My friend Leah Shaw, who has died aged 100, was a humanist, peace campaigner and feminist.
She was born Lieselotte Hermann in Stuttgart, Germany, the daughter of Bernhard Hermann, a lawyer, and his wife, Johanna (nee Künstler). They separated and when Leah was nine, she and her mother moved to her grandparents’ strongly Jewish household in Mannheim, and she went to a Jewish school in Ulm. Hitler seized power in Germany when Leah was a teenager, and she never lost the fear that discrimination could lead to genocide.
She was able to leave Germany in 1938, by means of an arranged marriage, which was later annulled. She left behind her widowed grandmother, her mother (who later died in a concentration camp), and her friends and relatives, to travel to Palestine. There, after nursing training, she met and married Louis Shaw, a Jewish British soldier, and in 1945 they settled in the UK, where Louis joined his family’s furniture business in London.
He and Leah lived in Brixton and later Northolt, and had a son and two daughters. Before the war, Louis had trained as a draughtsman; in 1957 he got a job working for Lucas’s in Birmingham, and the family moved to Solihull. There Leah got involved in the Polygon discussion group, a chance to share and learn about radical ideas, and also joined the local CND branch. Later she made frequent visits to Greenham Common and took part in demonstrations.
When Louis died in 1967, to help with finances Leah began to let rooms in the family home to language assistants in the local schools, from countries including Germany, Spain, Austria and France. Over the years, she had perhaps more than 50 lodgers, many of whom became her firm friends. They recall visits to the cinema in Leah’s blue Mini, and long discussions about feminism, non-violence, political awareness and the struggle against discrimination.
Leah loved reading and one lodger estimated that her book collection ran into the thousands. She was a student on a WEA literature course in Kenilworth for more than 30 years; even after she moved to Stourbridge in her later years she still managed a weekly train journey to attend the class for some time, and she was still attending meetings of her book group in Stourbridge until the age of 98.
Another lodger wrote of Leah’s “unreserved acceptance of LGBTQ+ people”. Friends recall her amazing memory (her thoughts on life were included in a 1985 book A Wealth of Experience: Lives of Older Women by Susan Hemmings ) and her interest in humanism (I met Leah more than 50 years ago through the Birmingham Humanist Group).
She is survived by her children, Jonathan, Devorah and Judith, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
