My mother Joan White, who has died aged 95, was a Yorkshire railwayman's daughter who, from Cockburn high school, Leeds, won a scholarship to read French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
She was the daughter of William Sutton, who served in the army throughout the first world war, and his wife, Minnie. After the war, three more children were born and the family experienced severe poverty, alleviated when William secured a job on the railways.
During her three years at Oxford, Joan would sometimes send money home from her meagre grant to pay the family's bills. She was highly sceptical of the middle-class Communist party faction in the Oxford Union. "They knew nothing about the working class," she would say, and her politics remained liberal for the rest of her life.
But university opened new worlds to her. She supported herself in the summer vacations and became fluent in French by working for a doctor's family in Malbuisson, in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France – a practice she continued after she graduated and became a teacher. The outbreak of the second world war thwarted her hopes of building a new life in France. She left in September 1939 on one of the last boat trains out, and spent the war teaching in Derbyshire and Leeds.
In 1945 Joan married Donald White, an organic chemist who taught for many years at Salford Technical College (now Salford University). They lived in Manchester and then Lytham St Annes, and had two daughters who in turn became scholarship girls. Janet studied physics at Imperial College London, and I read history at my mother's alma mater. "Get your qualifications," she would say, "and then you can do what you like."
She encouraged us in freedoms she herself had tasted all too briefly. An excellent linguist, widely read in French literature – she loved Balzac – Joan sacrificed career for family, helping to care for her elderly parents and an aunt who all moved from Leeds. She continued to teach part-time, retiring when she and her husband moved to Kingsclere, Berkshire, where Donald died in 1983. She spent her last years in a retirement home in Wimbledon, south-west London, outliving her three younger siblings, Jeffrey, Dorothy and Leslie.
She is survived by Janet and me, and two grandsons, Christopher and Scott.