Trailblazing photographer and travel enthusiast Billie Buchanan

A fiercely independent woman, it is assumed by Colin and his wife Sarah whom Olympics.com spoke to at their countryside house three months before Paris 2024 begins, that his mum’s passion for photography accelerated after her new husband, Laurie, left the country days after their wedding to work overseas as an oil industry engineer.

They didn’t see each other for a year.

Prior to the marriage Billie had worked as a photographer, firstly for weddings and then industrial, including photographing the testing of the prototype of the first commercial gas turbine engine, at an aircraft factory in North London.

Post-marriage, she didn’t work, as per the era, and also because the family regularly travelled overseas, “but she kept her camera with her all the time”, says Sarah.

This shared passion for travel meant the couple and their three children – Colin, his twin sister, and younger sister – lived in the Netherlands, Spain, then under General Franco’s rule, and Nigeria.

Cinefilm footage from the latter, filmed by Billie and found by Colin, reveals both domestic scenes and tribal customs in an era when overseas travel was unusual.

Billie’s adventurous, independent spirit likely emulated her mother’s, who was left to bring up her two children alone after her husband, Chris Duffield, a Thames riverboat fireman and amateur rower, died of peritonitis when Billie was six years old.

Fyffe – originally called Florence, which she hated, so changed her name after seeing a truck go past one day with Fyffes bananas written on the side – worked full-time, starting with washing floors in a canteen and eventually as a restaurant co-owner. At a time when women weren’t expected to work, Fyffe was ambitious for herself, and determined that her two girls would be educated properly, so homework was a priority.

On leaving school, Billie studied photography at college, but no one in the family knows from whom this passion stemmed. The fact that Billie was a photographer at the London 1948 Opening Ceremony was still a surprise for her children when they were looking through their mother’s effects after she died in July 2021.