My aunt Beryl Knotts, who has died aged 92, was a social employee who introduced an unfailing cheerfulness to pals she made everywhere in the world by way of her work for catastrophe aid, with Oxfam and different organisations. She had a profitable mixture of mischief and optimism based mostly on her Christian religion.
Born in Epsom, Surrey, she got here from an in depth household; her father, Lyn, was {an electrical} and alerts engineer on the railways, which impressed Beryl’s brother, John, to pursue a profession in mechanical engineering. Her mom, Kath (nee Treacher), dreamed of working as an architect however was steered into extra “appropriate” work as a secretary.
Beryl sensed the waste and at 19 – following education on the Gray Coat Hospital in Westminster and Farnham ladies’ grammar faculty – with the backing of her mom she left a boring job as a farm secretary for social work in kids’s providers and two diploma programs, at Edinburgh College and the London College of Economics.
An early episode when she needed to take away six kids from an unsafe residence – armed with chocolate, her Ford Anglia and the tackle of a convent – ready her for challenges to return. In 1966, stimulated by a pupil working journey to Canada, she joined a medical and social work group on the excessive Amazon 500 miles upstream from Manaus in Brazil.
When that contract got here to an finish in 1969 she backpacked spherical South America, which sealed her love of distant international locations and their individuals. Returning to the UK on a ship transporting bauxite, she took up a put up with Oxfam, quickly heading out to Peru when an earthquake struck in 1970. She labored from 1971 to 1973 in Nigeria with the Worldwide Union of Youngster Welfare, serving to homeless kids following the Biafra struggle. She was then based mostly on the IUCW’s headquarters in Geneva for 5 years earlier than returning to the UK to work for Oxfam once more, in 1978.
Her human qualities at all times shone out, however Oxfam and the IUCW additionally recognised her organising abilities. She devised and led youngster support programmes in southern Sudan and Nigeria, reported on employees salaries in India, reviewed Oxfam’s work in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and, at Oxfam’s HQ in Oxford, strengthened frontline sources and revised the sector administrators’ handbook.
She was Oxfam abroad personnel officer from the mid-Nineteen Eighties till her retirement in 1991. She was appointed MBE and (unknown to her household till after her dying) was awarded the Daniel Carrión medal for humanitarian providers to Peru.
After retirement Beryl was a byword for charity and United Reformed Church work; she welcomed a stream of tourists from everywhere in the world till shortly earlier than her dying.
She is survived by her nieces, Sue and me, her nephew, Peter, two great-nieces and two great-nephews. She known as her personal memoir Led By a Kindly Mild; like John Henry Newman, the author of the well-known hymn, she knew in regards to the encircling gloom however gave all that she needed to dispel it.
