Mrs Deborah Kirkwood: Don’s wife and a major figure in North Oxford life

Deborah Kirkwood 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, Mrs Kirkwood dedicated herself to city groups as well as contributing to academic studies on the role of wives in society.

Born in Devon, Mrs Kirkwood spent much of her childhood in what is now Zimbabwe, where her father, a mining geologist, had found gold.

After he died when she was just 11, her mother initiated a series of expeditions ‘home’, resulting in an education that encompassed schools in England and Africa and studies at Paris’s Sorbonne.

It was a comfortable though somewhat frivolous life, she later recalled, until a wartime encounter changed everything.

While nursing in Nairobi she met her future husband, a young South African soldier called Kenneth Kirkwood.

In 1953, he was recruited from South Africa to become Oxford University’s first professor of race relations. Professor Kirkwood died 13 years ago.

Through Oxford’s International Gender Studies Centre, Mrs Kirkwood contributed to — and co-edited — Women and Missions, Past and Present; anthropological and historical perspectives (1993).

She also contributed two chapters to The Incorporated Wife (1984).

In 1978 she translated a book about Rhodesian land reform from French to English and together with her late husband had a long association with the Budiriro Trust, which supports education in Zimbabwe, as well as the Oxford United Nations Association.

She had been a chairman of the Oxford YWCA, a governor of Bishop Kirk (later Frideswide) School and a churchwarden at SS Philip and James Church, and 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.