My grandmother Ruth Johns, who has died aged 91, was a social historian, journalist, author and entrepreneur. Her career was defined by her work with communities, her passion for social justice and her belief that people thrive when power is decentralised.
As an isolated young mother in the early 1960s, Ruth wrote to the local newspaper asking if other parents would like to meet up at her home. She was surprised at the response she got, and was soon running a part-time registered playgroup in her home.
She began to develop the idea for what became the Family First Trust, a community housing organisation offering non-institutional accommodation to young, disadvantaged single mothers.
She applied successfully for funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation and was able to buy and convert two houses in Mapperley, Nottingham, to form accommodation for single mothers, expanding to later include a family centre and 14 new-build flats.
Ruth later recalled a Home Office official describing the first housing scheme as a “revolutionary idea”. Her book based on her experiences as the director of Family First, Life Goes On, was published in 1982.
Born in Romford, Essex, she was the daughter of Dorothy (nee Dann), a schoolteacher until her marriage, and Gilbert Thomas, a poet and writer. The family moved to Teignmouth, Devon, when Ruth was four, and she later attended Teignmouth grammar school.
She joined the Mid Devon Advertiser as a trainee reporter in 1951, then, two years later, aged 19, got a job on the Western Morning News in their Exeter office.
In 1957 she married Paul Johns, and they moved to Oxford, where she worked as an import/export officer at Elliston & Cavell department store before having her first child. The family moved around for Paul’s work as a personnel manager, and it was while living in Lichfield from 1960 that Ruth began her playgroup.
During that time she also campaigned for play space on a new council estate and was a founding member and area co-ordinator for the newly set up Pre-School Playgroups Association (now Early Years Alliance). It was after the family moved to Nottingham in 1965 that Ruth set up the Family First Trust.
In 1976, Ruth and Paul divorced, and she moved to London with her children to become the national director of Action Resource Centre (ARC), advising government and large companies on how they could support community initiatives in 13 cities.
She married Walter Block in 1979, and they moved to Warwick. She did an MA in peace studies at Bradford University (1990), and, in 2002, published St Ann’s Nottingham: Inner City Voices, a history of a working-class neighbourhood, told through the voices of its residents. St Ann’s was cleared for redevelopment in the 1960s and early 70s, and 30,000 residents compulsorily relocated, which Ruth had campaigned against at the time.
Ruth was also a poet, potter, painter, and seamstress. Her daughter, Naomi, died in 1996, and Walter died in 2016. She is survived by her two sons, Neil and Martin, three grandchildren, Adam, Thomas and me, and three great-grandchildren.
