My mother, Jean Thornton, who has died aged 85, was a tireless anti-racism campaigner and political activist in Bradford for 50 years.
Born Jean Furness to working-class parents, Tom and Edna (nee Goodall), in Spen Valley, West Yorkshire, she was highly intelligent and articulate, and but for a bout of pneumonia she would have gone to the local grammar school. Her father had been injured in the Battle of the Bulge at the end of the second world war and as a result was disabled. Jean was the eldest of 11 children and played a large part in looking after her younger siblings. She went to Millbridge national school, Liversedge, and left at 14 to become train as a tailor.
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