Dr NICOLA HUMBERSTONE

19 November 1947 – 8 February 2026

By Lindsay River

Nic Humberstone was known to many in London, Norfolk, the University of Warwick and wider afield.  She was known best for her long time feminist and socialist activism, then to some for her work on soap operas in academic sociology, and with older people and carers in North and East London.  Latterly she became familiar to many for theatre with the London lesbian group Drill Hall Darlings, A Carnation for a Song older LGBT group at the Young Vic, the comic duo Vic and Nic, the Mildmay Theatre Group, many other community drama projects and to students of drama at City Lit.

Her sharp intelligence was mesmerising and she was tremendously funny. Soon after I met her in 1994, I found myself on a headland in Frinton where she made me laugh so much I was afraid I was going to suffocate.  It was worth the risk.    When I met her, she drank too much and ate too little.  She was so thin her bony bottom drilled a hole in my wicker rocking chair as she rocked back and forth.  After a few years we were fatter, more sober and happier, and we were together as partners til 2004.  We remained close friends until she died.

Nic had escaped from a very difficult childhood in Bedford, a childhood marked by lack of maternal love.  It was however illuminated by the consistent deep affection of her much older half-sister Linda and the support of a series of cats, in particular a tom cat called Butch.  After Linda got married it was probably cats that kept Nic sane in between visits to Linda.  Though quite a small girl, she went on the train, clutching special Bedford sausages from her mother, some of which she ate raw.

She scrambled through into her teens. It was not easy for a young working-class lesbian in the mid-sixties.   No support, no visibility: where were the lesbians?  There were rumours of Dusty Springfield but no actual noticeable lesbian presence in any communities Nic encountered.  She told a wonderful story (which will be published when we have collected her monologues) about going to a Marianne Faithfull concert and being kissed by her at the stage door.  The story is replete with ironies and wry retrospective social commentary.  An acute social commentator, Nic was always fascinating in analysing her own past, while conveying not only the loneliness, but the drama, ecstatic excitement and sheer joy she discovered even in unlikely places.

After being thrown out of school at 15, she worked in various unpleasant jobs and did manage to leave her unwelcoming home for a tiny bedsit (where she sometimes had to climb in and out of a window to access it because the door got blocked}.  She discovered a paperback novel by Cressida Lindsay titled No John No, and it actually featured lesbians. There was nothing to lose so she wrote to the author.  Amazingly, Cressida wrote back inviting her to a commune in Norfolk. Nic set off, greatly excited.  But disappointingly there were no lesbians there.

After some complex adventures Nic did end up studying for A levels and she met her first girlfriend at Norwich Tech. They went to Warwick University together. You can read Nic’s vibrant account of their activism against patriarchal teaching there in an article called Lesbians Ignite at Warwick University. It is here on HOWL.

Nic’s outraged, creative politics developed further in the Women’s Liberation Movement.   She went on to campaign on many queer feminist and socialist issues, for Palestine, against the war in Iraq, against fascism, and she would be out there now had she lived.  She never forgot the dire impact of class in the UK and her politics were always intersectional. Nic was greatly loved by women she taught at Morley College where she opened doors to university and new careers to those who were mature students, as she had once been classified herself though only in her early twenties.

Nic taught me too.  She gave me a new career developing older people’s services, sharing her particular exciting anti-ageist approach that I had not experienced before. She could cut out a lazy or sentimental or even unnoticeable bit of ageism from the design of any project, with the forensic scalpel of her gleaming intelligence.  It was terrifying and the true original meaning of awesome.

Nic was doing excellent work ever since I knew her – for a long time with Age UK and with community organisations in the east end and in Camden, with Opening Doors for older LGBTQI+ communities, and with the NHS, improving services to older people in hospital. She and her colleagues have won awards for this from the NHS.  For her work with The Association of Greater London Older Women came an award for work she pioneered and promoted – the use of improvised drama to raise awareness about issues impacting older women. We improvised in performance when training other organisations, not just in the development of our sketches.   As older women of varied ages who were members of AGLOW it was far more accessible to act out a story rather than to have to learn lines.  AGLOW used improvised drama on many issues based on the experiences of members who were diverse in sexuality and background.   Often it was the hidden ageism we brought out.   In separate sessions (as AGLOW and my organisation Polari) Nic and I trained staff and volunteers on the existence and needs of older lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans older people.

Nic loved working with older people, she saw their/our skills, the resourcefulness, resilience, humour. She was very popular and older people she worked with found it hilarious when Nic was filmed on TV news buying tobacco from a street stall. The joke was she was doing some work on smoking cessation in the East End.   She was instantly recognisable in her trademark leopard coat.

While tremendously generous to the older people she worked with, Nic could be a stringent critic, and her sarcasm was often merciless.  She had strong opinions and neither fools nor the self-serving and careerist were suffered gladly. Her keen intelligence and social criticism led her to seek a more sustained expression of her ideas, and she turned again to the sociology that had inspired her in her youth.

She wanted to examine the way the exciting seventies feminism she’d been part of has been misrepresented in retrospective summaries in both the media and academia.  This sadly proved impossible to undertake with the University of East London that she approached first.   She changed tack, moved to Middlesex Uni and decided to do a PhD looking at soap opera’s representation of LGBT people.  She set out to examine how these soaps with their fictional LGBTQ characters had been represented and also how they had been received by older audiences.   She discovered real diversity in that reception.  Even in the more conservative of the sites where she undertook interviews, older women told her of their memories of queer people: lesbian telephonists in World War Two for instance.   Her thesis is well worth a read and can be found at Older People, Sexualities and Soap Operas: Representations of Lesbian – DocsLib. Nic wanted to become an actor when she was young, but she had no chances. From her fifties she shared a lot of her life through dramatic monologues sometimes reflecting memories of surviving that sixties Bedford, in other work she explored fantasy and sometimes surreal scenarios.  She had many fans.

Lifelong she had a particular facility, based I think on a long-lasting jubilation that she had escaped from that personal desert of repression and the absence of generosity, a facility for joy and enthusiasm.  There was so much she loved: theatre, film, literature, marvellous women actors, sketching people in cafes, walking along the Thames path, going bat detecting in cemeteries, and always the analysis of societal trends.  There was a joke she never tired of: ‘Let me through, let me through, I’m a sociologist!’ So much brought her joy but especially and reliably, cats, coffee and cryptic crosswords.   I shall never see her like again and I know a huge number of others who feel the same.

Note:  Nic’s archive will be housed at Bishopsgate Institute’s Special Collection and Archive:  https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/stories/