Nurse who left Yorkshire to help the poor in India in 1981 retires from charity work at the age of 85

From her retirement home in Headingley, Leeds, she said, “The work in India has been far from easy. It would not have been possible without the generous financial donations from the Sylvia Wright Trust and its large band of supporters in Yorkshire and further afield.

“Together we have done our best to help, serve, improve and develop the lives of the people God has made known to us. It is humbling constantly to meet people whose life has been transformed in so many ways by our services.”

During four decades in India, she developed a modern 180-bed hospital, a boarding school for 200 profoundly deaf children, a day centre for up to 100 severely disabled children and a nursing college for up to 120 students.

She stepped down from her leadership roles in January 2022. After a period of liaison with her successor, John Rajkumar, she has now retired fully.

The school, day centre and nursing college which Sylvia started are carrying on the work. The hospital was sold to a group of Indian doctors in 2017.

In 1982 she settled in the town of Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, one of the poorest regions of southern India. There she first established a mobile clinic which treated over 400 patients a day in scattered villages. Three years later she acquired her first small hospital to deal with illnesses and endemic diseases that had previously been left untreated because of the lack of doctors, hospitals, clinics and medicines.

Her own money soon ran out and she was supported at first by a group of friends. This support developed into a small but very active charitable trust, The Sylvia Wright Trust, with supporters of all faiths from all parts of the UK and overseas. For some time, the Trust will carry on supporting the projects that Sylvia set up.

Ms Wright received the MBE from Queen Elizabeth in 1998 and a further OBE from the then Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in 2008 in recognition of her work.

Tony Allinson, Chair of the Sylvia Wright Trust, said: “Sylvia is modest and unsentimental about her outstanding achievements. These were driven by her faith, an incredible seven days a week work rate, a forceful personality and a determination to overcome every obstacle.”

Ms Wright was a pupil at Lawnswood High School in Leeds and trained as a nurse at Leeds General Infirmary. After a spell as a senior nursing officer looking after community health in the inner city in Leeds, she became a senior lecturer in nursing at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) before settling off to India.

Huge numbers of staff and students, past and present, gathered to say thank you at farewell events before she left India. A minister of the Tamil Nadu government, E V Velu, presented Sylvia with an honorary shawl.