My mother-in-law, Grace Thomson, Lady Thomson of Monifieth, has died aged 88. When, as Grace Jenkins, she married George Thomson in December 1948, they formed a personal and political partnership of equals that lasted almost 60 years until George's death.
Daughter of Nan and Kennie, Grace was a Glaswegian, brought up in Townhead. Her father, a railway labourer and NUR activist, was blacklisted after the general strike – for Grace, the "hungry 30s" were a personal reality. She left school at 15 to work as a clerk with Glasgow Corporation, and after second world war service and night school she qualified as a teacher at Jordanhill. Grace always had a gift for sociability. After 1945, the centre of her life was the Glasgow Labour movement where, on an evening of carol singing, she met George.
Their partnership took Grace first to Dundee, George's home town, where he became an MP in 1952. They brought up their young family – two daughters, Ailsa and Caroline (now my wife) – in Harlow New Town, Essex. As George's career progressed, they moved to south London (where Grace taught at the Dick Sheppard comprehensive school), Admiralty House in Whitehall (when George served in Harold Wilson's cabinet), Brussels (when he became a European commissioner), a flat opposite Harrods (when George, by now a life peer as Lord Thomson of Monifieth, was serving as chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority), then Charing in Kent and finally London again.
In all this, Grace was a vital presence – defending George from attack from the leftwing in Dundee, handling constituency casework, entertaining politicians and trade unionists from British colonies; using her French, German and Italian to wow our European partners in Brussels; talking to anyone and everyone with the same infectious spirit. After George's death in 2008, despite increasing frailty she kept up this performance, helped by Barbara, her devoted Polish carer.
In 1960s Labour politics Grace and George were more Callaghan than Jenkins: all the more remarkable, then. that in 1981 Grace became an active and unwavering member of the SDP. Having been one of the hundred signatories of the Guardian advert launching the SDP, Grace volunteered as a receptionist in the new party office.
The common thread was social democratic internationalism. Immediately after the war, Grace helped organise food parcels for German trade unionists out of meagre British rations. The Thomsons' first venture on the European continent was to an Austrian socialist summer camp. After the 1948 Czech coup, Grace became a fervent opponent of communism and its fellow travellers: at the same time she remained passionate about colonial freedom, racial equality and a united Europe. It was Labour's drift to hard left anti-Europeanism that drove her return to Glasgow for six weeks in 1982, campaigning up and down the tenements off the Dumbarton Road, for Roy Jenkins's Hillhead victory.
Grace was of a generation in which few women of her background fulfilled their potential. She made up for it, in her wonderful partnership with George, and as an ambitious mother for her daughters.
She is survived by Caroline and Ailsa and her three grandsons, Mark, Roger and Andrew.
