Lynn Rose, who has died at the age of 94, worked throughout her adult life, whether as a full-time mother, practice manager for the radical Highgate group practice of socialist doctors, or HIV/Aids counsellor.
She was born in London’s East End – within the sound of Bow bells, as she liked to boast – to Orthodox Jewish-Polish parents, Sam Prevezer, a retailer in Whitechapel, and his wife, Fay (nee Goldberg). She attended Central Foundation school for girls in Bow. Many of her parents’ close relatives had been murdered in Chelmno concentration camp in Poland during the second world war. She was brought up in a tightly knit family who believed their supreme obligation to their two daughters was to protect them from harm.
An unfortunate result was that she was not allowed to take up her place as a medical student and follow the career path she had wanted – a path that for a woman in the 1940s was still relatively rare. As we often discussed, she would otherwise have been on the frontline with Médecins Sans Frontières, so committed was she throughout her life to serving the cause of social and political justice.
In her 50s, however, having raised three children and gone through two divorces, she seized her chance at education, becoming a mature student of sociology at the University of Salford, where she went on to complete an MA with a dissertation, of which she was very proud, on homophobia in the medical profession during the Aids crisis.
She was a unilateralist disarmer, radical feminist, socialist and passionate anti-racist all her life. Her political engagement never waned. In the last years of her life she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – but her commitment to a better world only seemed to intensify. She also had a gift for turning the frustrations of her own life into an inspiration to her daughters, Alison, the philosopher Gillian Rose, who died in 1995, and me, to fulfil ourselves professionally in ways she herself had been unable to do.
In this her generosity was without limit, as everyone who met her and experienced her kindness and genuine interest would attest. In the face of crushing restrictions on her life, she never stopped questioning the way of the world and standing up for what she believed in.
She is survived by Alison, from her second marriage, to Irving Rose; by me, from her first marriage, to Lesley Stone; and by her grandchildren, Nile, Mia and Paige.
