My mother, Joan Marks, who has died aged 95, moved from Australia to the UK with her young family in 1970, bucking the emigration trends of the time and spending most of the rest of her life in Surrey.
In England she continued her work as a housewife and was also of great support to her husband, Frederick, in his music business career, which encompassed senior positions at Pye Records and Phillips Music, Walt Disney and Billboard magazine.
She was often at Frederick’s side on business trips and company events, intelligently engaging and able to charm everyone she met. At home she hosted fantastic parties for entertainment business people from all over the world, including Rupert and Anna Murdoch, Herb Alpert and Val Doonican. Somehow she always managed to put even the most demanding guests at ease.
Joan was born in Brisbane, to Jim Robertson, an accountant, and Olive (nee Chave), a clerk. After attending North Sydney Girls’ high school she took a science degree at the University of Sydney, and in 1953 began working at the Bread Research Institute of Australia – a real place, despite its slightly comical name – as a research chemist looking at ways to allow bread to stay fresher for longer.
In 1955 the institute provided part-funding to send her on an eight-month trip to Europe and the Americas, during which she met other experts in the field before setting off on an extended holiday.
While playing golf in Banff in Canada on that tour, she met Frederick Marks, and later accepted his marriage proposal even though she was supposed to be mulling over another from an Australian suitor who had popped the question before she left on her travels.
She and Frederick were married in 1957 and settled in Australia, where Joan designed and supervised the building of a house in north Sydney in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, her favourite architect. They had four children, then the family moved to the UK for Frederick’s work.
At their new house in Leatherhead, Surrey, Joan again put her design skills to use by creating a traditional dry-stone Japanese riverbed in the garden. A lover of things Japanese, in Sydney she had designed and built her own lacquer cabinet, decorated with embroidery from a kimono bought by her mother in Tokyo in 1930.
For some of the time that Joan was performing her great double act with Frederick, she was affected by mild multiple sclerosis, which impaired her mobility in later years. However, she had learned to live with the condition for 40 years. Beyond a quick growl to herself and a “bugger, this makes me so cross!”, she would just get on with things.
A talented golfer, in her spare time she also loved painting, excelling in watercolours and still life, and followed David Hockney’s example, creating (in her late 80s) vibrant pictures on her iPad.
Frederick died in 2000. She is survived by her children, Andrew, Peta Louise, me and Graeme, and seven grandchildren.
