My mother, Madge Elliot, who has died aged 95, after 10 years of coping with Alzheimer’s disease, was a railway campaigner, tennis coach and local activist in Hawick, in the Scottish Borders.
She was propelled into public life in the late 1960s when, with assistance from the Rev Brydon Maben, she embarked on coordinating a campaign to save the Waverley railway route, which ran between Edinburgh Waverley and Carlisle Citadel via Hawick, from proposed closure.
In November 1968, she was the driving force among those who set up a petition protesting against the withdrawal of passenger services. This attracted 11,678 signatures within 25 days, and was delivered to 10 Downing Street on 18 December 1968. The communication, coordination and effort involved in managing such a campaign, long before the days of the internet, was no mean feat for Madge, who, at the time, described herself as “a mere housewife”.
Despite the protests, the line closed to passenger traffic on 6 January 1969. My mother, though, was never prepared to accept the decision, which effectively left her home town of Hawick without access to 20th-century public transport. Her involvement with campaigns to restore rail services in the Borders continued for decades, and from 1998, with the Campaign for Borders Rail, began to make an impact. The Borders Railway between Edinburgh and Tweedbank opened in September 2015.
Born in Hawick, to Rebecca (nee Gemmell) and George Robson, both hosiery workers, Madge attended Drumlanrig primary and Hawick high schools before leaving in 1942 to do secretarial work for the knitwear company Robert Pringle & Son, now Pringle of Scotland. She gave up working in 1952 after marrying Bob Elliot, a secondary school teacher, to concentrate on homemaking and raising their two sons, Sean and me.
Madge had met Bob while playing tennis on public courts at Wilton Park in Hawick. Among a group of regular participants, they established Wilton Park Tennis Club in 1948. Both qualified and became tennis coaches during the 1950s. They spent their summers at the club, playing and organising matches and competitions for the many juniors who passed through their hands, and even managing the courts when a council court attendant was no longer provided.
When the concept of short tennis was devised, they grasped the opportunity and each winter, for almost three decades, spent hours volunteering their skills coaching local children at Hawick high school’s games hall at weekends. Their devotion enthused countless young players and they were an influential partnership, producing a steady stream of players successful at club, county and national level.
A lifelong socialist, Madge involved herself in a swathe of Hawick organisations and was always ready to stand up to the powers-that-be for any perceived injustice meted out to the town, her rail campaign a testimony to her tenacity.
My father died in 2016. My mother is survived by Sean and me, four grandsons and four great-grandchildren.
