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 Helen
Franks, the health and features editor of Laterlife until last
Autumn, sadly died on Easter Sunday at the age of 73. She was
cremated at Golders Green on April 1 at a service attended by
more than 250 people.
Helen had an exotic air, which might be traced in part to her
grandparents, Russian and Polish Jews fleeing persecution at the
turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, who settled in London. It
also was there in her striking looks and her wonderfully stylish
dress sense. Helen was brought up in Soho, and for her London's
cultural richness was very much home. During the war she was
evacuated to schooling in Oxford, but returned later to live
with her parents in Hackney, before, daringly - this was the
early 1950s - moving into a bedsit in Bayswater and launching
herself on the world of work.
In 1960 she married Arthur Franks, a consulting engineer. Early in
their marriage they moved to their comfortable family home in
West Hampstead. Here, very much a team, they brought up their
three children, Hannah, Julia and Steven, and later delighted in
their five grandchildren.
As her many friends will attest, Helen had the rare and precious
gift of turning casual acquaintances into lifelong buddies. The
funeral and the gloriously joyful lunch that followed at her
husband, Arthur's Highgate golf club, there were men and women
from the many groups and circles to which she had belonged and
contributed along the way: journalists from Women in Media in
which she played a prominent role in the 80s and 90s; a
successful crime-writer from her very active writers' group; a
friend who had been part of a prison visiting group; students
from the course she taught for several years at City Lit as well
as fellow walkers. Walking remained one of the great pleasures
of Helen's life almost to the very end.
Helen had been a hardworking and successful journalist for many
years. Starting as a sub-editor in the 1960s firstly on Good
Housekeeping magazine, then Woman, she went freelance when her
children were born, putting in eight years as family health
editor of Home and Freezer Digest, and later writing features, a
medical news column and an advice column.
She wrote seven books, many of them covering edgy, difficult
subjects: Goodbye Tarzan (Allen and Unwin, 1984), Remarriage (Bodley
Head, 1988) and Mummy Doesn't Live Here Any More (Doubleday
1990). Her health books included Bone Boosters (Boxtree 1993)
which she co-wrote with the Green Goddess, Diana Moran, and one
of the first anti-ageing books, Getting Older Slowly (Rosendale
Press1995).
She contributed to the Guardian, the Times, Observer, Independent,
Good Housekeeping, Woman, Family Circle, Marie Claire, Choice
and Woman’s Journal. For the last seven years she was health and
features editor of www.laterlife.com , a job she adored and which
she only gave up, reluctantly, when she became ill and found
typing too difficult.
All of us involved in
www.laterlife.com will greatly miss her energy,
enthusiasm and friendship.
Helen Franks (nee Swayger), writer and journalist,
born April 5 1934; died March 23, 2008
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