My aunt Patricia Howcroft, who has died aged 79, was raised in Notting Hill, west London, and her spirit and values were demonstrated by a landmark event during the 1958 race riots there. On the afternoon of Monday 1 September, a young Antiguan student, Seymour Manning, who was visiting a friend in Notting Dale, unwittingly found himself in the midst of the troubles.
He was chased into Bramley Road and was punched and kicked to the ground, but found sanctuary when Pat called him into the greengrocer's shop that her family owned. It was a lock-up shop and had to be closed from the outside; Pat locked the door and faced down what quickly grew into an angry crowd.
Contemporary news reports suggest that she bravely faced up to 300 people until the police arrived. One man was quoted as saying that they would have torn Manning apart. This episode, incorporated into Absolute Beginners, the 1959 book by Colin MacInnes, epitomised Pat's indomitable spirit. MacInnes described how "except for that ... vegetable woman (who I bet will go straight up to heaven like a supersonic rocket when she dies – nothing can stop that one), no one … reacted against this thing".
My aunt spent a lifetime loving, encouraging and defending people. She worked for many years at St Andrew's youth club in Victoria, at a legal advice centre and at the Maya Project in Fulham, an organisation for vulnerable young women from which she retired in 1993.
Pat and her younger sister, Janet, were evacuated to Devon during the second world war. They spent five years boarding at Dartington Hall school, a real culture shock for two young London girls, and Pat looked after her younger sister throughout. They returned to London after the war. Pat spent much of her time at Kensington Baths, on Lancaster Road, where her father, the boxer Fred Bloomfield, ran the swimming baths. Her determined spirit resulted in her becoming Kensington schools' swimming champion for both freestyle and diving in 1949.
In the 1960s, the family's properties in Notting Hill were subject to compulsory purchase to make way for the building of the Westway trunk road. Pat's family relocated to Fulham and there she became the matriarch of a large, close-knit family. She was married for 61 years to her teenage sweetheart, Ron, whom she met aged 13. She was a loving mother to three daughters, Carole, Jeanette and Sue. They all survive her, along with 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Pat was an inspiration to us all, and the world seemed a safer place with her in it.