My mother, Gwenyth Shaw, who has died aged 95, gave up a lectureship in economics at Liverpool University in 1946 – the year she married – to follow her new husband, Roy Shaw, to his first job as a Workers’ Educational Association tutor in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Although she taught adult classes in railway economics at Hull University during the winter of 1946-47, thereafter she devoted herself largely to raising their five sons and twin daughters. She found time, however, to gain a first in humanities from the Open University (her second degree), to lecture in further education in Stoke-on-Trent and to teach courses on the poetry of Philip Larkin jointly with Roy after he retired in 1983.
In 2002 they moved to Hove, East Sussex, where Gwen met Sybil Oldfield, a reader at Sussex University, with whom she co-edited the poetry anthology The Old Familiar Faces: Poems on the Experience of Ageing (2007). She also completed and edited Roy’s autobiography, Catching the Rope: A Memoir of the Early Years 1918-1946 (2013), and wrote Becoming Me: A Memoir of the Years 1923-1946 (2014).
Born in York, the daughter of Dorothy (nee Crumpler) and John Baron, a regimental sergeant major turned greyhound stadium manager, she attended Bolling high school for girls in Bradford before gaining a first in economics at Manchester University in 1944. There she met Roy, five years older than her and from a working-class background, who had recovered from chronic ill health to study German and philosophy.
Over four decades, Gwen encouraged Roy’s moves through adult education departments at Leeds and Keele universities to the secretary generalship of the Arts Council, for which he was knighted in 1981.
In Leeds, Shipley, Keele and Muswell Hill, north London, she hosted friends such as the author Richard Hoggart and his wife, Mary, the MP Jennie Lee, the novelist John Braine, the playwright Arnold Wesker and his wife, Dusty, and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall.
After Roy died in 2012, Sybil was Gwen’s companion for the rest of her life.
Gwen is survived by her children, Adrian, Philip, David, Daniel, Freda, Catherine and me, 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
