My mother-in-law, Mary Brown, who has died aged 93, was a special educational needs teacher and volunteer staff member at the Forest School Camps (FSC) children’s charity.
Mary first heard about FSC while working as a teacher in London schools in the 1960s, and she decided to do the training in childcare and woodcraft needed to become a volunteer – she “just knew” she had to get involved. In 1968, through FSC, Mary met Bob Hall, a communist shop steward; they became lifelong partners, and ran summer camps together for 40 years. Mary especially loved communal singing round a fire.
Mary was born in Carmel, California, to Mary (nee Marble) and Charles Henderson. Her father had inherited a comfortable income from silver mines and tobacco, but her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and her mother disappeared suddenly when Mary was seven. She was brought up by her grandmother and father, attending Westridge, then Carmel high school, in California, until her father remarried, when Mary and her older brother, Charles, were sent to boarding school. Sailing and horse riding became her refuge. A summer camp in the High Sierras around 1944 kindled her lifelong love of hiking.
Mary’s mother, having remarried and settled in Scotland with her new husband, David Abercrombie, a phonetician at Edinburgh University, re-established contact with her children, and in 1948, Mary and Charles moved to live in Edinburgh. Mary studied at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1953 with a master’s in social anthropology and psychology. That year she married David Brown, and they had three children, Neal, Nicholas (who became my husband) and Susannah, before moving to London in 1961 for his work as a BBC announcer. The marriage foundered, but they reconciled and had a fourth child, Sarah, before finally separating around 1970. They divorced in 1974.
After fast-track graduate teacher training in London in 1965, Mary taught at Hallfield infants’ school, Isaac Newton secondary school, where she was both a class teacher and what was then called a remedial teacher, and Bevington junior school.
In 1971, she took a course in the psychological origins of severe reading disability, at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and a diploma at London University in the education of maladjusted children, and began teaching a groundbreaking tutorial class in Southwark for children with emotional difficulties, which she continued until 1992. She also qualified in counselling skills at South West London College, and taught these skills at Westminster Pastoral Foundation until 2011, when she retired aged 81.
Mary seemed inexhaustible. In 1985 she became a Royal Yachting Association dinghy instructor, taking vulnerable people sailing with Tideway Sailability Club at Greenwich Docks. Every summer for many years she went to California with the Sierra Club; in her 60s she climbed three 12,000ft passes in a day, carrying a 40lb rucksack. Until she was 93, she went kayaking on the Thames. She devoured the Guardian every day, and relished the quick crossword.
Bob was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2002. Mary cared for him, solo, until his death in 2015.
She is survived by her children, grandchildren, Rosie, Marie and Theodora, and two great-grandchildren.
