My friend Rosemary Walker, who has died aged 71, worked variously as an environmental health officer, a lecturer and a gardener, making her home for more than 40 years in Saddleworth, a community to the east of Manchester.
Her combination of scientific understanding and gracious empathy made her a natural as an environmental health officer, whether dealing with insanitary housing that often had to be condemned, measuring industrial pollution or checking on standards in slaughterhouses.
She served on three councils – Ashton (1973-74) and Tameside (1974-78), both in Greater Manchester, and then Vale of Aylesbury (1978-80) – before moving to the corporate sector with Debenhams, where she was an environmental health and safety adviser with responsibility for northern England. When the company outsourced its health and safety roles in 1986 she became an independent consultant for a time, before accepting a post as an environmental health lecturer at the University of Salford.
She was born in Liverpool to Douglas Walker, who worked for the Liverpool Docks and Harbour Board, and Freda (nee Carter), a teacher. The family moved to Birmingham when Rosemary was small, and she attended King Edward VI grammar school for girls in the city.
Fiercely independent and a strong feminist, she took a degree in environmental sciences at the University of Salford before becoming an environmental health officer at a time when the profession was male-dominated.
After her spell as an environmental health officer and then 17 years of teaching at Salford University she found she had gone as far as she wanted to, and left the university at 50 to do practical work that would keep her fit and out of doors. She became a dry stone waller, ran a cafe, and worked for the Groundwork Trust managing a community garden in Hattersley, near Manchester. This helped her discover a new passion for gardening, and she started a business planting and nurturing small gardens in the often difficult conditions of the villages and hills in the Saddleworth area.
Rosemary also used her academic skills to carry out research for the Labrys Trust, a Leeds-based charity that aims to improve the lives of older lesbians. In addition she made regular visits to Greece to help with the Sappho women’s festival on Lesbos. On one of her early trips there, refugees were beginning to land on the island after hazardous boat trips from Turkey; Rosemary helped to transport them from the coast to a safer place and this made a deep impression on her.
Disabled in later life by complications from rectal cancer and multiple myeloma and unable to continue gardening for others, her last years were spent campaigning for an assisted dying law in the UK. She embraced this cause with her usual passion and determination: lobbying, conducting media interviews, fundraising and inspiring her friends to help.
She is survived by her sister, Marilyn.
