My mother, Rosemary MacDonald, who has died aged 78, left school at 14 but went on to become a passionate advocate of education in all its forms. Just before her 50th birthday, she graduated from Edinburgh University, and became a university administrator.
Born and brought up in Romford, Essex, by her staunchly Conservative and working-class parents, Lilian (nee Andrews) and Alexander Adams, a policeman, Rosemary grew up accepting an unequal society and her position in it.
An indifferent scholar, she greeted with joy the day she left Bush Elms county secondary school. However, a living had to be earned and Rosemary was sent by her father to Mulley’s Commercial School in Romford to learn shorthand and typing. She progressed to the Civil Service Typing School, with day release for her general education to West Ham Polytechnic.
On her first day at West Ham, Rosemary came home in tears, having been bawled at for not being able to spell. Despite this inauspicious start, her spelling improved and she discovered that learning could be fun. That it could also be empowering was to come much later.
Her civil service secretarial career was unceremoniously dumped for a dashing young Scotsman, Ian Main MacDonald, a paratrooper serving with the fiance of her typing pool companion, Doreen. Rosemary and Ian met in February 1957 at a bar near King’s Cross station, and married in December that year.
The highlights of their first 20 years together included riding a motorcycle and sidecar in the Scottish Highlands, the birth of two children, life-threatening illnesses, hiding from bailiffs and a battle for financial survival.
Moving to Midlothian, Scotland, in 1979, Conservative-voting Rosemary found herself in the heart of a mining community shortly to be at war with Margaret Thatcher. Rosemary was in turmoil. “Could it,” she wrote, “be true that apparently not everyone agrees that Labour (with a Big L) is the enemy of the state? ... And who is this guy Marx?”
The transformation was incremental and irreversible; by her own admission, she never voted Conservative again. The Guardian started to appear on the kitchen table and was to remain her paper of choice.
Having left school with no qualifications, Rosemary enrolled to read social sciences at Edinburgh University. On graduating, she served with pride and passion in her subsequent job at the university, progressing from a junior secretary in the department of education to executive assistant to the director of human resources.
Empowered and emboldened by learning, Rosemary left her husband of 30 years with no illusions about the enduring financial hardship this would entail. She was keen to empower others too, volunteering as a literacy tutor in Edinburgh, leading chair-based exercises in care homes in Leith and undertaking work on mental health and wellbeing for older people. She was also a member of the Older Person’s Equality Forum, a body consulted by Edinburgh city council on policies that affect older residents.
Rosemary is survived by me, by her son, Fergus, and granddaughters, Ella and Daisy.
