My friend Janet Shapiro, who has died aged 84, was a mathematics lecturer and campaigner for the rights of pensioners. She devoted much of her spare time to working with the National Pensioners Convention, as well as with the Hornsey Pensioners Action Group in north London.
She was a fierce defender of the NHS as a member of Haringey Keep Our NHS Public and she also belonged to her local Labour party’s health and care group. In addition she was a prolific letter-writer and correspondent to her area’s newspaper, the Ham & High.
Born in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, Janet was the youngest of the four children of Robert Howe, a dockyard joiner, and his wife, Lilian (nee Smart). Educated at Sittingbourne grammar school, she gained her teacher’s certificate from Hockerill training college in Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire in 1959 before completing a supplementary course in teaching mathematics at Stockwell College in Bromley, Kent, in 1960.
After teaching maths at three London secondary schools, in 1965 she took on a research assistant job at the school of mathematical sciences at the Polytechnic of North London (now London Metropolitan University), moving up to become a lecturer there two years later and then being promoted to senior lecturer in 1973, remaining in that post until her retirement in 2000. During her time working at the university, she also completed a PhD in mathematics.
As her campaigning work showed, Janet had great strength of character as well as integrity, selflessness, energy, optimism, and enthusiasm. Her family constantly urged her to relax, and to leave some of her battles to others to fight. But she took little notice. When she did take time away from the frontline, she put her energies into art, theatre and literature, often finding links in all three to mathematics.
Her husband, Ray Shapiro, whom she married in 1965, died in 2003. She is survived by their children, Laura and Ian.
