My mother Stefanie Logie, who has died aged 101, was a passionate musical educator and charity volunteer.
Born into a cultured Jewish family in Berlin, Stefanie, known as Steffie, recalled a happy home life with her parents, Hedwig (nee Mosert) and Julius Pariser, a cloth merchant, and her elder sister, Leonie. Music came from her mother’s side: Steffie’s grandmother sang and her mother studied the piano at a conservatoire in the city, alongside Otto Klemperer. Steffie discovered a talent for the violin, although her ambition was to become a journalist.
She went to school locally, but the rise of the Nazis began to overshadow her adolescence, and, when Hitler came to power in 1933, her father sent his two daughters to safety in Sweden. A friend arranged Steffie’s passage to Britain to work as an au pair for his relatives in north London, and her parents and sister joined her. At 19, Steffie embraced England unreservedly as her new home.
She met her husband, Gordon Logie, an architect and town planner, at the boarding house where they both lodged, and they were married in 1936. Steffie and Gordon decided to stay in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, after being evacuated there with their baby son at the start of the second world war. Apart from five years living in Cambridge, where Gordon was appointed as head of the planning department, Steffie remained in Hemel for the rest of her life.
Initially she trained as a chiropodist as, she explained, this was the fastest way to learn a trade. However, she soon started working as a violin teacher. As well as playing chamber music, she founded her own adult beginners’ orchestra, the Dacorum Recreation Orchestra, which she continued to conduct into her 90s.
Steffie campaigned for Amnesty International and raised money for Oxfam. She was a volunteer for the Samaritans for more than 50 years and was the country’s oldest Samaritan when she retired, well into her 10th decade. She read the Guardian thoroughly every day, always starting with the quick crossword.
At the age of 92, she was the oldest of five guest editors of a G2 edition devoted to issues regarding old age. She was 96 when she was a runner-up recipient of the Times/Sternberg Active Life award which she received at 11 Downing Street. She almost refused to meet George Osborne on the grounds that he was of “the wrong party”.
Gordon died in 1995. Steffie is survived by her four sons, Anthony, Jeremy, Nicholas and me, four grandsons, four granddaughters, and 10 great-grandchildren.
