My wife, Victoria Smillie, who has died aged 75, was a force of nature. In 1972, under her earlier married name of Lesley Mitchell, she was one of five women (nicknamed the “Watford Five”) invited by the Women in Media group to take on the task of presenting the “acceptable” face of feminism and women’s liberation in lobbying both the media and MPs for the passing of the sex discrimination bill.
The five (the others were Eileen Vielvoye, Rosemary Todd, Blanche McCorkell and Pat Howe) were friends who met in Watford to discuss feminism and women’s liberation matters and came to wider attention when they were interviewed by the Daily Mirror journalist Marjorie Proops. Then Shirley Conran, who was doing publicity for Women in Media, got in touch and became their campaign manager.
They were interviewed by national papers including the Sunday Times, and heard and seen on national broadcasts including Pebble Mill at One, and were instrumental in raising 100,000 signatures in support of the bill. It was passed into law as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.
Victoria was born Lesley Victoria Nelson in Liverpool, the younger daughter of David Nelson, a senior accountant at Henderson’s department store, and Jean (nee Anderson). In 1967 she was unceremoniously thrown out of Waterloo Park girls’ grammar school when she became pregnant with her first daughter, Cathy, and was thus unable to take her A-level exams.
She married soon afterwards, and had another daughter, Jenny – both daughters were born with progressive Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome and became wheelchair users. While raising her children, she found work as a journalist on the Bucks Examiner. When her marriage ended in divorce, she decided to break with the past by changing her name by deed poll to Victoria Smillie, in recognition of her Scottish roots.
After moving to East Anglia, she worked on the local paper in Hadleigh, Suffolk, where she also developed a love of amateur dramatics, playing the heroine in a local production of Sweeney Todd. She studied for a history degree at Essex University, graduating in 1981, and at the Henley Business School.
Victoria joined BT in 1981, as it became independent from the Post Office, working as a senior manager responsible for the recruitment and training of those “boffins” who drove the ongoing research into advanced telecommunications technology. She was also a trailblazer in getting disabled people accepted in industry, for which she received a Churchill fellowship.
Taking early retirement in 1996, she retrained as a person-centred counsellor at the University of East Anglia, and went on to become senior counsellor at Norwich Union insurance.
In 2005 Victoria became the CEO of the Mancroft advice project, and helped its transition into a charity helping address the many needs and issues facing young people in Norwich. She finally retired in 2009.
Victoria was a woman of extraordinary drive, wit, fun and empathy for others. She and I met in June 1999 at an Archers Addicts convention in Torquay – I have been playing Mike Tucker on The Archers since 1973. We settled together in Bawburgh, near Norwich, and were married in 2004.
She is survived by me and her daughter Jenny, and her sister, Margaret. Cathy died in 2005.
