“He endeared himself to every member of the synagogue by his constant tact, amiability and willingness to serve.”
Daphne’s mother, Esther (née Filschstein), an embroiderer, was one of five sisters. She was one year old when, in 1891, her family moved from Odessa (now Ukraine) to the UK.
“My grandfather, an antiques dealer, did not have much money when his family came to England,” Daphne once recalled, “and not much of a home to offer them, so they had a hard childhood and at times not enough to eat, and if it were not for the ingenuity of my grandmother and her skills in sewing, cooking and housekeeping, it might have been disastrous.”
Baby Daphne and her mother in 1918
At The Skinners’ Company’s School for Girls in Stamford Hill, Daphne excelled in learning off by heart and reciting poetry, including the poem To Daffodils by the 17th-century poet Robert Herrick, for which she was awarded a medal by the Poetry Society. In her 105th year she could still recite the poetry that she had learnt at school almost a century earlier.
Daphne won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art at the age of 17, and her training as an artist stood her in good stead.
After starting as a fashion artist and doing stage design — in 1939 she designed the costumes for Noel Gay’s show The Little Dog Laughed, which featured Flanagan and Allen singing the song Run, Rabbit, Run — she worked at the Hammersmith Hospital, drawing operations as they took place.
In the early 1960s Daphne started to work in the agony aunt department of the most popular women’s magazine of its day, Woman’s Own.
There, she managed a staff of 13 who, faced with sometimes 2,000 letters a week, researched the queries and answered the letters, above and beyond the select few chosen for publication.
She fulfilled a vital need that encompassed medical, social and psychological problems for thousands of readers who welcomed writing to the house name “Mary Grant”, confident that their privacy would be respected.
It was pioneering work: Daphne and her team were trying to fill the gap between the services provided by the state and the desperate needs and crises of ordinary people, not least in terms of pregnancy — wanted and unwanted — and sexual health.
“The cries for help are very real indeed,” Daphne once pointed out. “The dialogue with the reader helps us to learn more of human nature, and we feel pleased that we have managed to help in some way.
"It’s quite disturbing when you realise how many hundreds of people have no one else to turn to, and it’s a constant reminder to me of how vital and responsible our job is.”
“Joan, aged 15, writes to say she is pregnant and ‘according to the book she read’ her baby will be born in January,” Daphne recalled.
“She has not told her mother and although she has written her a letter she has not had the courage to give it to her and face her afterwards. She says she has bought a lot of clothing and cot blankets and hidden them under her bed.”
Daphne showed rare anger when people assumed that the letters were made up: “When people ask me what sort of work I do, and I tell them, they nearly always say: ‘Oh — I thought those sorts of letters were made up!’ — very few of them believe that the letters are written by real people with real problems.
“But I can assure you that these cries for help are very real indeed, and truth is very often much stranger than fiction.”
At Woman’s Own Daphne gave Claire Rayner her first job and, after seeing in doctors’ waiting rooms how many men turned surreptitiously to the problem page, she suggested that the magazine pioneer a men’s problem page, which it did in 1974.
After retiring from Woman’s Own, Daphne volunteered for a number of years at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and then at the Michael Sobell Centre, where she put her journalist experience to fresh use editing the magazine Emet and running, until the age of 90, a popular creative writing class.
Her skill in drawing people out was also displayed in a series of interviews with people in public life, which became one of the features of Emet magazine.
They proved to be so popular that Star Interviews, a book of her interviews with people ranging from Dame Barbara Cartland and Cherie Booth to Danny Abse and the Duke of Devonshire, was published.
In 1942 she married Dr Harold Claff, whom she had met at a Maccabi evening a year earlier. He became a much-respected GP in Tower Hamlets and continued to work as a locum until he was 88.
They had a daughter, Naomi Lightman, a lecturer in English literature, who in 1965 married the High Court judge Sir Gavin Lightman, who died in 2020.
Daphne and Harold moved to Hammerson House old age home, where Harold died in 2011.
She is survived by Naomi, her grandchildren Daniel, Esther (Solomon) and Sarah and seven great-grandchildren.
Daphne Claff: born June 14, 1918. Died August 3, 2022
