My mother, Marian Lyons, who has died aged 94, was first prompted to get involved in local politics in the 1960s by the hardships suffered by the people living near her village of Llanddulas, in north Wales.
Summer water shortages when tourists flocked to the area necessitated daily rationing and delivery of water by bowser. Rubbish collections were infrequent and primitive.
Marian was able to improve the situation as a councillor for Llanddulas on the Abergele urban district council from 1963 and became chair of the council in 1965. From 1964 she also served as Denbighshire county councillor for the Abergele district and, 10 years later, when Denbighshire and Flintshire merged to become Clwyd, she was elected as the new county council’s first leader. She was the first woman in the UK to serve as a council leader.
Daughter of Wilfrid Spence, an engineer, and his wife, Elizabeth (nee Scott), Marian was born and brought up at Elland, a small wool town in West Yorkshire. She had plans to study textiles at Leeds University but when the second world war began qualified ed instead as a state registered nurse. She specialised in ophthalmic nursing in Leeds, where she met Edward Lyons, who was training to be an ophthalmic surgeon. They married in London in 1945, when both were working at Moorfields Eye hospital.
They moved to Llanddulas when Edward took the post of consultant opthalmologist at HM Stanley hospital in St Asaph in 1954. Marian had enjoyed her years as a nurse, although she wrote: “What do I remember? Mary with no shoes. Bill, shattered by his wife’s desertion. The first patient in an iron lung. Parents’ agony. Bugs. I realised the many social problems which existed alongside medical conditions.”
Later in life, she maintained her association with nursing by becoming president of the Flintshire branch of the Royal College of Nursing and commandant of the Abergele detachment of the British Red Cross.
The extent of her contribution to Wales and the local community was exhaustive. She was the only woman on the Welsh Council, the body that advised on cultural and economic planning for Wales, in the late 70s, and represented Clwyd county council on the court of the University of Wales. She served the North Wales Society for the Blind and the Abergele League of Hospital Friends, sat on the joint committee of the translation of the Bible into Welsh and was a governor of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
She was also a committee member of Abergele Ratepayers Association and, together with Edward, served the Llanddulas Youth Club for a great many years.
In 1977 Marian was a recipient of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee medal. Her career in local government and in the service of others was all the more remarkable because she stood virtually alone as a woman in her endeavours.
Edward died in 2012. Marian is survived by their five children, Martyn, Gordon, Robin, Sally and me.
