My mother, Sheila Hawton, who has died aged 91, liked in her later years to surprise people with the fact that her first job was as a computer programmer.
After graduating from Royal Holloway College, which was then an all-women’s college of London University (and is now Royal Holloway London), with a master’s in aerodynamics, in the early 1950s she headed to Ferranti in Manchester and worked with the mathematician Conway Berners-Lee (the father of Tim Berners-Lee) on the Ferranti Mk 1 computer and later the Pegasus computer. Marriage and the arrival of children ended her programming career, as it so often did at that time.
The daughter of Arthur Fletcher, an electrical engineer, and Winifred (nee Russell), a former nanny, Sheila was born in Birmingham, shortly before her twin sister, Joy. She also went on to display strong mathematical skills, eventually studying at Bedford College, London. They were brought up in the city, with the family relocating at the start of the second world war to the Welsh borders for a few years.
After leaving King Edward VI school for girls in Birmingham, Sheila went to Royal Holloway, in Egham, Surrey, where she gained a degree in maths, followed by her master’s. At university, she met Ted Hawton, a student at King’s College London, and they married in 1954.
In 1957, when I was a toddler, our family moved to Zimbabwe to a mission school now called Thekwane, where Ted was to be a maths teacher. Despite having no teaching experience, Sheila stepped in to teach maths when one of the other teachers left unexpectedly. After five years at Thekwane they returned to the UK, by now with three children.
Ted trained as a Methodist minister, and in 1966 they went back to Zimbabwe. In 1973 he was appointed principal at Moleli school, where the previous principal’s wife had been a nurse, so Sheila was expected to run a clinic for the students. Despite having no experience she took on the role. The worst case she dealt with was a punctured lung caused by a stabbing – necessitating a long drive to hospital over dirt roads.
Sheila and Ted returned to the UK in 1976 and Sheila, nearly 20 years after first teaching, completed her PGCE in Birmingham, and taught for two years in Chelmsley Wood, on the outskirts of the city.
My mother provided the back-up to my father’s work as a minister, at the same time as being a much-loved grandmother. When she had a hip replacement, she asked the surgeon if she would be OK playing football afterwards. His jaw dropped … until she explained she only meant kicking about with the grandchildren.
After being widowed in 2010 she lived independently, moving to a care home only two years ago.
She is survived by her children, Malcolm, Sue and me, 10 grandchildren, Jennifer, Emma, Sarah, Rebecca, Deborah, Matthew, Dean, Steven, Gavin and Rosalie, and three great-grandchildren, Lyra, Imogen and Clara, and her brother, Russ. Joy died in 2018.
