Margaret Joseph obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/20/margaret-joseph-obituary

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My mother, Margaret Joseph, who has died aged 91, was a member of what she would call “the stage army of the good”, one of those people who are the backbone of organisations without ever seeking the limelight.

A lifelong socialist, for her, membership meant action: stuffing envelopes, manning stalls, turning out for marches – and in one case having to be the “pensioner” for a Friends of the Earth protest about fuel poverty, which involved sitting outside Parliament in a dressing gown by a bar fire trying to look cold.

She was born Margaret Johnstone, to Frank, a manager at Smithfield meat market, London, and Alice (nee Phillips), also a campaigner, who before her marriage had been active in the birth control movement. Margaret attended the Friends’ school in Saffron Walden, Essex, followed by Wycombe high school in Buckinghamshire. Moving to London, she studied history at King’s College, and joined the Fabian Society, where she met our father, Peter, a solicitor from a large London Jewish family. They were married in 1955, and settled happily in Highgate, north London.

She worked at the Whittington hospital as an administrator, and continued her various memberships: the Labour party (she was a member for more than 60 years), the Fabians, the Shaw Society, Hornsey Historical Society, Friends of the Earth and a local art group.

Peter died when Margaret was still in her 60s. With her characteristic sanguine temperament she threw herself back into her life; she travelled frequently, rekindling a passion that had started years before as a volunteer on the Youth Railway programme in Yugoslavia in 1947, as part of the effort to rebuild the country after the war, and a dam project in Bulgaria in 1948. In her retirement she booked railway journeys to Istanbul, to China, to San Francisco. A loyal Guardian reader, she once phoned me on someone’s mobile from a train somewhere in Mongolia asking if I’d keep the crossword for her. When not abroad, she helped to run a pensioners’ lunch club at Jacksons Lane Community Centre in Highgate – although some of the pensioners were younger than she was.

Margaret was principled and very rarely spoke ill of anyone, although she was not afraid to make her views known. Her funeral was packed with people of all ages. She was inspirational in her loyalty, her steadfastness, her quiet faith in humanity. She leaves my brother, Stephen, my sister, Marian, myself and eight grandchildren.