My mother, Miriam McLeod, who has died aged 82, was a teacher and lifelong peace campaigner.
The youngest of eight children, she was born in Hackney, London, after her Jewish parents, Nathan Lesser and Polly Whiteson, had fled from pogroms in Poland during 1914. The early life experiences of her parents shaped her commitment to non-violent resistance and, after her father died of cancer when she was 10, her mother’s socialist politics were also a great influence. The family ran a grocery shop near Victoria Park, then a working-class suburb of the Jewish East End, and Miriam would recall how her mum would pin down unsuspecting delivery men with a cup of tea, then lecture them about the evils of capitalism.
Although the second world war disrupted Miriam’s education, she was a bright student at John Howard school (now Clapton Girls), and excelled at languages. She won a scholarship to study German in Vienna in 1949, but chose instead to train to become an English teacher. Her first job was at Silverthorne girls’ school in Camberwell, where the prevalent disciplinarianism of 1950s schooling went against everything she believed education should be about. Partly as a consequence of this disenchantment, she joined the Communist party (which she left in 1956) and then the National Council for Civil Liberties, where she met her future husband Alex, an English teacher and later lecturer.
She worked at Silverthorne until 1964, when she took time out to raise their two children. She returned to the classroom in the mid-1970s, at John Donne primary in Peckham – specialising in what was then called “remedial reading” – until she left to read English at Goldsmith’s College in 1979. After graduating in 1982 she went back into teaching at nursery level, and also tutored adults.
The rise of Margaret Thatcher in the 80s reignited Miriam’s involvement in the peace movement, which she had first embraced during the Aldermaston protests in the 50s and 60s. With her daughter, Rachel, in 1983 she joined the Greenham Common peace camp, where they were both arrested. Her statement from her trial at Newbury crown court, where she was bound over to keep the peace, was the clearest expression of her political philosophy. It also formed the climax of a play about her life, which was written and performed by the Laban Centre Youth Theatre in association with David Savill of Lewisham Age Exchange in 2011.
Alex and Miriam had moved to Forest Hill, south London, in 1963 and Miriam lived for the rest of her life in the district even after they divorced in 1987. After she retired in 1990, singing, with her beloved Lewisham Choral Society chums and with the Sidmouth Festival Choir, was what she enjoyed best – apart from talking to her extended family of friends. She also loved knitting, which she had enjoyed from the age of three.
She is survived by Rachel and me.
