My grandmother, Margaret Morris, who has died aged 93, was a historian, college lecturer, letter-writer to the Guardian and a socialist campaigner.
For 47 years, Margaret was married to the educationist Max Morris, a former Communist social gathering govt member and president of the NUT (1973-74). Max and Margaret met in Hampstead, north London, by a shared curiosity in leftwing causes, they usually grew to become shut buddies when Margaret stood because the Labour candidate for Hornsey council in 1959; they married in 1961. They have been well-known in political circles and their events have been extensively celebrated.
Margaret’s campaigning focused housing issues and entry to larger training. Later, having joined the Communist social gathering within the early Sixties, she represented the UK overseas with the Girls’s Worldwide Democratic Basis and accompanied Max on international delegations.
Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Margaret was the one little one of Edith, a secretary, and Reginald Howard, a civil servant. She gained a scholarship to George Dixon grammar college, the place her early socialist views have been impressed by her historical past trainer. She studied historical past at Birmingham College, attaining a primary; then she took up a postgraduate scholarship at Oxford College.
Two formative occasions formed her life: being evacuated to Shropshire aged 9 throughout the second world warfare and receiving intensive hospital remedy for tuberculosis whereas at college. Her experiences have been drawn upon by her buddy Linda Grant, the novelist, in The Darkish Circle (2016), which depicted life in a TB sanatorium.
Margaret labored as a researcher for the Wiltshire Victoria County Historical past on the London College Institute of Analysis, and at Westfield Faculty, London. In 1976 she printed a e book on the Normal Strike of 1926.
From 1974, for greater than a decade she was a lecturer in fashionable historical past on the Polytechnic of Central London, after which within the mid-80s she grew to become director of modular research on the Metropolis of London Polytechnic (later London Guildhall College, and now London Metropolitan College).
In 1993, she granted permission for Pleasure Gardner, an abroad scholar, to proceed her research there, and was shocked when Pleasure died a number of days later after the police tried to arrest and deport her.
Following retirement in 1995, Margaret remained concerned in native politics and was a key determine within the Socialist Academic Affiliation. Between 1997 and 2002 she served as a lay chair of NHS complaints panels. She was additionally a governor at West Inexperienced major college, Tottenham.
Unbiased-minded, a voracious reader, formidable bridge participant, connoisseur of classic wine and a francophile, Margaret loved summers with Max, family and friends, in Menton, France. Though she grew to become fluent in French, she spoke it with an English accent.
Max died in 2008. Margaret is survived by her daughter, Georgia, two grandchildren – my sister, Natasha, and me – and 4 great-grandchildren.
