Our mother, Maureen Ward, who has died aged 97, was a senior civil servant who worked with Aneurin Bevan on postwar housing, as well as for the Colonial Office. When she married, and was forced to leave the civil service due to the “marriage bar”, she went back to teaching, for which she had initially qualified.
She was born Maire Molloy in Abbeyleix in County Laois, Ireland. Her parents were ardent nationalists. Her father, Michael, worked at Morrissey’s bar in the town and sang at local concerts; her mother, Mary Ellen (nee Kennedy), was a seamstress and a member of the women’s republican organisation Cumann na mBan. My mother had early childhood memories of the Irish civil war.
There was little work for her parents, and by 1928 the family had moved to London, where teachers anglicised Maire’s name to Maureen. She was the eldest of six children, and from the age of 13, when her mother died in childbirth, she helped to bring up the others; she described these as “years of deepest poverty”.
The route out of that poverty was education. Maureen went to Sacred Heart school, Hammersmith; the nuns saw her potential and encouraged her to stay on at school and go to university. She studied geography at King’s College London; which in 1939 was evacuated to Bristol. After graduating with a first, she returned to London in June 1940. That autumn she witnessed the London blitz.
Maureen trained as a teacher, but in 1946 successfully applied to the civil service, working first for Bevan. One of her jobs was to draft the report of a committee concerned with the “harsh and bare” appearance of housing estates. Later she worked in the Colonial Office, where she worked on the desk responsible for the Gold Coast.
She had met my father, Donald Ward, at the civil service interviews; they married in 1948, and had five sons. They lived first in New Malden, and later in Leatherhead, Surrey. Donald worked at the Board of Trade, later becoming secretary general of the Berne Union, the international export credit organisation. When Greg, the youngest of her five sons, was old enough, she went to teach at St Andrew’s convent school, Leatherhead.
Donald and Maureen travelled widely, both for Donald’s work and in retirement, until his death in 2001.
Maureen remained clear in her faith and her commitment to Ireland, whose affairs she followed closely, and to many charitable causes. Spirited and independent, she stayed resolutely in her own home until her last weeks. She was a great teller of stories, as her father and grandmother had been, and she wrote several accounts of her life, for her grandchildren.
She is survived by her sons, Anthony, Julian, Greg and us, her nine grandchildren, her brother Michael and sister Frances.
