Sue Owen obituary
Sue Owen, my mother, who has died aged 70, was for many years a teacher in adult education, helping people gain a second chance to achieve qualifications or enter university. She went on to lead a teacher training unit for Manchester’s adult education service, and her final job after retirement was teaching English at the Wai Yin Society, a Chinese cultural centre in central Manchester.
She was fascinated by foreign cultures and languages, and mastered German, Spanish, Russian and French. Throughout her life, she would always attempt to learn at least some of the language before going abroad, often to the surprise of waiters or tour guides.
Sue was born in a British army hospital in Wuppertal, West Germany, the daughter of Eric Ismay, a British soldier, and Gerda Freitag, a German woman who worked at the British barracks. The family moved to the UK in 1952, but within a year Eric was posted to Korea as a UN peacekeeper, so Sue and her mother spent the next three years in the company of other German wives of British soldiers in a row of tin huts at the army barracks in Hampshire.
The family moved house frequently as her father pursued his career. Sue went to seven different primary schools and quickly learned to change her accent as soon as she encountered her new classmates.
In 1968, she went to the University of Essex, where she studied politics and Russian, subjects that helped feed her lifelong interest in leftwing, internationalist politics. After university, she moved to Manchester, where she started her teaching career, and married Tudor Owen in 1978. I was born later that year, followed by my two sisters, Rachel in 1980 and Siân in 1989. She gave the three of us a firm moral sense and a clear feminist outlook.
She and Tudor were always hugely encouraging and supportive of their children’s ambitions, and, later, the source of irreplaceable help, advice, childcare and love when we had children of our own.
After their retirement a decade ago, my parents threw themselves enthusiastically into language, history and art classes, volunteering for a refugee charity, travelling, spending time with their close-knit group of friends, and singing in local choirs. Sue loved to sing – especially Joni Mitchell songs, always adding her own improvisations to the melody.
From 2015 to 2019 Sue and Tudor also cared for Sue’s elderly mother, and, after Gerda’s death, Sue organised a trip with other family members to find the site of the Freitag family farmhouse, once in Germany but now part of Poland. It was a powerful moment for Sue to locate its overgrown remains, along with the wooden church where her grandparents had got married and the town hall where her mother had worked at the start of the war.
She loved the idea of living as far as possible in harmony with nature – as her mother’s family had done on their farm – and in recent years rewilded part of her garden for this reason. A voracious reader of books and the news, for over 50 years Sue would settle down at the dining table each evening to read the Guardian from cover to cover.
She died unexpectedly as a result of an operation – a devastating shock to her family and friends.
She is survived by Tudor, her children, and her grandchildren, Ben, Amy and Dylan, who adored her.
