My wife, Teresa Collingwood Smith, has died after a short illness, aged 82. Like her father, RG Collingwood, a philosopher and archaeologist, and her grandfather, WG Collingwood, an artist, writer and secretary to John Ruskin, Teresa is hard to pigeonhole. She was a successful Oxford academic, and also an experienced community organiser and activist with the ability to act as a catalyst for others.
From an early age, Teresa, her mother Kate (nee Edwardes), and grandmother, lived with another family in a rambling house in Essex that was full of art and artists. Women were wholly in charge, and the source of Teresa’s view that women not just “could” or “should” be, but often were, very effectively in charge.
She followed her father and grandfather to study classics at Oxford University, in her case at St Hilda’s College. We met at a series of very dry lectures on the Roman poet Catullus in our first term in 1960. Her archaeological skills grew, on the island of Chios while learning modern Greek; excavating the Phoenician fortress at Motya, Sicily; and at the Roman palace at Fishbourne, Chichester.
She then worked for International Voluntary Service in Thailand, and travelled across the country and Cambodia, then with me, through India and Nepal. On our return we married in 1966.
Recruited by AH (Chelly) Halsey, the Oxford sociologist, to the national Educational Priority Areas project, Teresa spent three years in the South Yorkshire coalfield, working with families, setting up nurseries and piloting preschool programmes. The results in 1972 influenced the first shift in national policy towards early education.
Joining Oxford as a lecturer in 1974, Teresa provided the “community” element on the graduate social work course. Her research focused on parental involvement, joining Jerome Bruner’s Oxford Preschool Research Group with a study of family centres. This brought her into contact with many innovative early years people and projects, including Pen Green children’s centre, Corby, and the Peeple charity.
In 1994, she became the first female chair of the university’s powerful Social Studies board, and a fellow of St Hilda’s. She headed her own department for a decade, steadily transforming it into an international graduate teaching and research centre. Her research extended to include Russian workplace nurseries and many trips to work with Japanese colleagues on community regeneration.
Teresa was a lifelong political and community campaigner. Elected a Labour county councillor in 1985, she played a major part in extending Oxfordshire’s early years programme. She was on the advisory group that generated Sure Start, and with the Cabinet Office developed the children’s centres programme. From 2004 to 2010 she was a specialist adviser to the House of Commons select committee on children, schools and families.
Teresa never forgot her family roots, and was the honorary president of the Collingwood Society. She was never happier than when sailing the Norfolk Broads in our small dinghy, or trekking in the mountains.
Teresa is survived by me, our son, Tom, and two grandchildren, Leila and Sasha.
