Sue Ryder, who founded one of Britain's largest charities and was made a baroness for life for her dedication to helping the sick and disabled, died on November 2nd aged 77.
Sue Ryder was moved by the horrors she witnessed during the second World War to establish the Sue Ryder Foundation, now called Sue Ryder Care, which runs 80 homes in Britain and Eastern Europe for the chronically ill and disabled. She later married a war hero, Leonard Cheshire, whose name became as synonymous as hers with compassionate work.
Born in Leeds, Sue Ryder was the youngest of five children of a well-to-do family. when she was aged seven, she joined her mother in clearing slums, which enabled her to observe at first hand the effects of poverty and disease. When she was nine she was taken to see first World War graves in Flanders and in France. "My mother was a very strong social worker, her whole life was devoted to doing what she could for other people . . . and I grew up with a strong sense of conscience and a very strong religious faith," she told the Prague Post several years ago.
When war broke out in 1939, Sue Ryder, then 16, lied about her age and volunteered for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Soon she was diverted to the Special Operations Executive, the unit established by Winston Churchill to co-ordinate resistance activities throughout Europe during the war. Assigned to work as a driver and radio operator with the secret Polish Section, she ferried agents to the airfield for missions to sabotage industrial production in occupied Europe.
At 18, she was married for a few weeks to a young naval officer, who was killed shortly afterwards. After the war, she conducted relief work, driving thousands of miles across Poland and France to visit people who had been jailed for offences related to hunger and poverty. Her work also took her into the concentration camps, where she met survivors of Nazi atrocities.
She became an advocate for some 1,400 homeless Polish boys who had survived the war only to be locked up in German jails. She won freedom and repatriation for all but four of the boys and, in 1952, opened a home for them.
Immersed in her work, she had no thoughts of marriage. But a few years after opening her first home, she agreed to a colleague's suggestion that she meet Group Capt (later Lord) Leonard Cheshire VC, Britain's most decorated second World War hero.
Like Sue Ryder, he had converted to Catholicism and was heavily involved in humanitarian work. He had established a foundation to care for the Hiroshima victims that later grew into a worldwide organisation of 150 homes for the physically handicapped.
In 1959, she married Cheshire, a meeting and marriage of common dedication to suffering humanity. Besides his work in founding the Cheshire Homes for the chronic sick, and hers for Nazi victims, together they founded the Mission for the Relief of Suffering and the Ryder-Cheshire International Centre, called Raphael, at Dehra Dun in India, for children and adults, lepers, mentally sick, orphans and others in need. Working with them was Mother Teresa.
By 1965, she had established 30 homes in England, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and Germany. That year, the Polish government awarded her the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of their highest honours. Her own country took its time to create her a baroness; it came only in 1979.
Sue Ryder had been ill since last year, and her final months were accompanied by disagreements over the policies of the Sue Ryder Foundation. Last month, she set up a new charity, the Bouverie Foundation.
Her two autobiographical books were And The Morrow Is Theirs (1975) and Child Of My Love (1986, revised 1998).
Sue Ryder's husband died in 1992 and she is survived by her son Jeremy and daughter Elizabeth.
Sue Ryder: Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, born 1923; died, November 2000