25-05-2025
Annabel Cole obituary
My mother, Annabel Cole, who has died aged 101, led a remarkably varied life as well as a very long one. It spanned a childhood in France, a spell in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during the second world war, protesting at Greenham Common, local politics, teaching and painting.
She was descended from the Quaker Fry family, her maternal grandfather being the Bloomsbury art critic Roger Fry. Her mother, Pamela Fry, fell in love with a Romanian Jew, Avram Diamand, at art school in Paris, and Annabel was born in their studio there.
The family moved to Britain in 1932, as the whisperings of impending fascism became louder. She attended a range of schools, including Maldon grammar school and Chelmsford high school in Essex, and the progressive boarding school Frensham Heights in Surrey, before evacuating with most of her family to Canada early in the second world war.
Annabel spent several years working on farms in Canada before returning to England in 1943 to serve with the WAAF until after the end of the war. She had an eventful time in the WAAF that included helping to organise a successful rebellion against the substandard quarters her unit were ordered to move to.
She married John Cole, a solicitor, in 1948 and had three children – me, Peter and Rachel – over the next six years. Fiercely intelligent, she became increasingly frustrated by her role as mother and housewife, and once the children were at school she was able to expand her horizons.
Attending St Osyth's teacher training college in Clacton during the 1960s gave her the intellectual stimulation she had been missing; afterwards she taught in several primary schools in the Essex area, the last one of which involved helping visually impaired children.
Annabel's retirement in the mid-1970s began another chapter in her life, and perhaps the most colourful. She had been an active opponent of nuclear weapons for many years and became secretary of Colchester CND. A frequent visitor to Greenham Common, she was arrested on one occasion (though spared a prison sentence) for cutting through the barbed wire perimeter fence.
She remained politically involved well into her 90s and a distinctive (though tiny) figure on the streets of Lewes in East Sussex, where she lived for much of her retirement. She moved into a care home only at the age of 99, and even then very much on her own terms.
John died in 1991. She is survived by her three children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
