- The Guardian, Tuesday 13 April 2010
When he was demobilised after the second world war, my husband Ray Oakley, who has died of cancer aged 86, tried various jobs, but his true passion lay with young people and, in 1962, he was accepted by the Home Office to work as a housemaster at an approved school for teenage boys. This experience inspired him, as a mature student, to go to Leicester University to qualify for a degree in probation and social work.
Ray subsequently worked in Warwickshire as a probation officer and then later with social services, eventually becoming adoptions officer in the early 1970s. He helped set up the charity Parents for Children in 1974, an agency in London specialising in finding homes for children who were hard to place. Later he became a social work education adviser with the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work until his retirement in 1986.
Ray was born and brought up by his widowed mother on the Herefordshire-Worcestershire border, where he and his three siblings enjoyed a secure and loving childhood. He left school at 14 with a thirst for knowledge and sought to educate himself further by reading and attending evening classes.
When he was 18 he joined the RAF and trained as a wireless operator in Bomber Command. In a positive mood, he used to say that his days in the RAF were his university, although the experience, at such a tender age, affected him greatly and he rarely talked about it until the last few years of his life.
Ray was a man of immense intellect, widely read and a great conversationalist, with a passion for music. A loving and supportive husband to me, and proud father of Alison and Kate, he is survived by the three of us, and by his four grandchildren.
