My mother, Agnes Labor, who has died aged 96, was a Sierra Leonean educationist and politician, and the first black teacher in Leeds, where she qualified and took her first teaching post in 1956.
She was born in the Gambia, to the Rev Melville Cole, a Sierra Leonean vicar, and Louisa Brown, a Gambian teacher. In her early teens, Agnes was sent to Sierra Leone to live with an aunt. After leaving the Freetown secondary school for girls she became a primary school teacher. In 1953 she received a UK scholarship and travelled to Leeds to study at the Yorkshire Training College of Housecraft (which later became part of Leeds Polytechnic, subsequently Leeds Beckett University).
