My friend Patricia Norman, who has died aged 96, was a passionate educator who became life president of Brighton Housing Trust.
Born in Hove, Sussex, to Florence (nee Stutchbury) and Alan Cummings, both teachers, Pat was home-schooled from the age of seven. As a small child she often wandered the South Downs alone, later saying: “I knew I wasn’t lost, whatever my mother thought.” She lived her life like that – always quietly sure where she was going and why she had undertaken the journey.
Pat began work as a shop assistant at a Brighton grocer’s just before the second world war. During the war, after completing an advanced medical training course with the Red Cross, she became a nursing assistant in a GP practice in Park Crescent, where she was working when the street was bombed by a German plane.
After bomb attacks on the town, she would rush with the doctor to administer emergency first aid to those injured. She also dispensed simple medicines and ointments, helped with minor surgery and did routine injections.
Later, Pat trained to be a youth and community worker with the YWCA and was posted to work in London, Scotland and Wolverhampton, where she witnessed severe postwar poverty and deprivation. She eventually returned to her hometown and, on joining the Quakers in 1956, became increasingly committed to the use of education to promote peace and understanding.
She started to work in adult education at the Friends Centre, serving the Friends’ Meeting House for more than 40 years, first as secretary and then as principal. As well as teaching adults, she administered, planned and managed the educational programmes, and carried out fundraising. For more than half a century, and well into her 80s, she also ran a popular drop-in activity for older people, “Tuesday at Friends”, at the meeting house.
Pat became involved in the work of the Brighton Housing Trust in 1969, serving on its board for almost four decades, in later years as its chair. In 1995 she became the trust’s first-ever life president. Andy Winter, the trust’s CEO described Pat as “a saintly woman”.
Pat met her husband, Frank Norman, an electrical engineer, at a Quaker meeting in 1963, and they were married later that year.
Frank died in 1986. She is survived by their daughter, Lucy, two stepdaughters, Del and Jan, from Frank’s previous marriage, and four grandchildren.
