subsequently flitted between London and Brighton as she did modelling work, mainly for art colleges. Around this time Sonja also became an active supporter of CND, attending its annual marches against the nuclear bomb. When she and Dudley had two children, this precipitated a move into rural Kent, first to Sutton-at-Hone and later to New Ash Green.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1975, and Sonja decided it was time to go back into education at the Open University. She and I met at an OU summer school where I was moonlighting as a tutor, and we got married in 1975 in Gravesend.

We moved to Swansea (where I was a lecturer in zoology at University College, Swansea, now Swansea University) with Sonja’s children, and had two more of our own. An excellent cook, she was brilliant at entertaining visiting academics and students, and was also able to satisfy her wanderlust with camping holidays arranged around international conferences, some of which we co-organised.

She was a parent-governor at local schools and trained generations of children (including her own) as a swimming instructor at Penyrheol swimming club in Swansea. Later she took a computing course, using the skills she acquired, along with her organisational and linguistic assets, to get a job helping to run EU Tempus and Jeep programmes coordinating the movement of people and engineering equipment between Swansea and various educational institutions in eastern Europe.

After much travelling in that job, she retired in 2000 but continued to look forward to trips abroad on holiday, even after a knee replacement reduced her mobility. She never lost her love of beaches and swimming, and also became an enthusiastic painter.

She is survived by me, and by her children, Fulke, Ilka, Vincent and Daniel, and grandchildren, Cameron, Iona, Sadie, Sienna, Henry and Elliot.