My mother, Florence Lindsey, who has died aged 104, was a secretary and small business manager who became an active Labour party member in Lambeth, south London.
She was born in Lambeth, eldest of five daughters of Florence (nee Meredith) and Arthur Cole. Her mother had been a suffragette and a founder member of the Vauxhall Labour party. Her father, a painter and decorator, was a campaigner for workers’ rights who sometimes found himself unemployed because of his views.
She left St Mary the Less church school at 14, trained to be a shorthand typist and found employment at GEC in Kingsway, Holborn, just over the river Thames. When asked if she would like to attend evening classes two or three times a week to further her secretarial skills, her response was “four, if that’s possible”, and she passed her exams with distinction at 16.
By 1939 Florence was the secretary to the head buyer at Harrods, who observed that none of his previous secretaries had checked the arithmetic when typing an order. Florence could not possibly have just typed figures without checking them as well.
She married Syd Lindsey, a shoe repairer, that year, too, and my brother, Malcolm, and I were born during the second world war. By the 1950s my parents had saved up enough to acquire a leather goods and shoe-repairing business at Kennington Cross, and my mother became bookkeeper, head buyer and manager of my father and one employee.
Syd became a Labour councillor in Lambeth and Florence served as a school governor at Henry Fawcett primary school at Kennington Oval. She was determined to see that the school was improved, and put as much effort into this as she did into working with Malcolm and me to ensure that we passed the 11-plus.
By the end of the 60s, Florence and Syd had drifted away from the Labour party as their local branch became influenced by the hard left, and had moved from their council flat in Black Prince Road in Lambeth to their idyll – a house in the leafy suburb of Raynes Park, south-west London. When her children left home she provided room and boarding for students. A few years ago, she pointed out a picture to me of one of those students, Paul Myners, now Lord Myners, in the newspaper – he was a “very nice boy”, she told me.
My mother built a garden wall when she was 80 and remained active into her late 90s, busily helping the “old people” among her neighbours and caring for her sister, Vera, when her health declined.
My father died in 1998. Florence is survived by Malcolm and me, her youngest sister, Rene, four grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
