Dr Jean Toynbee obituary: The Yorkshire doctor who inspired a Hollywood film starring Elizabeth Taylor
Jean Toynbee, who has died at 105 and whose grandfather was the First World War Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was a family doctor in the area around Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, where she moved with her husband, the artist Lawrence Toynbee.
The second daughter of Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith and Betty Manners, Jean was born in November 1920, and her young life reflected the advantages of the privileged world into which she was born.
As a girl she loved horses and became such a passionate rider that she was said to have inspired the novel National Velvet, written by her mother’s friend Enid Bagnold and later turned into a Hollywood film with a young Elizabeth Taylor.
Like many daughters of wealthy families in the interwar years, Jean did not attend school but was educated by governesses at home, amongst whom was the novelist Julia Strachey, daughter of Lytton Strachey, one of the founders of the Bloomsbury Group of writers.
A debutante like her elder sister Mary, Jean was presented at a ‘coming out’ ball and might have been expected to conform to the social norms of her peers.
But she had always known her own mind and was determined to follow the path of her father, who had studied at Oxford before World War One.
On his deathbed, he had made Betty promise to let Jean follow suit, and in September 1940, following intensive private tuition, she arrived at Somerville College to read history.
She had been volunteering as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Royal Northern Hospital on London’s Holloway Road, and on arriving at Oxford she met the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, later to become the only British woman scientist to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Jean changed her subject from history to medicine, despite having never had a science lesson in her life, and went on to become a doctor. She completed her training at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.
She met her future husband during her studies and she and Lawrence were married at Westminster Cathedral in 1945, one month before VE Day.
They bought a house in Oxford, where Lawrence was teaching art, and Jean became a part-time GP in nearby Cowley, where her patients were largely car workers and their families from the Morris factory.
Meanwhile she began raising her six daughters.
In 1955 Lawrence inherited the manor house, hamlet and surrounding farms of Ganthorpe near Castle Howard, and a few years later the family made North Yorkshire their home.
Jean resumed her GP’s life in the villages of Ampleforth, Hovingham and Terrington, and Lawrence taught at Ampleforth College and Bradford School of Art, where his students included David Hockney.
Jean was also a medical officer at Ampleforth.
Lawrence died in 2002 and Jean, who continued working into her seventies, is survived by four of her daughters and 10 grandchildren.