My mother, Sylvia Wallis, who has died aged 100, spent much of her life in West Yorkshire, working for many years as a local authority clerical worker and for the Widows Advisory Service in Leeds, where she also set up and ran a club for single people.
Despite her associations with Yorkshire, Sylvia was actually born in Cardiff, to Johanna (nee Carney), a housewife, and Sidney Elias, a steelworker. When she was nine, her father, a Communist party member and chair of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, was imprisoned for three years for sedition after visiting the Soviet Union and writing a letter there calling for a revolution in the UK.
