Deeply held convictions about social justice guided both the personal and professional life of my friend Helen Cadbury, who has died aged 52 of cancer. She served twice (1998-2008 and 2011-17) on the board of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, the charitable foundation set up by her Quaker forebears to bring about economic, racial, gender and criminal justice. Helen took over as chair of the trust in 2013 when her sister, Ruth, was selected to stand for parliament.
Helen’s literary talents bore fruit in the form of the Sean Denton crime series, based in Yorkshire. Her first novel, To Catch a Rabbit (2013), was chosen by the Yorkshire Post in 2015 as one of the 13 books that best defined the modern county. It was also joint winner of the Northern Crime award that year. A second title, Bones in the Nest, was published in 2015, and the last of the trilogy, Race to Kill, is due to be published in September, followed by a poetry collection, Forever Now, in November.
Helen was born in Birmingham, the youngest of four children of Charles Cadbury, who worked in the family confectionery company at the time, and his wife, Jill (nee Ransome).
Driven by Quaker values, Helen first spoke at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Manchester at the age of 16. She attended King Edward VI high school for girls in Birmingham, Hulme grammar in Oldham, and the Quaker school Leighton Park, Reading, in the sixth form. She then followed a drama and film studies degree at the University of East Anglia with a spell in the Hull Truck theatre company.
In 1992 she met Josh Parker and they married and had two sons, Isaac and Reuben. Realising that touring theatre was incompatible with raising young children, Helen trained as a teacher and taught in two inner-London comprehensive schools.
The family moved to York in 2002. Helen worked at York Theatre Royal as education officer, and Askham Grange women’s open prison, near York, running drama groups. From 2006 until 2013, she was chair of Accessible Arts and Media, a charity running creative learning projects.
Helen’s breast cancer was diagnosed in 2015. After intensive treatment, she recovered long enough to deliver the keynote speech at Asia’s biggest philanthropy conference, held in Hong Kong last autumn, and to finish the third of the Sean Denton novels, for which television film rights have been sold. A WH Smith readers’ vote listed To Catch a Rabbit among the crime books they would most like to see on screen.
Ardent environmentalists who loved the outdoors, Helen and Josh owned a small wood in Yorkshire that gave Helen great joy. Hers was a sparkling, funny, curious intelligence, always put to purposeful good use.
She is survived by Josh, Isaac and Reuben, by Jill and Ruth, and by her brother, Tom.
