My grandmother Pauline Davison, who has died aged 86 of lung cancer, trained as a social worker after her youngest child started school and worked with children and families, first in Lewisham, south-east London, then in rural Cambridgeshire.
Following a period in the social work training department of Cambridgeshire county council in the 1990s she worked for three years in a hospice and then as a social worker at Papworth hospital. She was one of the first volunteers to be trained for the Cambridge Mediation Service, which helps warring neighbours resolve their disputes.
After retiring from social work in 2000, she committed herself to volunteering in her community in Cambridge: at a charity at Addenbrooke’s hospital; at her local food bank; and as a trustee at Michaelhouse, a community centre and cafe established by Great St Mary’s church, of which she was a highly valued member of the community, serving as a church warden and leading the pastoral visitors group.
Pauline contributed much to the celebration of literature in Cambridge as co-founder of Something Understood, a modern poetry group, and was active in the TS Eliot Society, playing a key role in maintaining the annual TS Eliot festival at Little Gidding.
She was born in Twickenham, south-west London, to Gladys (nee Mayhew), a seamstress, and Harry Le Brun, a printer and trade unionist. She showed early academic promise and won a scholarship to Westonbirt school in Gloucestershire, from where she then won a second scholarship, to the University of Oxford; she read English at St Anne’s College, as the first member of her family to go to university.
After graduating, she taught English in a secondary school in London before moving to Transvaal, South Africa, in 1963 with her husband, Colin Davison, an Anglican priest, whom she had married in 1960.
Living in the city of Rustenburg, she taught English at a Lutheran seminary and was involved in various community projects, such as a feeding scheme during a drought and setting up a family planning clinic in the local township, all while looking after her growing family.
In 1971, Pauline, Colin and their children were deported and forced to return to Britain, due to the couple’s active opposition to apartheid. The family lived in Lewisham, where Pauline began her career in social work in 1978, moving in 1980 to the village of Stapleford, south of Cambridge, when Colin was appointed vicar to the parish. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1989.
In her later years, Pauline completed a pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.
She is survived by her four children, Matthew, Bridget, Simon and Giles, and seven grandchildren.
