My friend Charlotte Jones, who has died aged 95, was a pioneering GP, an early advocate of family-planning services and an obstetrician who taught doctors and midwives to make childbirth as positive as possible for women, with fewer medical interventions and more involvement of partners.
An only child, Charlotte was born in Vienna and raised in Czechoslovakia. Her father, Stefan Hartstein, an obstetrician and gynaecologist in Bratislava, died when she was seven. Within months of Hitler’s annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, when Charlotte was 11, she and her mother, Marianne (nee Elbogen), a nurse, sought refuge in the London home of a distant cousin, and Charlotte attended a local grammar school.
