My mother, Elaine Holland, who has died aged 91, was a teacher, political activist and campaigner for green issues throughout her life. She was ahead of her time in her thinking about nature and environmental problems.
Settling in Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, she taught English at secondary schools and colleges, but in her understated style also fought for better local public transport and opposed the destruction of the local architectural and industrial heritage. The house she helped save and lived in for more than 50 years has a blue plaque to the scientist Sir Oliver Lodge. She travelled everywhere by bus, enjoyed cycling and stubbornly turned down car lifts from well-meaning neighbours.
Born Elaine Rose Savours in Harpfields, Stoke-on-Trent, she was the third daughter of Edgar, a Welsh civil engineer, and Doris (nee Holt), a primary school teacher and poet from Lancashire. Elaine was educated at Thistley Hough school for girls in Penkhull and after the second world war studied for a degree in English and French at Trinity College Dublin. In 1955 she worked in France as an au pair and English teacher.
Back in the UK she taught English at Knutton secondary modern school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and later for a period at the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, where her students were Post Office day-release employees. In addition, she taught at Kendal Technical College (when our family lived in Cumbria for two years in the 1960s) and at Stafford girls’ high school. In 1960 she had married Richard Holland, an architect. They had three children and she eventually gave up teaching in 1972 to devote herself to her family.
A lifelong Liberal, Elaine was elected as a Stoke-on-Trent city councillor (1973-76). In this role, she hoped to revive interest in reinstating the pre-Beeching railway lines and stations of north Staffordshire and prevent the further demolition of the Victorian terraced houses and historic villages of Stoke-on-Trent.
Elaine was a founding member and enthusiastic supporter of three local societies: the Potteries Heritage Society, the North Staffordshire Friends of the Earth and the North Staffs Rail Promotion Group. Thanks to her campaigning she helped save and list many historic buildings, averted the felling of trees and backed the reopening of local railway stations including Stone.
She tended an organic allotment near her home for more than 45 years, for which she won – to her great surprise at the age of 89 in 2022 – a local council environmental award. Even towards the end of her life she continued to campaign on local environmental issues, nurturing wildlife, hedgehogs and frogs in her garden. She read the Guardian from the days when it was the Manchester Guardian and scoured it daily for relevant stories to bolster her campaigning.
Richard died in 1986. She is survived by her children, Mary, Tom and me, two grandsons and a great-grandson.
