My colleague Hilary Friend, who has died aged 82, had a fiercely intelligent mind. She combined a career in adult education with an active interest in music, and was a skilled pianist, recorder player and sang in several choirs.
From 1999 to 2012, she led the Women’s Revolutions Per Minute (WRPM) project, a non-profit company involved in the research, marketing and sales of music by women in many genres, especially world music and political songs.
Following a classics and philosophy degree at Oxford (1966), and a PGCE at King’s College London, she taught languages, philosophy and literature in schools and colleges, while living in Brixton, south London. For 20 years from 1974 she worked as a tutor and manager in adult education in inner city London, Bedford and Manchester, focusing on equal opportunities and second-chance education.
We met while she was head, in 1985-88, of the North Hulme centre, part of Manchester city council’s community education service. This coincided with major urban redevelopment programmesin the city, which posed challenges for a team of educators eager to engage with the community. This proved an opportunity for Hilary to pursue her fight for inclusive forms of education for all, and she wrote up her research insights with an MA thesis on inner city regeneration and adult education at Manchester University.
In 1999 she took over as director of the WRPM project, which was founded in 1977, and in 2012 she deposited the WRPM collection and archive at Goldsmiths, University, London, becoming a visiting research fellow there. She co-authored a chapter on WRPM in the Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership (2024).
Hilary was born in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, and had two sisters, Judith and Alison. In 1949, when she was six, her father, John Friend, was appointed principal of Bretton Hall College of Education in West Yorkshire, while her mother, Mary (nee Pamenter) volunteered in the college library. She lived at the college for 14 years, attending Wakefield girls high school.
Her Oxford degree subjects notwithstanding, she had a clear preference for music. While at St Hilda’s College, she set up a choir.
At the age of 64, Hilary undertook a music access course at Morley College, London, relishing composing her own music and experimenting with sound and technology. Elsewhere she attended courses including a cappella singing, folk music and voicework.
A firm feminist, she had a love of nature and a commitment to social justice that combined in her support, for example, for the Right to Roam movement. Hilary was a fount of creativity. She had a strong moral compass; a quiet dignity and self-confidence. She shared her knowledge with those around her and had a special talent for communicating with children.
In 1971 she married Michael Turnbull, a New Zealand author who also worked in publishing, with whom she had two daughters, Isabel and Diana. They divorced in 1996, and Michael died in 1998.
She is survived by her daughters, and by her granddaughter, Melissa.
