Jean Wye obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/09/jean-wye-obituary

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The Depression was a formative experience for my mother, Jean Wye, who has died aged 94. She turned towards socialism, joining the Young Communist League at 15 where she met her future husband, Bill. They bonded during the battle of Cable Street in October 1936, finally marrying in 1955.

Jean, who had shivered in bed as a child when her father took away his warming greatcoat to go to work, was determined to change society, and her own prospects. She did both, educating herself with the help of the Manchester Guardian at the library, and joining the Young Communist League and the socialist Clarion Cycling Club.

She always remembered her birthday ride on 3 September 1939, when the cyclists stopped at a cafe and the bun she was eating “turned to straw in my mouth” as the prime minister concluded: “This country is now at war with Germany.”

Jean was born in Battersea, south-west London, to Jack Gregory and his wife, Daisy (nee Walsh). Jack served in the Royal Navy before becoming a post office engineer. Educated at Wandsworth Borough Polytechnic, Jean became a secretary, gaining the shorthand and typing qualifications needed to join the Treasury. There she became personal assistant to the economist JM Keynes, with whom she attended the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944. Keynes and his wife, the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova, introduced her to the opera and ballet, and she often went to see the newly formed English National Ballet at Sadler’s Wells.

Jean stayed at the Treasury, working for Sir Douglas Wass, with whom she travelled to Berlin during the air lift in 1949. But like so many women of her generation, she stopped work after she married. Bill, an engineer, took up a post advising the RAF in Cyprus in 1956 and, typically adventurous, they drove through postwar Europe, arriving at the height of the Cypriot independence crisis. Jean was temporarily airlifted back to Britain having succumbed to one of several episodes of mental ill health that periodically incapacitated her.

She gave birth to her first son, Ben, in Cyprus, at the military hospital in Dhekelia in 1961. The following year she became part of the postwar “new towns” movement by settling in Hemel Hempstead, where in May 1966 she had a second son, Tim.

After Bill’s death in 2007, Jean’s health declined, but she had wonderful memories of the productions she had seen at the Royal Opera House after a day’s work at the Treasury. Her favourite opera was La Bohème.

She is survived by Tim and me, and by four grandchildren, Jacob, Joseph, Eastre and Hallam.