Obituary for the Nightingale Journal
March 2023

Melissa Hardie-Budden,  MBE, BA, SRN, PhD, FRSA

Melissa was born in Houston, Texas, in 1939 and spent her teenage years moving around Texas and Oklahoma, as her father was an oil refinery engineer. She obtained her BA at Boston University and subsequently worked at Harvard and Yale. Moving to Britain, she enrolled, as Melissa Woelfel, in the graduate set of the Nightingale School in 1967. Her mentor was Norna Jamieson and ‘Jimmie’ remained a great friend for many years. Melissa worked for three years as a research assistant and librarian at the Nightingale School before moving to the Nursing Research Unit at Edinburgh. She became lead researcher in the study of ‘auxiliaries in health care professions’ for the Scottish Home and Health Department, teaching at Edinburgh University and becoming the ninth person in the UK to obtain a PhD in nursing studies. She married Miles Hardie, who was director of the International Hospital Federation.

Towards the end of the 1970s she moved to London and opened a bookshop in Richmond called Deborah Books. Its subtitle was ‘Books by and about Women’. She also commenced her next career as a writer and publisher. Her publishing company, Patten Press, published mainly healthcare titles, biographies and poetry in the early years.

She moved to West Cornwall in the early 1980s, bringing a small lorry load of books from her shop. We built a substantial granite building in our garden and established a library of books ‘by and about women’. Melissa named it The Jamieson Library and the redoubtable Jimmie came down from Shetland to perform the official opening in 1986. In 1997 we formed a registered charity called The Hypatia Trust and Melissa proceeded to put together collections of her books and donate them to universities. The first collection of 10,000 books went to Exeter and others have gone to Bonn, Barcelona, Falmouth  and Leeds. Melissa was director of the Trust for over 25 years.

Patten Press morphed into Hypatia Publications, the publishing arm of the Trust. Melissa researched and published on several subjects – the history of Penzance, the artists of Newlyn and West Cornwall, and, finally, her magnum opus, a tracing of the maternal ancestry of the Brontë sisters, whose mother lived in same street as us in Penzance, before moving to Yorkshire.

Melissa was made MBE in 2013 ‘For Services to Heritage and the Arts in West Cornwall’.

Phil Budden, Husband