Winifred Tumim

Winifred Letitia Tumim, Lady Tumim ( Borthwick; 3 June 19365 November 2009) was an English charity administrator and reform campaigner. As chairperson of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) from 1985 to 1992, she led a reform of its management to create clear duties for all the staff. Tumim worked with the Charity Commission for England and Wales and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) to research attitude and performance in the charity world's wider managerial sector. She was chairperson of the NCVO between 1996 and 2001, writing a report advocating for the reform of charity law, which led the Blair ministry to pass the Charities Act 2006. After Tumim's death. the NCVO created an award in her name to reward an improvement in charity governance. Biography Family background Tumim's father, Algernon Malcolm Borthwick, was chairperson of the family-owned global meat-importing business, served in the Gordon Highlanders as a lieutenant-colonel in the Second World War, winning the Military Cross, and was unsuccessful in getting elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative Party MP in the 1945 United Kingdom general election. He was married to Edith Wylde (née Addison) and was a descendant of Scottish landowners from Midlothian; Tumim's great-grandfather Thomas Borthwick was appointed a peer but died before the issuing of letters patent in 1915. Tumim was born Winifred Letitia Borthwick at Wethersfield Place, Wethersfield, Braintree, Essex, on 3 June 1936 and grew up at the home. She was educated at North Foreland Lodge School. In 1955, Tumim enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to read philosophy, politics and economics. She graduated in 1958. At the college, Tumim met Stephen Tumim, the barrister and future Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, and the couple married on 1 February 1962. They had three daughters; the second was born profoundly deaf and the youngest lost her hearing while she was still an infant. Career Knowing two of their daughters were deaf, Tumim and her husband were devoted to learning about deafness and taking actions that would improve their livelihood, in an era where there were controversies over how deaf persons should be educated. In 1974, she became a governor at Mary Hare Grammar School for the Deaf in Newbury and was a member of the Warnock inquiry on the education of handicapped children four years later.