Daisy Barclay died in November, just a few weeks after her 100th birthday.
Born in 1916 in the east end of London, Daisy Emma Barclay (née Hickey) was the youngest of seven children. After the death of her mother, when aged two, she was fostered by a Baptist couple in Cheshire. Through them she came to faith in Christ.
British Syrian Mission
She trained as a secretary and from the late 1930s worked for the British Syrian Mission (later MECO, recently merged with SIM-UK), which ran schools for girls in Syria and Lebanon. She retained a close, life-long interest in this mission.
Its General Secretary, J. D. Maitland-Kirwan, more or less adopted Daisy into his family. Her friendship with his daughter brought out the mischievous sense of fun which lurked beneath her proper manner. They used to attend Westminster Chapel in central London and there, or at All Souls, she met a couple about her age, called Oliver and Dorothy Barclay. She and Dorothy became good friends. Since Daisy lived just down the hill from them in Highgate, she saw a lot of them and their children.
School teaching and Oliver
In 1958, aged 42, Daisy decided to leave the Mission to train as a primary teacher at Chichester Teacher Training College. She threw herself into her new work, teaching in Kentish Town and Regents Park. She loved the children and they her: she introduced them to poetry and helped them to marvel at the natural world. She would have happily continued in teaching, but the Lord had a completely different role for the second half of her life.
When Dorothy Barclay died in 1964, Daisy found herself helping with the care of Dorothy’s four children. Two years later, at 49, she married Oliver, whom she had long admired and now come to love. Daisy watched and prayed over her new family, then aged 7-15, and proved a wonderfully supportive wife to Oliver in his role as General Secretary of the IVF/UCCF, first in London, then Leicester.
Hospitality
Daisy exemplified hospitality as ‘making a place for people not just in your home, but in your heart’, as UCCF staff, international students and overseas guests could testify. Christmas and summer tea parties at the Barclays’ were highlights of the year for all.
Daisy died peacefully at home, some three years after her beloved Oliver, and is survived by her four step-children, ten grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
