Robert Darley-Doran’s life has taken him from a house above Seneca Lake in Upstate New York to the streets of Istanbul, across Turkey and deep into the Middle East, shaped along the way by a one-way steamship ticket, a silver coin and a glass of ice-cold lager that led to sixty-six years of marriage. He is now a resident (fondly referred to as a family member), at Frome Nursing Home.
Here, a lifelong passion and unusual line of work still continues.
For decades, Robert built his life around the study of Islamic coins, travelling across Turkey and the Middle East with his wife, Liz. Together, they wrote and catalogued extensively, their most recent book focusing on Byzantine and early Islamic copper coins, completed just before Robert moved to Frome in Somerset. Even though sadly now he lives with a vascular dementia, his eye for a coin remains. He can still identify one at a glance and comment on it with the same knowledge and precision he always had.
At the start of 2026, he and Liz completed three more cataloguing jobs together and hope there is still more work ahead!
Where It All Began
Robert grew up in Geneva, Upstate New York, in a house overlooking Seneca Lake. A railway line ran beneath the garden, and Robert traces his lifelong love of trains back to the sound of them passing at night, which, depending on how often they passed, may or may not have helped him sleep!
After university he lived in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, for two years before returning to New York. Then, in 1965, the pull of Turkey became too strong to ignore. He bought a one-way ticket on a steamship to Liverpool and didn’t look back. Much of the next fifteen years was spent abroad, mostly in Turkey.
A Time of New Beginnings
On the evening Robert arrived back in Istanbul in 1965, he got talking with a stranger in a restaurant who pointed out how happy he sounded to have returned to Turkey and kept his glass topped up with Raki, the local spirit, aniseed-tasting, not unlike Greek ouzo. The next evening, still very much recovering from the raki, he and his travelling companion Min Vernon went to visit friends. Among these friends was Elisabeth Franks, Liz, as she was known. Liz sorted out Robert’s raki hangover with a glass of ice-cold lager! and somewhere in the middle of all that, they realised they were made for each other! It is, by any measure, an unusual way to begin a sixty-six year marriage, but it worked!
Soon afterwards, Robert and Liz began building a life together with their children, Kathy and George. The family moved to Ankara, where they spent six years living and travelling whenever they had the chance. One of those trips took them by Wagons Lits train to Erzurum, a city in the east of Turkey, where Robert bought a silver coin the size of a British crown, covered in Arabic inscriptions.
After the 870 km return trip from Ankara to Erzurum, he showed it to an elderly friend. “I grew up with these,” the friend said. The coin turned out to have been minted in Kostantiniyya, Constantinople (not Istanbul), bearing the insignia of the ruling Ottoman sultan on one side and the date of striking on the other. At that moment Robert was hooked.
Putting Down Roots in England
Robert and Liz eventually settled in England in 1980. They made their home in Avington, a small village near Winchester, within easy reach of London. In the mid-1990s, Robert became a British citizen at a small ceremony in Winchester, attended by the whole family. He and Liz then found themselves moving to Frome in 2023 to be closer to Kathy and her husband Jonny.
A Lifetime’s Work
Robert’s first book recorded a collection of gold coins belonging to a Lebanese banker and was published in Switzerland in both English and Arabic. With Robert’s knowledge of coins and Liz’s experience as a writer and editor, they made a good team, and over the years their work took them well beyond England.
They prepared Islamic coin auction catalogues for Spink and Sotheby’s in London, before their work took them to the middle east. In Oman, they wrote a book on the country’s coinage and helped set up a coin and banknote museum for the Central Bank. Bahrain followed with another book and museum, then there was a cataloguing job in Kuwait where they were told they were working too slowly, despite, in their words, “working like demons”.
Not every trip went quite to plan. In Casablanca, they arrived to value a collection belonging to a man who had recently died, only to discover he had already sold everything of value and spent the money. His family weren’t particularly pleased, although the trip wasn’t a complete loss. His widow cooked them bistilla, a Moroccan dish that Robert and Liz remembered as one of the most delicious things they had ever eaten.
Their latest book, on Byzantine and early Islamic copper coins, was finished just before Robert moved to Frome Nursing Home in February 2025. The travelling may have changed, but the work hasn’t stopped!
A Faith That Has Stayed with Him
Running alongside all of it, quietly and consistently, was Robert’s Christian faith. He served as churchwarden at Avington and went to Winchester Cathedral with Liz regularly. At Frome, the Rev. Seamus Hargrave, Vicar of St. John’s Church, comes in once a month to lead a short service for any family member who wants to attend.
Life Goes on at Frome
More than half a century on from that first coin in Turkey, the knowledge is still there. After a series of falls at home, Robert moved into Oakside Woodlands, one of the smaller households within Frome Nursing Home, only half a mile away from his home! Here he has a room with French windows, plenty of daylight, birds, and on the wall, a train calendar, a quiet nod to the railway line at the end of his childhood garden that started it all.
The team have noticed that Robert will sometimes speak Turkish during conversation, a thread that leads back to the years he and Liz spent living there. Kathy and Jonny visit regularly, while Liz continues to work alongside him on coin cataloguing. The work continues, the faith continues, and so does the life that brought him here.
To learn more about Frome Nursing Home, please visit https://fromecarevillage.com/frome-life-captured/