Joyce Wainwright, who was mother to the three of us and our late brother Andrew, was a powerful political force and a pioneer of social networks to promote reform. Although she tried gamely, the frailties of increasing age prevented her from mastering Facebook, Twitter or Bebo. But she had created her own, hands-on versions, years before her death, aged 88.
Like many women of her generation, she seemed in public to be primarily a devoted assistant to her husband of 55 years, Richard, the late Liberal MP for Colne Valley in the Yorkshire Pennines. So she was, but she had opinions of her own and a genius for spreading them on doorsteps and through an extraordinary web of friends and contacts.
Always welcoming and open, this was the proto-Facebook which gave the Colne Valley Liberal party a strength that took its opponents and national political commentators by surprise, notably in 1966 when the seat was the only one in the country lost by Labour at the general election. Joyce used the same techniques with equal skill, modesty and her natural cheerfulness at Gipton Methodist, a small chapel on a large social housing estate in Leeds, and as a governor of the nearby Wykebeck primary school.
She was the oldest of five children of Arthur and Emmeline Hollis of Leeds, a conservative and Anglican couple but with radical views instilled by the ordeal of the first world war. Arthur was a pilot shot down and taken prisoner, while Emmy nursed on the western front. When Joyce met Richard, a Methodist with Quaker links as a conscientious objector in the Friends Ambulance Unit during the second world war, they chimed in their warm, humanitarian outlook and zeal for social change.
Her adventures in the cause took her in 1973 to rebel-held areas of Guinea- Bissau during the Portuguese colonial war, returning with the gift of a python skin (but not three milking goats, which had to be left behind) and a sheaf of information on schools and hospitals for the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust which had commissioned the visit. As a national member of the Women Liberals executive in 1979, she pressed firmly for the truth to be told in the Jeremy Thorpe affair.
In old age, she relished tea and debates at her bungalow with the likes of Nancy Seear or Anne Scargill and fellow members of Women Against Pit Closures. No child could fail to absorb her principles and energy, and she rejoiced to see plentiful grandchildren infected too, along with her tribe of nieces, nephews and cousins.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/25/joyce-wainwright-obituary
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