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Before the days of incubators for premature babies, Frieda Fordham was born in Salford, two months before she had been expected, on 23 February, 1903. She died aged almost 85 on 7 January, 1988, and into those years she packed a tremendous amount of living. Her inheritance was not a simple one: her mother was a talented singer and writer, an independent character, whereas her father was an accountant and a business man, perhaps a more pedestrian person and certainly very upright. Another important person in her young life was her maternal grandfather, who had been president of the United Methodist Free Churches. I believe she partly admired him and partly identified with her mother's rebellious attitudes to patriarchal men. Her grandmother was a stable influence in her somewhat disordered childhood, as her parents' marriage did not last.
Frieda was recognised as intellectually gifted at Halifax Girls' School, but she chose to become a dancer: she wanted—repeating her early birth?—to go out quickly into the world, using her artistic gifts and postponing further studies. Being lively, good-looking and, I expect, charming, she married Percy Campbell Hoyle very young. He had been an Air Force pilot in the 1914-1918 war; they had two sons. However, like her mother, she was unable to accept incompatibility. They went their separate ways and she brought up the boys.
The experience of being a single mother of sons who had to go to a Roman Catholic preparatory school, where they were unhappy, led to her interest in education and in children's problems. After studying social science at the London School of Economics she trained as a psychiatric social worker, and with that the tide turned. The stages of her life up to then and before she became well known were those through which many women in this century have had to pass. Thereafter she carved out her own way, but not on her own—in the early 1930s while working at the London Child Guidance Clinic she met Michael Fordham. Then