Judith Chester, who has died aged 83 from cancer, was a fiercely independent working woman and activist before feminism took centre stage. She was my wife from 1961 until our divorce in 1970 and for a second time from 2017 until her death.
Born in the Oxfordshire village of Hook Norton, she was the daughter of Tom Williams, a farmer and pacifist, who became a conscientious objector during the second world war. Her mother, Mary (nee Sturdy), delivered most of the village babies as the district nurse. All the Williams children, Judith and her three siblings, were educated at a Quaker school nearby in Sibford.
On leaving Sibford school Judith rapidly climbed the hospitality ladder, becoming manageress of the Wimpy Bar in St Giles, Oxford, while still in her teens. Not long afterward, she met and married me, and we settled in London, where I was a journalist on the Sunday Times.
We had two children – Saul and Cal. When we divorced we agreed child support, but Judith adamantly refused any maintenance for herself. Within a few months she emerged as one of the founder members of an organisation calling itself Gingerbread, which aimed to improve life for single parents mainly by developing local self-help groups. From a standing start, almost 400 such groups were established nationwide by 1980.
Meantime, Judith combined child-rearing with a solid career in social work that would take her from her home in Brixton to local authority welfare offices all around the capital. Camden, Hammersmith, Lambeth and Lewisham were among the boroughs who employed her.
Aside from one brief departure, working at the Royal Marsden cancer hospital, most of her effort was concentrated in foster care. Her empathy and wit were reckoned to be best deployed in this area, especially when homes for the most difficult teenagers were being sought. She also won prominence and respect for her pioneering advocacy of the benefits of same race foster placements.
At the age of 59, she was appointed to a prestigious training post with the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (now CoramBAAF), but soon decided that she would rather be doing than teaching. On moving to Brighton she joined Families for Children, a large private agency, and clocked up another 15 years of close encounter fostering work, only faltering towards the end when our older son, Saul, died from cancer.
Judith and I remarried in Brighton soon after Saul’s death but with our other son, Cal, living very close by. We remained by the seaside for four happily married years until the day she died. She is survived by me, Cal, our grandson, Izaac, and her three siblings, Pat, Sue and Tom.
