My mother, Janet Alty, who has died aged 86, was an environmental campaigner and community activist.
She was the first and only Green party town councillor in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, when she was elected in 2015. By the time she stood down in May 2023, the Greens were the majority party on Warwick district council, which covers Warwick, Leamington Spa and Whitnash. A woman who lived by the principles she promoted, she enthused many others to participate in local and national campaigns.
Janet loved speaking to residents and solving difficult problems for them through sometimes ferocious advocacy. She was never worried about ruffling a few feathers to give others a voice.
While running the West Midlands Green party, she was involved in creating a paid elections team, helping the party to flourish. She also had a significant impact on shaping the party nationally, having been its joint chair (1987-89) and a member of the policy committee.
In addition, Janet campaigned for the Pedestrian Association and Living Streets, chaired Leamington’s old town single regeneration fund group, started the canal festival and was a contributor to the Warwick district faith forum, describing herself as a member of all faiths.
She was also one of the founders of the Leamington home teaching scheme, helping Punjabi women to learn English, a co-founder of the Leamington cancer support group and chair of the Leamington peace festival.
Janet was born in Hartford, Cheshire, the only child of Agnes (nee Mitchell) and Hamish Myles, both Scottish PhD chemists. Agnes did not continue her career after marriage, but Hamish worked as a research chemist at ICI. When Hamish was made director of ICI in New York in 1954, Janet studied for and passed her A-levels in one year at Manchester high school for girls in order to be able to emigrate with her parents. She studied modern languages at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, before working as a translator in Geneva.
In 1962 she married Christopher Alty, with whom she had been at the Grange primary school decades previously, and settled in Cambridge, where Christopher was a postgraduate research fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. They moved to Leamington in 1965 when Christopher joined the engineering department at the newly formed Warwick University.
The family stayed at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, mid-Wales, when Christopher was taking a sabbatical there during the summer of 1976. This experience proved instrumental in shaping Janet and Christopher’s views on environmental and energy policy. Subsequently Christopher edited, with Rob Todd from CAT, An Alternative Energy Strategy for the UK, published in 1978, Janet typing every word of every edit. It was a prescient forerunner of Zero Carbon Britain published 30 years later.
Christopher died of cancer in 1979. From 2005 Janet, together with her partner, Mota Singh, a previous Labour mayor of Leamington Spa, worked hard for the Buwan Kothi international trust supporting the Gilly Mundy memorial community school in Haryana, India.
Mota died in 2021. Janet is survived by the two children from her marriage, Ali and me, and by three grandchildren.
