Maurice Little, MB BCh BAO, 1965 (died 7 January, 2017, aged 75)
Extract from appreciation by daughter Claire Brooksbank; a full version of this article is available here.
My father, Maurice Little, who has died aged 75, was a dedicated and skilled paediatrician, a committed volunteer for a number of charities and a loving father and husband.
He was born near Enniskillen, County Fermangah, in 1941, to Emily (née Ross) and John Little, who were dairy farmers. Maurice read medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating in 1965 and then leaving Northern Ireland to work in Liverpool at the Alder Hey hospital.
There he met Lorna Marchesi, a medical student. They married in 1970 and moved to Canada, where Maurice took up a fellowship in paediatric neurology at Kingston General Hospital in Ontario. They returned to Cardiff in 1973, where Maurice became senior registrar at the University Hospital of Wales before moving to Kent in 1976. There he worked at All Saints Hospital in Chatham as a consultant paediatrician. He mentored many people, and many families owed him a debt of gratitude for his tireless commitment to child health.
As well as numerous teaching and advisory roles and work with the Royal College of Paediatrics, Maurice worked for various charities, including Cancer and Leukaemia in Children. He also travelled to Romania and Palestine to teach and offer advice on clinical services.
After his retirement he was a member of the independent monitoring board of Rochester Prison in Kent for more than a decade. He was a keen linguist and attended Irish and Spanish classes for many years.
He and Lorna loved to travel and had friends around the globe. In later years he was a devoted grandfather, never more in his element than when calming a crying baby in his expert hands. We called him “the baby whisperer”.
He is survived by Lorna, his three children, James, Katherine and me (Claire), and two grandsons, Billy and Fergus.
Top of Page