Attending the founding meeting of the World Disarmament Campaign in 1979 was a life-changing experience for my mother, Eileen Brown, who has died aged 95.
It compelled her to join Mothers for Peace (later Women to Women for Peace) shortly afterwards, and she visited the Soviet Union with them in 1984; she was later involved in peace initiatives in Northern Ireland.
At the same time she became an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a supporter of Campaign Against Arms Trade and the United Nations Association. She would get up at 5am to join a coach party to London for a CND demonstration, because she felt she had a moral obligation to take part. In more recent years, she struck up a friendship with Bruce Kent, the former general secretary of CND.
In the 1990s, in her retirement, she became aware of the situation of children in Romania and, with local practitioners, initiated a health and social care programme in Constanța to help prevent babies and children being abandoned in orphanages. For this she was made OBE in 2000.
Born in Stechford, Birmingham, to Scottish Presbyterian parents, Isabella (nee Dargie), a clerk, and Thomas Glencross, a marine engineer, Eileen spent most of her life in Wallasey, Merseyside. She left Wallasey high school at 16 to become a trainee radiographer. Nursing training followed at Liverpool Royal Infirmary from 1945 and later midwifery in Edinburgh in 1951. She later recalled some of her nursing experiences in a self-published memoir, Getting Through (2009).
In 1957 she married Eric Brown, a maintenance engineer whom she met at the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company, Liverpool, while working there as an industrial nurse. His untimely death 10 years later meant bringing up their two young children, my sister, Myra, and me, on her own. She became a health tutor at the local further education college until her retirement in 1984.
Alongside her work in Romania, she was involved with the Wirral Ark, a local charity supporting homeless people. She always made time for her church, friends and family – and especially for her three grandchildren – and was renowned for her homemade, traditional afternoon teas.
Eileen might have seemed an unlikely campaigner. “I’m just an ordinary woman,” she once said when meeting the then local MP, Lynda Chalker, about an issue that concerned her. “Mrs Brown,” Chalker replied. “You are anything but an ordinary woman.”
Eileen is survived by Myra and me, and by her three grandchildren, Harry, Isabel and Edwin.
