Our mother, Sonja Le Vay, who has died aged 86, was a dedicated socialist, nurse, magistrate and parent. She never stopped working to improve the lives of others and was appointed MBE for services to the community last year.
Daughter of Albert Hansen, a builder and trade union activist, and his wife, Fernanda (nee Gudmand), a seamstress, Sonja was born in Hudevad, a small village in Rolfsted, Denmark. The early death of her father and her upbringing by her mother and grandmother during the German occupation of Denmark was a formative period in her life that defined her social and political views.
She had aspirations to read medicine, but due to her family’s poverty had to leave school at 14 and start working. She later completed her nursing training in Odense and worked as a nurse in Copenhagen, caring for children affected by the polio epidemic of 1952.
Sonja arrived in London in 1955. She took up a nursing post at the Brook hospital, where she met and married the orthopaedic surgeon David Le Vay, who had five sons from a previous marriage. She loved being a stepmother and considered them “bonus children”, as they are called in Denmark. The couple went on to have six more.
In East Sussex, where the family settled in 1965, she was active in the Labour party right up until her death, standing in local elections. She supported Amnesty and also volunteered as a Samaritan and at shelters for the homeless, and co-founded a charity that helped rebuild an orphanage in Bulgaria. She was a magistrate for 28 years.
For the last 20 years, Sonja was a Quaker, the community having become an important part of her life. With it she helped set up a youth housing project in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
As she said: “I did try to make this world – my little world, at least – a better place. Socialism, like my faith, has always been very important to me.”
Sonja is survived by her children, Lone, Jonathan, Lewis, David and us, and by her stepsons, Simon, Julian, Charles and Ben, 10 grandchildren, and numerous “bonus” grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Her husband and Martin, one of her stepchildren, predeceased her.
