Hetty Bower vowed to campaign until her final breath - her last words were ‘Ban the bomb for ever’

14 Nov 2013 00:00

Britain's oldest campaigner Hetty Bower dies aged 108 just two months after giving a speech at this year's Labout conference

She was born in 1905 when Edward VII was King and women did not have the vote. She died this week just two months after giving a speech at this year’s Labour’s conference.

For an incredible 108 years in between, Hetty Bower devoted her life to campaigning for peace and social justice. Her battle was finally over on Tuesday night at the Royal Free Hospital in London, two weeks after she suffered a stroke.

Hetty was a veteran of the 1926 General Strike, of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street when ordinary people faced down Oswald Mosley’s fascists, and of the peace movement that followed two world wars. She was a founding member of CND.

The last time I met her she vowed to campaign until her last breath. And she did. Her daughter Maggie Dolan says: “Almost her last words were ‘Ban the bomb, for ever more’. It was among the songs we sang with her in her last few days.”

Hetty Bower with 10-year-old George O'Rourke at the Aldermaston demonstration — "Ban the bomb": Hetty Bower's last words. Here she's pictured campaigning with 10-year-old George O'Rourke at the Aldermaston demonstration

Hetty’s love of music came from the air raids of the First World War when she would sit under her parents’ mahogany table listening to Caruso singing opera on the gramophone to drown out the anti-aircraft guns. So did her love of peace.

Born in Hackney, East London, the seventh of 10 children, she worked in schools, fashion, cinema and business, and helped found the first-ever union for women – the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries.

She was inspired to start campaigning by her sister Cissie, who was a suffragette. Hetty went to meetings in secret and seeing the suffragettes win the vote for women showed her you really could change things.

She joined the Labour Party 90 years ago in 1923 and helped to get the very first Labour MPs into parliament. During World War Two she ran a refugee hostel in North London for people fleeing Czechoslovakia.

And she never stopped going on demonstrations even in the last weeks of her life.

“Why wouldn’t I march?” she asked me. “I’ve got good legs.”

She marched against closures at her local Whittington Hospital in North London, on a hip replaced by its surgeons. She marched against austerity and welfare cuts. And she always marched for peace.

The only things she didn’t like about demos were the noise and the fact that others usually marched too slowly for her.

“I will peacefully protest in any way but I don’t like shouting,” she said.

In September, the Daily Mirror invited Hetty to our Real Britain anti-austerity event at Labour’s conference. We knew she could inspire people to fight back against the fear and poverty facing millions,.

Hetty ended up inspiring Labour leader Ed Miliband, who met her after her powerful speech. She told him she had been a big fan of his dad Ralph, the Marxist academic attacked by the Daily Mail in September.

“What words of advice do you have for me, Hetty, as Labour leader?” Ed asked her. “Two words,” she said. “Social justice.” On Tuesday night after she died he hailed her as “a remarkable fighter for justice”.

In her conference speech, Hetty, impeccably turned out as always, remembered the days before the NHS with painful clarity. “Families were forced to choose between buying medicine for their children or a loaf of bread,” she said. “We must never ever go back to those days.”

Afterwards, the BBC called her “frail”. She was fuming. Next to her we are all frail.

I first met Hetty as she campaigned for Whittington Hospital. She was shy about being interviewed but her friend Bernard Miller told her that as the government attacked the welfare state, we all needed inspiration.

So Hetty told me she still remembered the Whittington when it was a Poor Law Hospital. Her younger daughter Maggie was born there before the NHS was even born. And her beloved husband Reg was cared for there in his final days.

I was astonished by her voice. So firm and strong. By her attention to detail and her steadfast desire for every fact to be correct. She told me not to say she was on the front line at Cable Street.

“I was in the second line,” she said, this 5ft 2in woman who had helped to face down the thuggish Blackshirts.

Hetty Bower 2013 Labour Party Conference, Brighton — Labourite: Hetty at the 2013 Labour Party Conference in Brighton

She explained to Ed Miliband that she had joined Labour at 17 but had left several times, not least over the Iraq War.

He was touched by their conversation and made references to her for the rest of the conference. And she was impressed by his stand against the energy barons and his pledge to axe the Bedroom Tax.

She also told him she had the Labour Party to thank for meeting Reg when she was sent round to collect his subs. He had been out raising money for locked-out miners and they went on to campaign together for almost 75 years.

Hetty showed me a picture of him. “My mother used to say his kindness was written in his face,” she said.

At the conference she told more than 300 delegates: “I have lived for a very long time and I have a very good memory. I’ve lived through two world wars and I have spent most of my adult life working for peace on our planet. I don’t think human beings are civilised while we still waste time and money killing each other when we should be sitting at a table discussing how to improve the lives of ordinary people.”

She also attended a Real Britain event with poverty campaigner Jack Monroe and Unite leader Len McCluskey. Jack said yesterday: “She is a reminder to me that no protest is ever wasted, that we must raise our voices wherever and whenever we can.”

Mr McCluskey added: “We owe a deep debt to Hetty and her generation and we owe it to them to continue the fight to save her beloved NHS for our children and generations to come.”

Alamy

That Hetty’s passing took everyone by surprise is a tribute to her extraordinary life force. All of us lucky enough to meet her expected her to go on for ever. Daughter Maggie says Hetty spent her last days listening to favourite music compiled on an iPad by friend Bernard.

They all sang along, with Celia, Hetty’s elder daughter there too. Her favourites were Ban the Bomb (CND anthem The H-Bomb’s Thunder), Joe Hill (about the death of a trade unionist) and the peace plea Where Have All The Flowers Gone.

“This gave her great pleasure,” says Maggie. “The lop-sided smile she turned on us if she was pleased was like a huge ray of sunshine.”

I know Hetty wouldn’t approve of this piece. She never liked to read about herself. She would rather these pages were devoted to the threat of nuclear arms or saving the NHS. But she would want us to say that there is always a point to campaigning.

“We may not win by protesting,” she told me last summer. “But if we don’t protest we will lose. If we stand up to them there’s always a chance that we will win.”

Today, Hetty is gone and the poor, the oppressed, the ordinary, the workers and the carers have lost a unique champion.

But she taught us something vital – we can all be our own Hetty Bower.

:) En fantastisk kvinna!