My mother, Loїs Williams, who has died aged 98, was a social work team leader, an actor, a founder member of the National Childbirth Trust, and a lifelong campaigner for human rights, justice, peace and equality.
Her acting career began with the Entertainments National Service Association in 1945, followed by many repertory theatre tours and seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre in Stratford alongside Paul Scofield and Joss Ackland. These provided rich material for her creative writing in later years.
In her mid-40s she qualified as a social worker at North London Polytechnic, leading to a job in the half-built modernist utopia Thamesmead, described at the time as the cockney Venice-on-Thames. Loїs believed with a passion in the plans for an integrated community, promising harmony and improved quality of life to Londoners moving from poor inner-city housing. Thus began 16 years of working in a multidisciplinary way – with GPs, health visitors, education and the church, including the inspirational Right Rev Jim Thompson, then rector of Thamesmead, to try to make a difference to the lives of children and families in the area.
Inadequate infrastructure left Thamesmead marooned, but Loїs continued to work tirelessly, remaining compassionate and determined. For example, she persuaded the director of social services to loan money to a teenager in care for the purchase of a moped so that he could travel between work and college to complete his apprenticeship. This sparked a successful engineering career. My mother remained in contact with him for the rest of her life.
Born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, she was the daughter of Mona (nee Lawson), a housewife, and Cyril Johnson, a carpet manufacturer and gifted amateur musician, who had played with Elgar. Cyril was asked by his wife to provide distraction by pounding out Grieg on the piano during Loїs’s birth.
Educated at Malvern girls’ college, Loїs then attended Rada (1942-45) where she was awarded the gold medal. There she met Clifford Williams, whom she married in 1949. He left acting in the early 1960s and became a teacher. The couple had four children, Nicholas, Rebekah, Adam and me, and separated in the late 1980s.
Loїs had many campaigning passions and interests. Her own experience of medicalised and cruel childbirth in the early 1950s led to her becoming a founder member of the NCT. She joined the 1958 CND Aldermaston march with a child in a pushchair, and remained a peace campaigner for the rest of her life. She was a member of CND, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the British Humanist Association, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Labour party.
On retirement in 1990, she toured the world, visiting friends and relations, and returned to her passion for writing poetry and short stories. She described herself as a “lifelong collector of friends” and an “inveterate letter writer (from whom) no one escaped”.
Loїs is survived by her four children, eight grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and her sister, Elizabeth. Her brother, Alan, died in 1994.
