Throughout her life, first in apartheid-era South Africa and then in Canada, my stepmother Audrey “Bobbie” Cobden, who has died aged 92, fought against racism. She was also a great defender of the weak, the poor and the elderly.
Bobbie was born and grew up in Johannesburg. Her father, Sydney Dodson, who managed the piano department of a furniture business in the city, and her mother, Olive (nee Hiles), divorced when Bobbie was in her teens.
She took a degree in psychology at the University of Natal (now the University of Kwazulu-Natal) and then opened a child psychology practice in Durban. At the outbreak of the second world war, she drove a truck all over South Africa in a recruiting drive convoy. After the conflict had ended, as part of her training in child psychology, she underwent psychoanalysis at Anna Freud’s clinic in London. She went on to practise from time to time – but it was her anti-apartheid politics that drove her.
She worked for the multiracial Liberal party of South Africa in the late 1950s, alongside people such as Alan Paton, Peter Brown and Jack Unterhalter, before the government forced it to disband.
In 1957, Bobbie played an important part in the bus boycott, during which 70,000 black workers living in townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg rejected an increase in their fares and walked 10 miles to and from the city every day for many months. They were angry at the government for refusing to support a bus service for black people when it was willing to support bus services for white people. Bobbie organised efforts to help them get to work and keep their morale high.
She worked long and hard, too, for the Treason Trials Defence Fund, supporting the 156 defendants (including Nelson Mandela) and their families. She also launched and ran the Domestic Workers and Employers’ Project (DWEP), whose aim was to secure better wages and working conditions for exploited black domestic workers.
In 1959 Bobbie helped to organise the production of the jazz musical King Kong, which brought African music to the attention of white people, in South Africa and beyond.
She was not keen to leave South Africa, but did so because her husband, Harry Cobden, whom she married in 1955, wanted to be near his sons – her stepsons – and their families in Canada.
But there was no stopping her after they settled in Kingston, Ontario, where she worked for disadvantaged children, for the elderly and the dying. Harry died in 1997; she then moved to Peterborough, in the same province, and took up the cause of the indigenous people.
She is survived by her half-brother, Christopher, and half-sister, Jane, from her mother’s second marriage to Howard Henwood, and by her stepsons, David and me.
