Sonia Hall obituary
My mother, Sonia Hall, who has died aged 88, left her home in Sri Lanka in 1951 to study medicine in Britain, and lived in England for most of the rest of her life.
She was born in Colombo into the Bandaranaike family, which had held prominent positions in Sri Lankan politics and law. However, her father, Sammy Dias Bandaranaike, did not have a political life, and was an agricultural officer in the department of agriculture. Her Indo-Trinidadian mother, Esther (nee Ramkeesoon), was technically a housewife but in fact was formidable at running the Bandaranaike coconut and rubber estates that her husband had inherited. She was also the one who had the drive to get her three girls through school and into university.
Sonia went to Bishops College boarding school in Colombo, and when the second world war broke out she and her two sisters continued their education in a temporary school 120 miles outside the capital, in Bandarawela.
In 1951 she travelled to England to study medicine at Cambridge University, and after three years at Girton College and another three training at the Royal London hospital she graduated in 1957, after which she did one-year’s pre-registration as a houseman at the London hospital, specialising as a paediatrician.
A brief return to Sri Lanka saw her practising paediatrics at Colombo Hospital, and it was there in 1959 that the then prime minister SWRD Bandaranaike was admitted after he was shot at his home. Sonia was his second cousin once removed, and was summoned to the ward where he was fighting for his life. “Do you think he’s going to survive?” his wife, Sirimavo, asked her. “I had absolutely no idea!” Sonia recounted to us. “What with the press of doctors and others all around him, I wasn’t even close enough to see him properly.” A short while after the assassination, Sirimavo led the Sri Lanka Freedom party to an election victory that made her the first female prime minister anywhere in the world.
On Sonia’s return to England, in 1961 she married Digby Hall, a fellow doctor, and they moved to Edinburgh, by which time she had given up hospital work so that she could bring up their young family. Eventually, after a move to Woodbridge in Suffolk in 1969, she returned to medicine as a consultant haematologist and dermatologist at Ipswich hospital, staying there until she retired in 2006, aged 74.
Sonia always enjoyed bright, inquisitive female company, and when she and her university contemporaries started one by one to reach 60 years of age, they hired cottages in the Cotswolds, Lake District and elsewhere, from which they would venture on walks as they swapped stories and explored the local area. When she couldn’t hook up with them, she treated her family members to trips to museums, exhibitions, lectures, concerts and the theatre, both at home and abroad.
Digby died in 2009. She is survived by her four children, William, James, Mary and me.
