silverguide.site –

My father, Ray Wegrzyn, who has died aged 70 after living with Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years, spent his working life writing about other people, and his last year relying on others to find the words for him.

In 2002 he was appointed one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Probation, assessing the efforts of probation services across England and Wales. He believed people could change, and that the work – whether supervising an offender or inspecting a service – deserved honest engagement. He had no patience for doing things for appearance’s sake. “I made a small difference on a national scale,” he wrote. “That’s not bad for a lad from Longsight.”

Born in neighbouring Victoria Park, Manchester, he was the son of Josephine (nee Mackay) and Frank Wegrzyn, a Polish soldier who had been a prisoner of war and worked as a scaffolder by day and a barman at night. Frank was killed in a road accident when Ray was three, leaving Josephine widowed with three small children. Growing up with that loss, Ray came to expect things not to work out, so that when they did, he said, it was always a delight.

Bright but unconvinced by school, he walked out of his A-levels at Xaverian college, a grammar school in Manchester, and, on the same day found himself a job at the Cambrian Unit, a special school for autistic and disabled children. There he met Dot Sansome, another carer at the unit, whom he married in 1977. They moved to Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1981.

He joined Greater Manchester Probation Service aged 19 on the then new community service scheme, introduced in 1973, taking offenders to work placements instead of prison, and had his first full caseload by the age of 21. He then qualified as a probation officer, working initially in Salford with young people and later on a community project run jointly with the local police. He subsequently moved to Oldham, but was promoted and from 1998 ran the whole of the Salford probation division, overseeing more than 90 staff.

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s just before turning 40, he refused to let it define him and kept working for another 16 years until 2011, when ill-health forced his retirement. He did not let that stop him. He channelled the same energy into Parkinson’s Equip, the charity he founded in 2013.

It made grants to people with the disease who wanted to take part in sport and the arts, and came to support dance as a form of therapy. He wrote Out of Order (2018), contributed to Chapter & Illuminating Verse, a book of poems about Parkinson’s (2011), and a children’s book explaining the condition to young people.

He was resuscitated by a stranger, Penny Overbury, who had some first aid training and became a great friend, after a heart attack in Glossop town centre in 2019.

He is survived by Dot, their sons, Matthew and me, and a granddaughter, Joanna.