Obituary, The Independent, 2001

Sue Ryder, who has died aged 77, was one of the most remarkable Christian charity workers of her own or any time. Inspired by the misery she knew as an upper class girl visiting slums in Leeds in the depressed 1930s, and by the philanthropic work she did with her mother in the slums there, it would not have been surprising if she had devoted her life to the relief of suffering. But her life’s mission became spectacularly clear when she saw the suffering in continental Europe, and especially amongst the survivors of concentration camps, as she worked as a volunteer in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sue Ryder returned to England and began work building a network of residential and holiday homes for the unfortunate of every kind.

The Sue Ryder Foundation took as its logo (a word she would not, probably, have recognised or approved) a sprig of rosemary, following the idea in Thomas More and Shakespeare that the herb stands for remembrance. The name and symbol are to be scrapped in a makeover now being undertaken as modernising professionals, following an acrimonious dispute, reorganise the foundation under its new name, Sue Ryder Care. In July, Lady Ryder described the take-over by her trustees, which wrested control from her, as a hijack.

The foundation, founded in 1953, was:

avowedly a living memorial to the suffering of two world wars, and would grow to number 100 homes and centres in 20 countries. It came to be supported in part by 500 second hand shops, one of many 'chains” of such enterprises vying for trade in Britain’s high streets. Sue Ryder established 28 homes in Poland and 22 in Yugoslavia.

If her charity work was motivated by the experience of misery at home before the war and abroad after it, her own personality seems to have been strikingly shaped by her wartime experience. She had been working as a volunteer nurse, when in 1943, aged 20, she decided to join the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), whence she was seconded to work for Special Operations Executive, the top secret organisation running spying and resistance operations behind enemy lines. 'I was posted, very briefly, to the Czech Section, but otherwise served with the Poles”, she wrote, in her autobiography, Child of My Love. She worked at preparing and despatching Polish agents ('Bods” in the jargon she loved): these men were famously dashing as well as brave. She only talked of them as being heroic, but they must have been powerfully charismatic and may well have been erotically thrilling to a young woman of high spirit.

Sue Ryder fell in love with eastern Europe and especially Poland and its people. When she was ennobled for her work, she chose to become Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, she chose that city because of her 'great admiration, respect and love for the Polish people. I feel I belong to Poland.”

'As part of my training,”, she wrote, 'I was taught the rudiments of the Czech and Polish languages, but never succeeded in speaking them naturally, though I can follow conversation.” A worker in one of her London shops says Lady Ryder was being too modest: 'Every Christmas, she used to come in. She would say to me, ‘Let’s go into the back, and speak in Polish’. She spoke the language beautifully. Better than me”.

Sue Ryder was born 3 July, 1923, the youngest of her mother’s five surviving children (and there were several half-brothers and sisters from her father’s previous marriage). The family home was at Scarcroft, near Leeds, and was the headquarters of widespread farming interests in Yorkshire and Suffolk. Her father, Charles, was cultured and was deeply concerned at the misery caused to his tenants by the agricultural depression which followed the First World War. It hit him, too, and by the mid 30s, he and his family were forced to live full-time in Thurlow, Suffolk, in what had been a holiday house visited annually by private railway carriage. She was proud of the small and ordinary skills she learned from scullery and dairy maids, and carpenters, on her father’s farms. But she always had a rather grand air about her, and would let drop stories of former glories, such as large gardens and head gardeners. 'I was too busy, unfortunately, to learn about gardening”, she said: with the implicit reminder that 'the Work” left no time for the amusements of ordinary life, fit, one couldn’t help she thought, for ordinary people.

She was a schoolgirl at Benenden, in Kent, where work with the London Settlements (high-minded charity operations run partly by public schools and universities) carried on a tradition inculcated by her mother, whom she had already helped with slum work in Leeds. At school she became keen on classical music, which was a lifelong addiction. She determined to become a nurse.

Though she knew grand people, would later speak in the House of Lords on housing, moral and charity issues close to her heart, and had the ordinary snobbery of her background, Sue Ryder was never anything like an 'Establishment” figure. She was not remotely clubbable. For someone who founded such a vast enterprise, she was not at all interested in management. Actually, she was only interested in suffering and its relief.

Her marriage to Leonard Cheshire, VC in 1959, followed what must have been an extraordinary courtship, conducted over a four year deepening relationship between two people whose wartime experience had been remarkable, whose conversion to Roman Catholicism had sprung from and led to great devoutness, and who were separately running unique, private foundations providing residential care in several continents. He was the country’s most famous second world war bomber pilot, but typically absorbed in her own activities, she had never heard of him until in 1955 he asked her to visit one of his early homes as a fellow professional. Before her marriage, Sue Ryder wrote to her close associates to say that both of them intended that 'the Work” remain paramount, and to all appearances it did. They both believed that suffering should be addressed for the spiritual opportunities it afforded both victim and carer. 'I believe that to be with people who are suffering, whoever they are, makes one humble. They may be lepers or children in the last stages of tuberculosis, or starving. No matter what they look like, they have they have something abut them which is very beautiful and gentle. It’s a sort of radiance, an image of God”, she told an interviewer at Christmas, 1992, when the Queen’s broadcast had included a tribute to Leonard Cheshire, who had died from motor neurone disease that July.

Sue Ryder was a very small, very thin woman. It was not clear, really, what she lived on. It might have been air, since I don’t recall her eating or taking any interest in eating. Perhaps it was nerves. She seemed to be a kind of dervish-cum-dynamo. There was always a suspicion that she needed to feel a constant surge of adrenaline.

In the very early 1970s, I was her husband, Leonard Cheshire’s driver and occasional amanuensis, based at the old farmhouse house and its modern extensions at Cavendish, Suffolk where she housed various 'Survivors”. That was the word always used of the men and women, many of them Polish, from Nazi concentration camps, who lived rather eccentrically under her roof. The Ryder/Cheshire mÈnage (it included their two children and an Irish nanny) lived in a small flat overlooking a decent garden and the tennis courts which Cheshire liked to play on as virtually his only outdoor recreation. She had no such frivolity in her busy days and nights. She didn’t need entertainment, but Cheshire, who delighted in gadgets of every kind, would record cassettes of classical music, and the show tunes he adored, for her interminable drives at home and abroad.

The key to her frantic, frenetic life was surely her SOE experience. That was a time, one conjectured, when she could be utterly devoted to, constantly consumed by, a task so noble that it obliterated the petty and trivial. It was harrowing work, but it is easy to imagine that there was a kind of joy to be had in serving so high a purpose. Indeed, after the war no joy quite matched it.

There is something about the psychology of people who aspire to saintliness which is very close to amazing selfishness. Both Ryder and Cheshire had it. The peacetime work of both – running homes for the disabled and the displaced - involved what looked like exquisite devotion to others, but actually allowed both of these extraordinary people to explore a kind of living martyrdom which gave both a tremendous charge. He was very cool in manner: there was something very measured in his intensity. But she seemed to be on the receiving end of a tremendous buzz. She was like a highly-charged sparrow as, dressed in decent little skirt and jacket costumes, she tripped and skipped from prayers in the chapel to kitchen to post-room, aways chivvying someone as she went. Her headscarves were characteristic, reminding one of the queen, and even of regality. She always seemed to be carrying papers, as a nest-builder might carry twigs and scraps of plastic. She said she hated personal publicity, and affected to be shocked when, in 1956, she was number five amongst what she called 'the victims” of 'This Is Your Life”, the veteran ITV heart-string plucker. Actually, she was a natural star and one of the reasons one is glad she never fulfilled her childhood ambition of becoming a nun is that it would have deprived her of the chance to walk backward into limelight.

She was much more obviously tiresome than he. As homes were opened on a shoe string in the leaky country houses her operation was expanding into, or lorries were loaded and dispatched to Eastern Europe, she loved last minute disasters, because they allowed her to dash to the rescue of the humdrum volunteers and workers who had cocked-up. Preparing late night collations in ramshackle kitchens, or parcelling food and woollies for Survivors overseas, she was always at the heart of the action. She loved to be able prove that there was always a need for her to dig deeper than any one else, to keep going when others flagged. (Cheshire, by contrast, preferred decent planning and a deal of calm, and usually got it.)

Sue Ryder could not bear to delegate. For her, bliss was climbing behind the wheel of her pale-blue long-wheel base Transit van, or the similarly coloured small Morris lorry, for long, night-time drives across Europe, delivering succour. In recent years, when there was controversy over the running of her shops, it was easy to imagine how impossible she must have become as the titular head of foundation as it grew into a modern charitable enterprise. Part retail corporation, part government welfare sub-contractor, there must have been little room for the muddling-through which informed the early days, when the spirit of Dunkirk and the special agent was all. She and the generation of older men and women who operated the shops must have loathed the professionalism which was now necessary.

Over the years, I have thought how like she might have been to Therese of Lisieux, perhaps even Edith Piaf, and almost certainly Margaret Thatcher. Passionate, focussed, glorying in an orgy of self-denial. But it is important not to miss out a quality which was oddly missing in the more obvious humorous Leonard Cheshire. Cheshire was a practical joker, a man who played pranks of a kind which seemed suitable for school dormitory or RAF officers’ mess, and didn’t always judge them well. Actually, he had very little capacity for ordinary human contact. People loved him, and he probably loved some back. But he was a very enclosed man. Sue Ryder, on the other hand, had a gleam in her eye. Behind the piety, the seriousness, the awesome dedication, there was something a bit like flirtatiousness, and an occasional sign that she knew how essentially comic absolutely everything is. She was in that sense much more ordinary than Cheshire, which is a funny thing to say about a woman who would probably make a good candidate for canonisation.

ends