Muriel Gofton

Her story is a remarkable one of a woman who, after sacrificing academic aspirations, spent her thirties working in the so-called displaced persons camps of war-torn Europe, before returning to found the Cala Sona Refugee Enterprise in Netherton, Wishaw.

The project, which began with a mansion house and later grew to include a neat row of prefabricated homes, was funded by money begged and wheedled from the Church of Scotland, Rotary Clubs and various local organisations. It provided a safe haven and a new start for seven families from across Eastern Europe, a few of whom remain in the homes to this day.

Miss Gofton was born in Middlesborough in 1912 and educated in Manchester. Her sense of duty and a desire to care for others may well have been born during her teenage years when, inspite of demonstrating a flare for languages, she abandoned hopes of a university education and returned home to care for her sick mother.

After her mother's death, she stayed at home to care for her father, a tuberculosis sufferer who had been gassed in the trenches during the First World War. He died when Miss Gofton was 21, and with the outbreak of war she joined the Red Cross, serving in hospitals across Europe.

At the end of the war, Miss Gofton was a member of one of the five Red Cross teams who entered Belsen concentration camp three days after it was liberated by the Allies. Over the next few years she worked in refugee camps across Western Germany, most of whose internees had been brought to Germany as cheap labour. By the early fifties, the majority who languished in these camps were tuberculosis suffers who became Europe's unwanted, stigmatised, stateless and unable to emigrate.

Their plight appalled Miss Gofton, and in 1957, determined to help, she applied and was granted permission by the Ministry of Health to bring a group to Britain. She chose Wishaw, after being advised by the Ministry of Labour that the refugees would be able to find work in the local area.

Interviewed at the time, Miss Gofton said her aim was to restore the health and the pride of people whose suffering was unimaginable. Decades on, the children of the refugees are testimony to her success, most having gone on to higher education.

After buying a small, stone mansion house in Netherton, Miss Gofton brought the families she had selected to Scotland. A year later, she built a row of wooden prefabricated homes. Each had a small garden.

To support the community Miss Gofton bought two shops in Netherton, a haberdashery and a fish and chip shop. By the seventies, the shops had gone and only three refugees remained in the mansion house. Faced with spiralling heating costs, Miss Gofton decided to sell the building to the Margaret Blackwood Housing Association, who converted it flats for the disabled.

Finally, crippled by arthritis, Miss Gofton left the community she founded and moved in 1988 into a nursing home in Larkhall.

Yesterday, the few frail refugees still living in the wooden houses and the new flats built by the Margaret Blackwood Housing Association described Miss Gofton as a remarkable woman who had remained a friend.

Reluctant to delve back into the dark past and their own war-time experiences, they recounted how Miss Gofton had always fought prejudice, on one occassion insisting a local minister talk to school children who had taunted the German-speaking refugee children. She was, they said, a deeply religious woman with a love of classical music and an ingrained sense of social injustice. Though retired and increasingly in poor health, she continued to fight for the rights of others, often writing letters of protest. Over the years she kept an account of her work and the fate of those she brought to Scotland, but left instructions on her death that the book should not be published.

Miss Gofton never married, and is survived in Scotland by her cousin John Gofton, four cousins abroad, and her niece, Vanessa Scarth.