A GLOBETROTTING nurse who worked in Iran and Ethiopia during their revolutions has died aged 100.

Victoria Road resident Irene Purry worked abroad training nurses before retiring to the UK in the 1980s with her husband to their home in Oxford.

She was a member of several community organisations and a governor of a North Oxford school.

Mrs Purry was born Gladys Trusler in Islington, North London, on April 14, 1915, and attended school in Islington.

She went to nursing school in 1936, learning at Clare Hall Hospital, South Mimms, before transferring to North Middlesex Hospital, in Edmonton, and North Cambridgeshire Hospital, in Wisbech.

During the Second World War she lived in a flat with her sister near Clapham Junction and worked at Kingston Hospital.

She applied for further training and was awarded scholarship at Battersea Polytechnic to do a degree in nursing.

In 1947, she was made a tutor at Epsom Hospital, in Surrey, and stayed until September 1950, when she went to Tehran, in Iran, to work at the Princess Ashraf School of Nursing.

At the time of the British and American-backed coup d’état of 1953 – which saw the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh – she was running a nursing examination when revolutionaries burst into the room and demanded the British left Iran.

Like many others at the time, she took refuge at the British embassy and was repatriated to the UK.

She then took a job at Mile End Hospital, East London, before becoming deputy matron in Redhill General Hospital, East Surrey.

She married Philip Ashley-Carter in 1956 and they had their son Jeremy in August 1957. The family moved to Coventry when Mr Ashley-Carter joined Standard Motors.

But in 1960 he died of a heart attack aged 48 and Mrs Ashley-Carter and her son moved together to Warwickshire, where she went back to teaching nursing.

In 1962 she took a job in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, joining the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital as a sister tutor.

It was there, in 1965, she met and married John Purry, a chartered accountant with Price Waterhouse and Peat Marwick Mitchell.

The following year the couple bought a house in Banbury Road, Oxford, which they would use for their two-month annual holiday back to Britain.

In early 1974 Mrs Purry experienced her second revolution – the beginning of the Ethiopian Civil War – when the Marxist Derg staged a coup d’état against Emperor Haile Selassie.

Mr Purry closed the Price Waterhouse office in 1979 and took a new posting in Zambia, where they stayed for five years before retiring.

The couple then moved to Oxford, into a home in Victoria Road, and continued to travel – particularly to Spain – and joined several clubs.

Mrs Purry joined the Oxford Women’s Luncheon Club and the Conservative Association and during the 1990s was also the chairman of governors at Cutteslowe First School – now Cutteslowe Primary School – having been persuaded to join by former Lord Mayor of Oxford Janet Todd.

Between 1990 and 1993, Mrs Purry was president of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society in London and befriended former Essex MP Sir Bernand Braine, who championed the cause of Ethiopia in debates at the House of Commons.

For the organisation’s 50th anniversary, a friend arranged a special return trip to Addis Ababa which Mrs Purry joined aged 82.

Mrs Purry was also thought to be one of the Open University’s oldest graduates, after she earned a degree in social sciences aged 84.

She celebrated her 100th birthday on April 14 this year, but a few days later suffered a series of strokes.

After a short stay in hospital she returned home and passed away surrounded by family on May 15.

Her funeral will be held on Friday, June 19, at 1pm at St Peter’s Church in Wolvercote.