My mother, Sylvia Wallis, who has died aged 100, spent much of her life in West Yorkshire, working for many years as a local authority clerical worker and for the Widows Advisory Service in Leeds, where she also set up and ran a club for single people.
Despite her associations with Yorkshire, Sylvia was actually born in Cardiff, to Johanna (nee Carney), a housewife, and Sidney Elias, a steelworker. When she was nine, her father, a Communist party member and chair of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, was imprisoned for three years for sedition after visiting the Soviet Union and writing a letter there calling for a revolution in the UK.
Owing to her mother’s ill health, Sylvia and her younger brother, also Sid, were subsequently placed with a series of foster couples, some of whom were far from ideal, before they were returned home on her father’s release.
Sylvia’s disrupted childhood led to a fitful education, and she was never at any one school for long. For a time her family lived in Leeds, where she was a witness, as a 13-year-old, to the Battle of Holbeck Moor, in which anti-fascist demonstrators attacked supporters of Oswald Mosley. During the conflict she hid under parked vehicles as mounted police charged around, an experience that left her with a lifelong fear of horses.
In 1940 the family moved to Guiseley, West Yorkshire, where, as “incomers”, they encountered some hostility, but they stayed and Sylvia began working as a bomb-gear inspector at a local aircraft factory.
She met Reg Wallis, an RAF crewman, at a dance in 1941, and after marrying in 1946 they toured Europe on a Lambretta scooter. Later Reg balanced work as a printer with performing with the Wallis Family, a troupe of entertainers that included his brother. They toured clubs, pubs and seaside resorts across the north of England from the late 1940s through to the early 70s.
As she and Reg moved around the country, Sylvia worked in various clerical roles, including for Wisbech council in Cambridgeshire and then, back in Yorkshire, for the Leeds Permanent building society. After raising me for some years, she returned to work as a rent collector for Aireborough council.
Reg died of cancer in 1978, and after her retirement in 1983 at 60, Sylvia kept herself busy with a part-time role as an office manager in Leeds with the Widows Advisory Service, providing advice and support for recently widowed women. Simultaneously she also established the Tuesday Club for single, widowed and divorced people to meet and socialise, running it with an elected management committee until the early 2000s.
Intelligent, strong-willed and argumentative, Sylvia epitomised her favourite quote by the playwright Sean O’Casey, who said that “life is an invitation to live”. She enjoyed the theatre – both as an audience member and as an actor with her local branch of the Unity Theatre group – reading, music, travel, dance and politics.
She is survived by me, two grandchildren, Emily and Anna, and her younger sister Catherine.
