Sheila MacKay obituary

My friend Sheila MacKay, who has died aged 75, was a community worker, an educator and a lifelong activist for peace and justice. She spent her life exploring what it means to tackle inequality by working within groups where people supported one another. She was also immense fun.

With her lifelong partner, Margaret Bremner, Sheila was in 1984 one of the founder members of the Gareloch Horts, a women’s nonviolent direct-action group that, more than 40 years on, is still protesting against the UK’s nuclear weapons. She took part in many eye-catching actions at the nuclear bases at Faslane, Coulport and Greenham, at international arms fairs and at the parliament buildings in Scotland and London, for which she was arrested many times.

Born in Glasgow to Kathleen (nee Reid), a welfare officer, and James MacKay, a chartered accountant, Sheila grew up sharing her parents’ social concerns and ideals. Her fight against injustice started in childhood when she realised that her brother’s shorts had pockets, but hers did not.

After Glasgow high school for girls, Sheila did an arts degree at Glasgow University, graduating in 1972, then spent two years on a VSO assignment in Brunei.

Back in the city, she completed her training in community education at Jordanhill College and went on to community work in Clydebank, then adult education in Maryhill, creating women’s training courses in areas such as confidence building and women’s health, as well as basic education. After two years as a youth worker at Runshaw College in Preston, Lancashire, Sheila moved to Edinburgh in 1992, where she worked as a women’s project leader at Save the Children, as an outreach worker with Edinburgh Rape Crisis (1994-99), for the Scottish Centre for Nonviolence (1994-99), and as a team leader with East Lothian community and adult education (2002-12).

Sheila’s nephews Patrick and Alistair both lived with a rare genetic disease which, in their teens, left them using wheelchairs. Like their contemporaries, they wanted to travel the world, so in 2003 Sheila and Margaret put together the audacious and amazingly successful Wicked World Tour, which took both boys to the US, Australia, New Zealand and south-east Asia.

With a choir called San Ghanny (meaning “we shall sing” in Arabic), Sheila twice went to Palestine, in 2012 and 2017, to sing alongside and in solidarity with oppressed communities in the occupied West Bank.

I met Sheila when I joined the Horts in 2001. She lived with a sense of wonder and openness, inviting people to be the best version of themselves, but at the same time loving everyone exactly as they were.

She and Margaret had a civil partnership in 2008. Margaret survives her, as do her brother, Hamish, and her nephews, Steven and Gavin. Her sister, Jean, and Patrick and Alistair, predeceased her.