Elva's love of travel led to journeys to Australia and the Far East.

A Soroptimist convention in New York in 1956 which she attended was followed by three months of journeying across USA and Canada, earning money to support herself by undertaking commissions to paint animals.

By November of the following year, Elva had arrived in Bombay to attend a vegetarian congress.

During her journey to India, she made head and shoulder portrait sketches of the crew of the MS Sangola from the Captain down to the cadets, and some theatrical sketches.

Many months were spent in India travelling and painting portraits, landscapes and scenes of Indian life.

Moving on, she held exhibitions in Singapore and Malaya, where she painted a portrait of Air Marshal the Earl of Bandon, then Commander in Chief of the Far East Air Force.

Painted in 1957/8, this portrait is among those held in the archives of the RAF Museum.

Richard James, a friend and fellow painter, said that after her Singapore exhibition she went up into the Malayan mountains.

There she met and sketched a girl to whom she gave the sketch. The girl was a nursemaid in a royal household. On seeing the sketch, her employer's wife asked the girl to find Elva again so that she could paint the royal children.

Elva stayed in the palace and painted many other portraits, including one of His Majesty the Yang-di-Pertuan Agong.

Some three years were spent in this way.

Moving around the world on her own, a single woman nearing 50, shows that Elva Blacker was a fearless, confident person.

At the time, the Malayan Emergency was in place, with communist terrorists emerging from hidden places in the jungle to carry out murderous raids.

Up until this time, all the work Elva Blacker carried out during her WAAF service had been stored in a cupboard at her home, not looked at and forgotten, for nearly 30 years.

But she uncovered them and showed them to a retired colonel she had met on a sketching trip to Hereford, where she had shown him a photograph of her sketch of a Free French Squadron.

The colonel at once recognised her work was a unique pictorial record of great interest to recorders of wartime history.

In 1974, 113 items of Elva Blacker's wartime work was acquired by the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon.

At that time, a wartime friend remembers Elva calling to visit her at her home with her car full of her painting materials, showing that, at the age of 66, she was still working.

During her last years, Elva Blacker was unable, because of her deteriorating eyesight, to continue to paint.

Her long-time friend Richard James accompanied her to dog shows at Olympia, where she displayed her work.

She continued to support local art, and annually sent work in for exhibitions in Sutton.

Elva Blacker died at Sutton Hospital on April 10, 1984.

August 29, 2002 16:30