My mother, Violet Pole, who has died aged 92, was a social worker, teacher, socialist, campaigner, traveller and lover of the arts. In many ways she was ahead of her time, and passed her adventurous and independent spirit on to her four daughters.
Violet was born in Cardiff, the eldest child of Richard (Dick) Woodruff, an engineer, and Winifred Rees, who in 1935 inherited the family pub in Cefn Cribwr, near Bridgend. There Violet and her sister and brother spent the Depression and war years, while their father worked at the motor plants in Dagenham and Coventry. When the news of the end of the war came on the eve of VJ Day, she and a friend walked through the night from their village to the next one, shouting through the letterboxes: “The war is over!”
Violet, always an avid reader, went to Bridgend county grammar school for girls and then to Cardiff University. After graduating in English, French and history in 1951, she began the new professional social work diploma, and worked as a children’s officer in the Rhondda for several years, and then as a youth employment officer. During this time she met a young academic, David Pole. They married in 1956.
When in 1970 David became economic adviser to the Department of Health and Social Security, Violet was uprooted from her family and social circle. She embarked on a London history course, joined a women’s club and became active in the Labour party, beginning an energetic career of local activism. She was a history teacher for a year at Beaverwood school for girls and taught intermittently (1976-79) at Valley primary school, both in Bromley.
In later life Violet and David returned to Cefn Cribwr, where she threw herself into village life, a process eased by the fact that she was related by varying degrees to half the population. She became chair of the community council, served on the constituency Labour executive, co-founded a local preservation group, started girls’ multisports sessions – where previously all funding had gone to boys, campaigned to keep footpaths open and against the opencast mine. Her memory was astonishing: she could remember the names, relationships and lives of hundreds of local people from the 1930s onwards.
Violet had a talent for narrative, bringing to vivid life her childhood and her travels across Europe with her sister, Barbara, and later with David. Her range of interests was extraordinary and her collection of books, leaflets and periodicals vast.
A lifelong socialist, Violet was already taking the Guardian in the days when it arrived in Cardiff a day late, and carried on reading it every day. She supported causes from Liberty to the Open Spaces Society. The day before the Brexit referendum, she and David, by now 90, both fervent Europeans, were the only local volunteers who managed to leaflet the entire village of 640 households.
Violet continued to live independently after David’s death in 2021. She is survived by her four daughters, Laura, Eleanor, Elizabeth and me, by seven grandchildren and her sister, Barbara.
