My friend and colleague, Maureen Henderson, who has died aged 83, joined the Polytechnic of North London as a social work tutor in the 1970s. At that time it had the biggest social work department in Britain and Mo soon became an important member of it, as the principal tutor and leader of the combined childcare and family social work course.
She helped to make this course reflect the community that social workers served in London, including introducing an access course for minority ethnic students. Another of our colleagues there, Mary MacLeod, remembered Mo as having, “a gentle presence that belied her fierce resolve and determination to bring a very disparate group of people together, despite ideological differences, to give our students the social work education that would focus them on serving the people for whom they were responsible”.
Mo and I had a break from North London in 1983-84 when we went as visiting professors to the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa in the US. We also rode 7,000 miles across 36 states in the US on a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle lent to us by one of our students.
Born in London, she was brought up by her mother, Rose Camps, along with her sister, Patricia, first in the capital and then in Littlehampton, West Sussex. When Rose married, Mo took her stepfather’s surname of Henderson. She went to Chichester high school and then Regent Street Polytechnic (University of Westminster) in London, graduating in the mid-60s with a degree in sociology. Later she was awarded a postgraduate diploma in social work from London School of Economics.
She worked as a social worker in south London before becoming a social work tutor at Middlesex Polytechnic (Middlesex University) and then the Polytechnic of North London in the 70s. By the time Mo retired from North London in the early 2000s it had become London Metropolitan University.
In retirement, she went on to help adult students develop study skills at the University of the Arts. She also had a lively interest in theatre and art and occasionally opera, although after attending a six-hour Parsifal in Venice she became somewhat resistant to Wagner.
She is survived by her sister, Patricia, and a niece, Jayne.
