Connie Mark was a community activist who was actively involved in a host of organisations and played a key role in reviving the profile of the Crimean War nurse and fellow Jamaican expatriate Mary Seacole.

Mary Seacole came to London in 1854 to volunteer her help as a nurse. After being rejected by the British Army, Seacole set up, at her own expense, a rest, refreshment and nursing post for troops near Sebastopol, to the praise of royalty and generals. After the war she arrived in London penniless but an appeal, led by The Times, put her back on her feet, and she lived out the the rest of her life quietly in London.

However, by the 1970s Seacole’s memory had largely faded, exemplified by the state of her neglected grave in Kensal Green. Connie Mark, who had come to Britain in the early 1950s with her cricketer husband, was living in West London and enlisted the help of the local MP, Clive (now Lord) Soley, to help to restore Seacole’s grave. This led to the setting up of the Mary Seacole Memorial Association, of which Mark was president, and then a statue appeal, under Lord Soley’s chairmanship, which is currently collecting money to set up a memorial at St Thomas’ Hospital in central London.

Constance Winifred MacDonald was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1923. One of her grandmothers was half Lebanese while one grandfather was Scottish and the other Indian.

She was educated at Wolmer’s Girls’ School and then underwent secretarial training at a commercial college. In 1943, while still at college, her teacher picked her out for an interview with the Auxiliary Training Service. She spent the rest of the war and a few years beyond working at the British Military Hospital in Kingston as a medical secretary, rising to the rank of corporal. She was refused the extra pay due to her for her promotion, later half-jokingly saying that “the Queen owes me eight years of tuppence a day”. Her complaints about her unfair treatment had her labelled as a trouble-maker, exacerbated by her refusal to clean the homes of white women officers, some of whom had served in Africa and treated their black colleagues as servants.

In 1952 she married Stanley Goodridge, a medium-fast bowler who played for Jamaica against a touring MCC side. He was given a contract to play for Durham and in 1954 she and their three-month-old daughter followed him.

She lived in cramped and freezing conditions in a flat in London, far from her husband and even farther from her other family. She went back to Jamaica in 1960 with her two children to recover her health and wellbeing from the discomfort and prejudice she had experienced in London.

She later returned, was divorced from Goodridge and then married Michael Mark.

Soon after arriving in Britain for a second time Connie Mark became actively involved in local organisations and became well known in the black community. She was a highly entertaining raconteuse whose star turn was performances of the works of the Jamaican poet and writer Louise Bennett-Coverley.

Mark was heavily involved in the West Indian Ex-Servicemen and Women’s Association, in Descendants, which helps people of African and Caribbean background to understand and celebrate their cultural heritage, and the Pepperpot Luncheon Club, mostly aimed at the elderly in Notting Hill.

She was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1993 and appointed MBE in 2001.

Mark remained a patron of several organisations until her death. Her last few years were spent at a nursing home in West London named after her heroine, Mary Seacole.

Her second husband predeceased her and she is survived by her son and daughter from her first marriage.

Connie Mark, MBE, BEM, community activist, was born on December 21, 1923. She died on June 3, 2007, aged 83.