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The Guardian

Patricia Herbert obituary

From 1975 until 1998, my mother-in-law, Patricia Herbert, who has died aged 81, was the south-east Asia curator at the British Library in London. In this role, she wrote multiple books, essays and papers, including The Life of the Buddha (1993), based on Burmese myths and legends, and an important bibliography of Burmese writing, described as one correspondent as 'like a bible' to scholars in Burma (now Myanmar). She also became friends with Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, Michael Aris, who were then living in Oxford. In her spare time, Patricia became a vital node in the international movement for democracy in Burma. Over the following decades, she often supported the families of liberation leaders forced to live in London, and served as vice-chair of the educational charity Prospect Burma from 1989 until 2017. For many young Burmese students in London, she became 'Auntie Pat'. Patricia was born in Pinner, north-west London, to Winifred (nee Lathey) and Laurence Herbert, who ran a bakery. She went to Heriots Wood grammar school, and pursued south-east Asian studies at Soas University of London, where she learned Burmese. During further study at the University of Michigan, she lived in a large Quaker housing co-op and, in 1968, joined protests against the Vietnam war. She moved to Yangon, at the time known abroad as Rangoon, shortly after with her first husband, U Kyin Swi, whom she had met at Soas and married in 1969. During her time in Burma, and on multiple subsequent visits to the country, as well as carrying out academic research, she became friends with many of the leading figures in the liberation struggle. In the early 1970s, she separated from Swi (they remained friends – indeed, he died in the family home while visiting her in 2015), and moved back to London. While working at the British Library in the 1970s, Patricia met Ariel Daigre, and they married in 1984. She acquired two stepdaughters, Olga and Christine, and the couple had a daughter together, Juliette. In 2017, Patricia was made MBE for her work, and the following year the International Institute on Social History in Amsterdam archived a collection of her papers as The Patricia Herbert Collection on Burma. She is survived by Ariel, Olga, Christine and Juliette (my wife), and by seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.