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This is Sheila Triggs on the 3rd of December 2014 interviewing Paula Shaw particularly about the memories of her great-aunt. Hello, I'm Paula Shaw and I'm here to talk about my great-aunt Mertscher. So do you want to tell us a little bit about who she was and when she was?

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Yes, my great-aunt Mertscher was born as Miriam Karpovich in Russia in 1896 and after the Russian Revolution she came to England. She was then a trained biology teacher and she came and married Alex Kay who was the first Labour Chancellor in Liverpool and she was involved with WILF at least from the 1950s.

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It may have been before but I don't have any recollection because I was only born in 1953. Good, good. So do you want to say something about what might have influenced her and how she got going and any background?

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Yes she was a very stern lady but very kind as well and her family, her parents sort of died when she came to England but her sisters and brothers were all killed during the Holocaust and I would guess that would have been when she actually got very involved with WILF. My father came to this country to live with her in 1938 and he never went back because

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his parents were killed in 1943 at Majanek. She was certainly involved with the peace movement then because I remember as a child sort of these mainly ladies coming around and having meetings. The other thing I have from the early days is a recipe book which contributions from

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WILF members of the Liverpool branch with all their recipes. I have got a very dog-eared copy of that recipe book. That's interesting that they considered that was a good thing to produce at that time and you've used this recipe book?

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I have, there was a lovely apple sponge cake which she used to make and I have done that and my children love it too even though they're grown up. I still haven't conquered chopped liver but I'm not a practising Jew so it's all right. I forgot to say she was Jewish so obviously.

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Right, so do you want to talk about your experiences when you were growing up of the sorts of things you observed her doing and as you got older what you understood of that? Yes, when I was 10 I was aware that she did go away and I didn't know at the time but I have a copy of her notebook from that year and she actually went to the World Peace

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Congress in Moscow in 1963 and I remember her talking to my father about Khrushchev and listening to him speak and how he wasn't, well I won't say what her views on him were because I can't remember exactly but quite often they used to talk in Yiddish if they didn't want me to understand what was being said but she did go to Russia and go to the

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World Peace Congress. Do you think she was a delegate then? She was a delegate, she wrote a report for the WILPF Peace and Freedom News which I still have the copy of that and I still have her original notes in a notebook which she used to make the report to WILPF. So it sounds like the Liverpool branch was quite active in those

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days in the 60s. She kept involved with it and as I got older I didn't go and stay as much. As a child I used to go every summer, my father always went to chemical conferences and I was dumped there happily but as I got older I didn't but I do know that she kept getting the WILPF newsletters right up to 1978 so she'd obviously stayed as a member and

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she died in 1979 but she did teach me a lot about being non-judgmental and listening to all sides as did my father and I think that came from her involvement with WILPF and her natural way of being. And how old was she in 1979 when she died? Oh my maths is bad. She was in an old people's home in Didsbury, Manchester. I think she was 90 odd but if

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she was born 1896 and she died in 1979 I should be able to work that out but you're working it out quicker. So you've mentioned some of the influences you think she had on you and the ideas that were coming from WILPF in those days. The fact that she had travelled to Moscow for this conference,

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did she go on any other trips? Not that she talked to me about all that I can remember because we are going back quite a way. She had a lot of influence on me as did my father politically. I think when my father first came to this country and lived with her he was a member of the Communist Party. As he got his English language and he got a degree and he went into

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industry he realised he wouldn't get a job with ICI if he was a member of the Communist Party. So then the Labour Party came in and she was very strongly Labour which is probably why I ended up as a Labour councillor for so many years. So her influence politically and they were secular. My father didn't practice Judaism. She did practice it when I was a child we used to have

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the Sabbath every Saturday but they were secular Jews they weren't really into all the traditional stuff. So there was influence there of different countries because there were relatives, not many, relatives and friends that used to come and stay at her house when I was there from different places and again my father had that because he worked around the world.

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And any other WILF women that you were aware of in those years? Not that I could remember accurately. There probably were some of the Liverpool branch members but when I had some time in 2006-7 I started looking through some of her documents. That's when I looked on the internet to see if it still existed which was when I became a member because

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I found it did exist so I was very pleased. So she influenced me to join a bit late. That's very interesting that you felt that. You waited until you felt you had the time. I had the time and also had the sense to think well if it still exists I could probably find it on the internet because I'd nowhere else to sort of search. But yes and now I'm in London I can

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help out as much as I can. So the name Ruth Osborne doesn't mean anything to you because she was a member of the Liverpool branch but I'm not sure if it was the same time. It's not ringing any bells. I mean there was a lady, a Christian lady because my aunt didn't have any prejudices called Connie Crease who may possibly have been because she was very

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involved with everything my great-aunt did. So I don't know if that name might be an old member. No there was someone called Edith or Ellen Dransfield something like that. No I mean their names will be if they did recipes their names should be at the bottom of these recipes as well. There's a Mrs Perry, a Mrs Bennington, Mrs Benson, Mrs Booth, Mrs Brunton.

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There's quite a few names here which I'm guessing would have been mainly world members but I didn't personally know them and even if I did I was a child and don't have much memory of it. But she was an inspiring lady my great-aunt. As I say she was quite, she didn't have any children of her own and she was certainly not a maternal aunt but she had a lot of intelligence

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and a lovely way. Everybody felt welcome there even if she was a little bit off-hand sometimes. And did she work at any stage in her life? She worked as a teacher. She used to teach biology when she was still in Russia. I have a photograph of her in Russia with this all boys in these strange clothes. I think then when she married my uncle Alex she didn't work. I don't know why

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whether it was just the way that it was in those days. I can't remember her working any time after that. She might have been of retirement age by then? Yes 18, yeah but I mean she supported and did the home in the old-fashioned way with everything was homemade. There was always loads of cakes because there's always loads of visitors and typical housewife but with her other interests,

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her politics, her wealth and possibly other things I don't know about. Are there some other ideas that you want to share with us about your aunt? My great aunt. I can't think of anything else. I'm just very proud that she was my great aunt because she was a wonderful lady and the fact that she took my father in when he was sort of 16, 17

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and he had a home with them. I mean she must have been going through a lot of upset herself with what was going on with the rest of the family. But when she did die the photograph she had eventually came down to me. So it's meant that I've been able to research the rest of the family and actually with my daughters go back to Poland which is the same area,

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Białystok and see all the things they talked about. So I only did that this year so that's been great. Do you want to say some more about that? Only that my father's brother, he escaped from Poland. He was four years older than my father and he escaped and got false papers and ended up in Israel as a solicitor and they kept in touch a little bit. I went to stay with them

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when I was 15 and then over the years I've lost touch and through Facebook, which I'm not advertising for at all, my cousin who is now 52, I last saw him when he was five, has managed to get in touch with me because I'd done research in the museums in Białystok that alerted him who was trying to find out things about his father. So we're actually back in contact and my other

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cousins, one in Canada, one in New York, so my cousins are actually in touch with me or I'm in touch with them. And my aunt Mercia, when she did die, she separated her money out. I know it's a bit morbid but each of the four of us got the same amount of money which helped us all set up with whatever we were doing at that time. So it's a link. And how old was your father when he, I mean

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you said how old he was but what year was that when he came? He came 1938-39. I'm still on the photographs, I've still got one of him in Warsaw in 1938. His naturalisation papers only come from 1947 when he was in the army and I can't find any other incoming documents of how he arrived as a passenger. So I've got pictures of him in Liverpool in a schoolboy's uniform in 1939, so sometime

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1938-39. So he was 16 going on 17 without any English because he told me when he travelled here he had to fill a form in and he had to put whether he was male or female and he put M-A-I-L because he didn't understand the English language with the male and the female so he's a bit post.

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Very good. So you've spent some energy in looking into your family. Family is obviously an important feature for you and for your great-aunt I think. Definitely and to share that with my own daughters one of which is 40 next week, the other 38, goes on down to their children and it's history is too society as memory is to the individual. Who's that? That's Arthur Marwick who's an Open University

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tutor but yes it's that sense of belonging and where you come from that's important, especially when they've travelled round a bit. So maybe you would like to say something about yourself in relation to WILPF. You did say a little bit before how you decided to join and maybe a little bit

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about WILPF itself and where you think it should be going. I think it's doing an amazing job, the only thing that upsets me is so few people know about it so I personally will do my best to advertise it and publicise it as I can. I'm trying to think, I'm not a feminist but I do believe that women have far more common sense and so actually stand a chance of getting peace. I

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think a women's organisation is the only way to go. I'm trying to think what else, I'm happy to do anything I can to help because I don't particularly want a job in it anywhere so in a voluntary capacity I'm quite happy to do anything and it will come. I mean we have got bits of news around now, we're getting back to pushing nuclear disarmament. I managed to get a motion through

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at my local branch in Hackney and now Hackney have adopted the recommitments to nuclear disarmament so if a few branches do that, obviously Labour Party, you never know, things might put a bit of pressure on. I'm a little cynical these days but I'm not cynical about WILPF at all. And when you were a councillor, what were the years of that? 1996 to 2006 in the London Borough of

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Croydon. And what did you feel you could do in local government? I mean you obviously had stood as a councillor, Labour councillor because you felt there was something there for you to do. I'd worked for local government from early 80s, tried to change things for young people, not got very far, just did a little bit so I thought if I go in as a representative maybe

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I'll be able to change things that way. I did change a few things, there was a couple of things I was really proud of but most of it is a nightmare of trying to get change to happen, same as with MPs and the civil service, the officers always want to have things done their way and if you get some sort of new idea it's sort of very hard to get that through. But we

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did end up with an excellent children's rights service in Croydon which unfortunately has gone now. We did end up with modernised homes for elderly people, especially with dementia, which was a bit of a risk at the time but in the end everyone's had to do it so there's a few things that we changed, there's a lot more that could have been changed.

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I really enjoyed it, I'd ended up as deputy leader which I don't think I enjoyed as much because it was all the meetings with all chief execs everywhere and being scrutinised by the mayor of London at City Hall and things like that. But I think the role I did enjoy the most was the sort of thing my great aunt used to do, not as a councillor but helping people with their

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housing problems or pointing them in the right direction, not doing things for them, just sort of getting through the system for them. So the casework for people in the ward that I represented was the best bit and I have thought of doing that again but I think grandchildren take precedence. Now one of the things that interests me is that first your great aunt was at home when she was

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active and also when you were at work you weren't involved with Wilt. Is there something to say there about how we engage women in the working years and so on? I think what I saw at the excellent seminar on Saturday when you've got young students getting involved, I think if Wilt can get them whilst they're at that stage they'll stick with it. I think in the past maybe

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there's been an older age group and we don't go on forever so it's really important to get some young blood and I think the links with SOAS and some of the other organisations Wilt have got, I think that's the answer for getting passionate young people involved. But there's a huge gap with the sort of, I don't know, late 20s, 30s, 40s of getting the message over but if we get

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them in their late teens, 20s, hopefully they'll stay as Wilt members and it'll pass on. There is a need to sort of advertise it more but there's very cynical apathy out there for any organisation that's trying to do the right thing such as Wilt. But there must be some other ways into the schools, you know, but everybody's trying now.

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And the other thing that is in my mind is about we have in Wilt this voice at the international level or at these these fora and then we are also on the ground locally. Is there something to say there about how we are able to link people up into that? Well the website's very good. I mean that's, and if people have got a particular interest

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like I have with still going with Rebecca Johnson's Ban the Bomb, you can find out more and more and that is very, very open. So if anybody's got a particular side of peace that they want to go for then it's through the website which I think is brilliant. I've lost track now of what I was saying. Sorry.

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No, that's fine. Is there anything else that you feel you want to, you haven't had an opportunity to say that you want to say, leave for people to think about and so on? Personally I felt I could get more involved when I moved to London. I think where I lived before in North East Lincolnshire was the back

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end of the world. I wasn't aware of any other members around there and I don't know how we get out to the rest of the country. I know we're international but we do need to actually reach some of the bits like you have with your recent good news on Cornwall but somehow, I don't know how, whether we go and do little missions out into the back of beyond or, I don't know how we

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do it but the website's one way to start, just letting people know about that. I don't know. Good. That's all very good and interesting and thank you very much for doing that. That's all right. It's a pleasure.