A GREAT-grandmother who was once chairman of the Oxford Young Women’s Christian Association has died, aged 92.

Deborah Kirkwood, below, was one of a generation of dons’ wives who dedicated much of their younger adult lives to supporting their husbands and rearing large families in the Victorian houses of north Oxford.

When the responsibilities of caring for her six children ended, Devon-born Mrs Kirkwood dedicated herself to city groups as well as contributing to academic studies on the role of wives in society.

She spent much of her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and later became a nurse in Nairobi, Kenya, where she met her future husband Kenneth. He became Oxford University’s first Professor of Race Relations and died 13 years ago. Through Oxford’s International Gender Studies Centre Mrs Kirkwood contributed to – and co-edited – several books.

She had been a chairman of the Oxford YWCA, a governor of Bishop Kirk (later Frideswide) School and a church warden at SS Philip and James Church. She was a grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother to eight.Mrs Kirkwood also had a long association with the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

She lived in Woodstock Road until her death.