My mother, Seonaid Wootton, who has died aged 79, found her passion for championing disadvantaged children early in her teaching career. She worked in Yorkshire as a deputy head and then for a decade as a headteacher, turning round a school for children with special educational needs. On retirement in 2002, she pursued her dream to become self-sufficient, winning awards for her homegrown produce.
A little over a year ago Mum was given a terminal diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer, which she faced with her trademark pragmatism and good humour. She had no self-pity, just courage and gratitude for those around her trying to help.
Seonaid was born in Glasgow, a daughter of Moira Beaton, a GP, and Bernard Camber, a consultant psychiatrist. The couple had recently divorced, and her mother moved Seonaid and her two siblings, Nard and Ann, to Shropshire a year later.
After attending the Priory school, Shrewsbury, as a boarder, at the age of 18 Seonaid moved to London to pursue a career as a legal secretary. Typical of her generation she married early, three years later in 1965, to Anthony Wootton, and then moved back to Scotland, to Aberdeen, to support her husband’s career as a sociologist. My sister Polly and I, their identical twin daughters, came a year later, and Seonaid described motherhood as “transformative”.
When we were two, she attended lectures at Aberdeen University to retrain as a teacher and started working in a primary school in a deprived area of Aberdeen. There she began her commitment to improve the lives of her pupils. Our family moved to York in 1973, again for our dad’s career, while she continued to teach.
A few years later they divorced, and Mum, fiercely independent, raised us with the same values. As a single mother, she showed great fortitude, remaining cheerfully determined to ensure our lives would be as little affected as possible.
She continued to work hard, taking every opportunity to progress and to champion disadvantaged children, in 1989 becoming headteacher of the Forest school, a Send school in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. During this time, she met her partner, Tony Akkermans, and when Mum retired they moved back to Shropshire.
Their home provided enough land for her to grow her own fruit and vegetables, and when her grandchildren began to arrive, she was able to combine her love of family and garden with her other passion, games. She was often happiest when combining all three.
Keen to avoid what she knew might be a painful and protracted death, our mother, ruthlessly organised and not in the least intimidated by authority, secured the green light from Dignitas. For her it always felt too soon to travel for an assisted death, until it became too late. She died at home with Tony, and with Polly and I nursing her in her final weeks. Her final wish was that her ashes should be scattered on her vegetable patch.
She is survived by Polly and me, by Tony and his children, Julie and Richard, and by five grandchildren, Jonty, Milo, Edie, Zoe and Bobby.
