My aunt, Maisie Best, who has died aged 90, was a social worker with a special interest in looked-after children and in adoption, sparked by her own childhood in foster care.
Born in South Shields, Maisie was one of two children of Sarah Shackleton Hopper, who was born and bred in the north-east of England, and Bernard Hart, a merchant seaman from Jamaica. Maisie and her younger sister, Adina, were orphaned aged eight and five following the early deaths of their mother, to asthma, and father in the sinking of the SS Dayrose by a U-boat in 1942. They were put into foster care separately.
