They Also Served — Lady Sue Ryder of Warsaw — Obituary 1

Margaret Susan Ryder was born in Leeds on 3rd July 1923, the youngest of nine children. Her father, a farmer, had married her mother when he was a middle-aged widower with five children. Her mother often shouldered the troubles of others; sometimes there was little room for the family as people crowded into the house to relate their problems. As a child, Sue accompanied her mother on visits to local almshouses and workhouses.

Sue was educated at Benenden School, Kent, and was 16 when war broke out in September 1939. She immediately volunteered to be a nurse with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. She was accepted but was soon posted to the Polish section of the Special Operations Executive.

Her job involved driving SOE agents to the airfield to take off on their missions to sabotage industrial production in occupied Europe. Three hundred agents passed through her hands in this way, including the SOE commandos who attacked the heavy water plant in Norway.

In the course of this work, Sue Ryder was immensely impressed by the help given by members of resistance movements in occupied Europe to SOE agents. "They went into it in cold blood, of their own choice," she recalled. "They were fighting for us and they didn't have to do it. The fact that they faced what they did face, completely aware of what lay ahead, would have an appeal to anyone."

In 1943 she was posted to Tunisia, then to Italy. After the war, she volunteered to do relief work in Poland. In 1959, she married Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, by now himself a charity worker, who had been setting up similar homes in Europe. Cheshire had been the official British observer of the destruction caused by the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and Sue Ryder came to feel strongly that nuclear weapons were a necessary deterrent to evil.

In 1975, she and her husband received the International Variety Club's Humanitarian Award, an honour previously won by Dr Albert Schweitzer, the missionary, and Sir Winston Churchill.

When she was offered a peerage in 1979, Sue Ryder took a long time deciding whether or not to accept. She finally did so, realising that the House of Lords could provide her with a useful platform. She took the title Baroness Ryder of Warsaw because, she explained, of her "great admiration, respect and love for the Polish people. I feel I belong to Poland."

In the House of Lords, Lady Ryder spoke regularly in debates on housing, the needs of the sick and disabled, unemployment, drug abuse, race relations and defence. She continued to work indefatigably for her foundation, routinely travelling 50,000 miles a year to visit homes and new sites and to attend official functions. When Poland first began to break free of Communism in the early Eighties, she organised the consignment of weekly lorry loads of aid.

But the need to raise funds for the foundation was a perennial problem. In 1989, faced with a £4.5 million deficit but with growing demands for assistance from Poland, Lady Ryder agreed to an appeal being made through The Daily Telegraph. Within a short time, contributions amounted to £40,000, enabling a lorry loaded with medicine, food and clothing to set off for Poland shortly before Christmas.

"A tin of food from outside means more to the Poles than just nourishment," Lady Ryder remarked. "It shows that they have not been isolated and forgotten. They know the rest of the world is thinking about them."

When the Queen Mother opened the Sue Ryder Foundation Museum at Cavendish in 1979, Lady Ryder insisted that it was a tribute not to her but "to all those who have suffered and who continue to suffer. It is intended to show the misery in the world and the needs which exist more vividly than the written word could do. It is not dedicated to me."

Among the exhibits were a reconstruction of her mother's room, her own wartime uniforms and many of the presents she had received over the years. But her own role in the movement, she insisted, was unimportant. "Something else much stronger guides the foundation," she continued. "I admit that my example may have influenced people but I, in turn, have learned from the example others gave me. My other source of strength is my religion. It is everything to me. I believe that everything I do is guided. If I fail in something all I can do is to offer it up as an attempt."

The last years of Lady Ryder's life were sadly clouded by ill health and by a bitter row with other trustees of the Sue Ryder Foundation over its management. In 1998 she retired as a trustee and earlier this year set up a rival organisation, the Bouverie Foundation, to distribute money donated to the Lady Ryder of Warsaw Appeals Fund.

Lady Ryder wrote two volumes of autobiography, And the Morrow is Theirs (1975) and Child of My Love (1986). She was appointed OBE in 1957 and CMG in 1976. Her husband, Lord Cheshire, died in 1992. She is survived by their son and daughter - both of whom, like their parents, are involved in charitable work.