Background
She was born Daphne Barbara Hubbard in Kingston, Jamaica, where her father was an insurance executive. In 1946 the family returned, first to Jersey then in 1947 to Billericay, Essex. In 1952 the family moved to Ethiopia. In 1957 after an unfortunate incident involving her alcoholic father, a toast and a drinks trolley, the family were asked to leave the country and went to Cape Town in South Africa. She began a University degree in Art, but in 1962 had to give it up and started work with Barclays Bank.
She married Richard Turner in 1963 and they went to Paris where she worked for the Berlitz School of Languages. They returned to South Africa in 1966 to run his mother's fruit farm in Stellenbosch. In 1969 she started working for Kupugani, an organisation that provided cheap food for the poor.
In 1970, on the breakdown of her marriage, she became acting Regional Secretary at the Institute of Race Relations. She worked again for Kupugani from 1971 to 1978. After a brief marriage to Gerald Stonestreet, she married architect Les Broer. The family fled back to England in 1978, shortly after her ex-husband Richard Turner, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, was assassinated. They lived in Farnham in Surrey, where she worked for the Centre for International Briefing, and joined the Labour Party.
Read more about this topic: Barbara Follett (politician)
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“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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