In her final days, my mother-in-law, Margaret Griffiths, who has died aged 78, was asked by a nurse whether she had worked. “Very hard,” she responded, “but I was not paid.”
Margaret was instrumental in setting up the Swindon Interfaith group in 1990, inspired in part by her experiences in Nigeria at the time of the outbreak of the Biafran war, seeing how easily a harmonious society can break up and how religious labels can be used to fuel suspicion.
She was born in Derby, daughter of Sidney Hall, a Baptist minister, and his wife, Winnie (nee James). The family moved to Swindon in 1945, and there, as a teenager, at the Baptist Tabernacle, Margaret met Vernon Griffiths, whom she married in 1961. After A-levels at the Commonweal grammar school in Swindon she passed the civil service exam and worked as a tax officer before she and Vernon left for the newly independent Nigeria, where Vernon taught physics in Ikare and Margaret helped with the accounts in a neighbouring school. She always looked back with pleasure on the six years in Nigeria, during which time their first two sons were born.
On returning to the UK, Margaret was diagnosed with the lung fungus infection aspergillosis, which dogged her for the rest of her life. She remained positive and used her recovery periods productively, writing campaigning letters on many subjects. In her times of energy she tended a thriving vegetable garden and undertook various voluntary activities, including teaching English to asylum seekers, supporting people with learning difficulties, and in her later years helping friends in failing health.
Her Baptist upbringing led to a lifelong interest in religion. Studying “man’s religious quest” as part of an Open University degree, she made contact with several religious communities, and out of this Swindon’s Interfaith Group was formed.
The British countryside was a source of huge pleasure for Margaret, and her enthusiasm for its beauty never waned. She developed a formidable knowledge of wildflowers, birds and butterflies, passing on these interests to her children. Awareness of older people’s difficulties in walking in the countryside led her to set up the Fair Weather Short Walk Group within the University of the Third Age. In the last few months of her life, when walking became difficult due to a fractured femur, she took pleasure in the peace of sitting in a place with a view.
Margaret is survived by Vernon, by her brother David, by three sons, Peter, Michael and Stephen, and by seven grandchildren, Liberty, Henry, Jessamine, George, Willow, Holly and Thomas.
