In 1950, during a banned May Day workers’ march, a heavily pregnant young woman climbed out of a police van, declaring she was about to give birth and should go to the hospital, not the police station. My mother, Shirley Hearn, who has died aged 89, was no stranger to protest.
All through her life, whether politically aligned or not, she had something to say about the state of the world. A socialist and feminist, with a green heart and a keen sense of justice, she interested herself in education, believing this to be key to creating a better world.
She was the only child of a Cornish professional singer, John Anstey, and Jessie (nee Ketley), a legal secretary. John died of septicaemia in 1932. Jessie then married Jack Farrell and had a second daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1934.
A clever and musical child, Shirley was educated at Mary Datchelor school in Camberwell, south London, and during the second world war, in Llanelli, south Wales, where the school was evacuated. She began training as a nurse at St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, in 1945.
Her nursing experience fuelled her ambition to become a doctor. She attended evening classes to gain qualifications for medical school. However, she was diverted from this course when she met my father, Leonard, at one of the evening classes, married him and began a family.
As soon as we four children were at school, she began training as a teacher. Working full-time as a biology teacher, she began a science degree with the Open University in the 1970s, completing it in the early 1980s. She taught for many years from around 1972 until her retirement in the late 1980s at Wilson’s school in Sutton, south London, where pupils recall her being inspiring and entertaining.
Shirley railed against gender role restrictions as she saw them in her own career and was determined that I, as a then partially sighted girl, should have the same opportunities as my sighted brothers. When I became blind, she urged me not to be restricted by others’ negative attitudes, encouraging me to find rational and creative ways to remove societal barriers, a discipline she was to apply to her own life in her frailer years.
In retirement, she bent her scientific mind to becoming semi self-sufficient ecologically. She didn’t have a lawn: she had solar panels. She embodied life-long learning, taking up fused-glasswork in her 80s. Applying her chemist’s mind to the task of creating different colours in glass, she produced elegant abstract pieces.
When I became a Labour politician in May 2014, elected a councillor in Haringey, north London, she would ring me up regularly with important policy ideas for me to pass to the leader. A true Corbynista, she believed that Jeremy Corbyn would bring about a better world. Typically, our last conversation, 10 days before she died, was on preventing climate change through socialist house-building policies.
She is survived by her sons, Leslie (who was almost born in custody), Nigel, my twin, Lindsay, and me.
