Zoë Maynard

In 1926 her parents, surgeon Roland Cumberbatch and musician Meta Davis Cumberbatch, moved from Trinidad to the Bahamas when her father accepted a post from the Colonial Medical Service.[1] She was born Zoë Ruth Davis Cumberbatch the same year.[2]

During World War II Maynard, still a teenager, enlisted as a private in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and was stationed in Jamaica.[3] She had numerous duties, including communications.[3] At the time of her death in 2018 she was reported to have been the last living female veteran from the Bahamas.[3]

On 17 January 1947, a little more than a year after the end of the war, she married Clement T. Maynard, the son of a builder and a suffragist.[2] Trained as a medical technologist, he would go on to become a politician and eventually deputy prime minister.[4] Maynard and her husband had five children: Julian (died 1995),[5] Peter, Allyson, David and Clement III. (Her husband also had one daughter from a previous relationship.)[6] Their daughter Allyson would go on to become the country's attorney general.

For some time, Maynard worked for the British Overseas Airways Corporation.[7] Arthur Foulkes recalled that she and her husband used the travel opportunities afforded by her career to purchase books for their comrades in the progressive movement.[8] (Books by radical West Indian authors such as C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon and George Padmore were not easily accessible in the colony.)[8] She also served as secretary general of the Airport, Airline and Allied Workers Union.[3]

A supporter of the progressive movement and women's rights, she worked closely with her mother-in-law, Georgianna Kathleen Symonette, during the suffrage movement.[3] In January 1968, a year after her husband was first elected to the senate, Maynard became the first woman to register for jury duty in the Bahamas.[3][9] She also served as secretary for the Women's Branch of the Progressive Liberal Party.[3]

In 1989, Clement Maynard was appointed a Knight Bachelor and Mrs. Maynard became Lady Zoë Maynard.[10]

After her husband's death in 2009, Maynard began studying pottery and painting.[11] Her works were exhibited in group shows such as "The F Factor: Female Artists of The Bahamas".[12]

Maynard died on 10 December 2018 at the age of 92.[3][2] In a tribute, opposition leader Philip Davis called her "a freedom fighter, particularly for women’s rights and in the arts."[13]