My mother, Mary Percy, who has died aged 102, worked hard to sustain her considerable family and was a talented amateur actor.
Born Mary Taylor in Birkenhead, she was the seventh of eight children of Charles Taylor, a manager in a card manufacturers in Liverpool, and Ada (nee Campbell), a housewife. Mary experienced hardship early in life when her brother Charlie returned seriously injured from France in 1918, and her father died when she was only eight.
Forced to leave Tranmere higher grade school at 14, she found work in 1928 at Lever Brothers’ soap factory in Port Sunlight as a post girl on 10 shillings a week. She rose to become a supervisor in the Hollerith department, which took its name from the inventor of the punch-card system used to process sales data.
After joining the Port Sunlight Players, she starred in the operettas The Desert Song and Rose Marie and the musical comedy No, No, Nanette. One reviewer thought her “an exceptional actress with an engaging style and infectious smile, [she] flashes a pretty leg and sings quite well”. Any thoughts of the professional stage, however, were constrained by the need to support her mother financially.
Mary met her future husband, Sydney Percy, when they both appeared in a play, The Middle Watch, in 1935. He was a Lever chemical engineer, also one of eight, and orphaned at 11. They were keen concert-goers, and saw many of the greats perform, including Rachmaninov, Kreisler, Menuhin, Robeson, Paderewski and Gigli. They married in 1938, waiting until Sydney had completed a six-month whaling expedition to the Antarctic as the factory-ship chemist.
With Sydney posted to a temporary Lever factory just outside Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, in 1940, Mary survived the air raids on Merseyside in an Anderson shelter in her mother’s back garden, with her feet in rainwater trying to comfort her infant child while pregnant with her second.
In 1954, Mary gave birth to her sixth child; and when Sydney died in 1973, Mary dedicated herself to her family with formidable energy and joie de vivre. She was the vibrant centre of any family gathering. She once told a bemused Tony Blair that her husband had been a Freudian; she meant Fabian. She kept fit by swimming and cycling well into her 90s, living alone until 99. Just weeks before she died, she was still doing the Guardian quick crossword daily.
She is survived by me and my five siblings, Michael, Alan, David, Elizabeth and Margaret, 17 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren.
