My mother, Jean Finlayson, who has died aged 91, was a journalist, campaigner and intrepid traveller. Although she came from a deeply religious and conservative part of the US, she developed radical views and was committed to social justice and anti-racism throughout her life.
Jean was born in a tiny town called Creal Springs in rural southern Illinois, where the midwest meets the deep south, the daughter of Dolph Holmes, a teacher, and his wife, Ione (nee Hepler). She won a scholarship to the prestigious University of Missouri School of Journalism, and after graduating in 1956 (and marrying in the same year), worked as assistant editor of a US-wide farming magazine. At the time she was living with her husband, William Burger, on a Texas farm so remote that she had to gain a pilot’s licence to fly a plane to get around.
Jean relocated to the UK in 1958 when William became a pilot in the US Air Force and was posted here. In 1960 she travelled to the Soviet Union, primarily by boat, and against her husband’s wishes. Although she lived a life of privilege as part of the American military officer class, Jean became involved in progressive political circles in Britain, taking part in CND marches to Aldermaston.
After separating from William, in 1963 she married Vic Finlayson, a Scottish biochemist and Communist party activist. Jean worked as a freelance campaigning journalist for the rest of the decade, writing for newspapers including the Guardian, the Times and the Sunday Times. She played an important role in raising awareness of issues such as dyslexia at a time when understanding of the condition was almost nonexistent, of “tug of love” cases where parents, mainly fathers, abducted their own children, and of domestic violence.
From 1970 to 1977 she was a columnist for the Bath Evening Chronicle, where her exclusive story on Princess Margaret’s antics in a nightclub led to death threats from angry royalists. Between 1977 and her retirement in 1989 she was publications editor for the Further Education Staff College, in Blagdon, Somerset, a government agency designed to foster links between further education and industry.
Jean travelled the world at every opportunity into her 80s, particularly the former Soviet bloc countries, the Middle East and Central Asia. She was a voracious reader with an abiding love of Russian literature, completing War and Peace for the third time when she realised that dementia was cruelly starting to rob her of the ability to speak and read.
Vic died in 2015. Jean is survived by me and my brother, Alan, and four grandchildren, Eleanor, Rhydian, Luke and Jake.
