I MEET Betty Tebbs in her neat and cosy flat near Bury, where she has invited me for supper.

I notice the current copy of the Morning Star on the table. “Oh yes, I read that this morning,” she says. I ask her to show me how she manages, as she is partially sighted. She sits down and passes the paper under the powerful light of a piece of equipment, rather like an old-fashioned enlarger, on the table in front of her. It magnifies the print 30 times and Betty demonstrates how she can also change the colour setting and font size. She praises the society for the blind and partially sighted, where she got the equipment.

Betty started reading the Daily Worker in 1946, when she met her second husband, Len Tebbs. At first she found it a hard read, but Len would find something in it he knew would interest her. She has continued to read our paper ever since, and is now 97.

A small, neat figure, dressed in light colours, Betty’s zest for life remains undimmed. “It’s been a beautiful day, hasn’t it?” she remarks. Despite her arthritis, she takes a daily turn round Bury Park on her mobility scooter, weather permitting. “Used to be the biggest park in Europe,” she tells me, proudly.

Not only a loyal Morning Star reader, Betty has also written her own memoirs, A Time to Remember. She starting writing at the request of her granddaughter, who asked her what life was like in her young days. Once she had started, she just couldn’t stop. She completed the memoirs in 1997, but her activism continues. There is much more she could add.

I first met Betty during a peace visit to East and West Germany organised by London Region CND in 1989. It was a crucial moment in history: after the Berlin Wall had come down, but before reunification. As we walked in the beautiful mountains of Saxony and scrambled along the rocky paths, Betty told me about her work with the National Assembly of Women. Impressive, I thought. But that was before I read her memoirs.

Betty suffered from rheumatic fever as a 10-year-old, and missed crucial years of schooling. Although she was clearly very bright, this destroyed her chances of a grammar school education. Instead, she left school at 14 and, determined not to follow her elder sister into the deafening clatter and heat of the cotton mill, spent weeks pestering a foreman in the local paper mill until he finally gave her a job.

She was taken on as a helper alongside a boy of the same age, but discovered he was earning two shillings more a week, a bitter lesson in women’s inequality. Undaunted, Betty joined the Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paperworkers, which then became SOGAT and was later swallowed up by Amicus — now part of Unite.

Betty has so much to be proud of in her life, but one of her best moments was when she finally won equal pay for work of equal value for all the women workers at East Lancashire Paper Mill, after 17 years of struggle. “I pass the site when I take the Metro into Bury,” she says. “Mill’s been demolished for years. Like a tooth that’s been removed. Makes me feel sad.”

Years later, she asked her union’s regional officer where she could be of most use, and took a job at Chadwick’s Paper Bag Factory, where the wage was seven guineas a week. “Seven guineas,” she exclaims, “I’d never been paid in guineas before. But it didn’t make the wage any more, not when I’d left East Lancashire on £18 a week.

But I could see there was work to be done there.” And work she did. In three years, wages were raised from seven guineas to £14 a week.

During the earlier part of WWII, Betty worked as a crane driver in a munitions factory until heavily pregnant with daughter Pat, when she was put on a machine which bored the centres of gun barrels. “The job was called ‘solid boring’ and if ever a job was correctly named it was that one,” she writes.

“Prior to the War, I had not seen any connection between my work in the trade union movement and party politics,” but her wartime experiences politicised her. Ernest, her first husband, was killed in the war and immediately her allowance was reduced from 28 shillings to 18 shillings and that of her daughter by one shilling and six pence.

Going to work one day in the paper mill after the war, Betty saw the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 1945, followed three days later by news of the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 200,000 people were killed immediately in the two Japanese cities, and many more in the days, weeks and years to come.

She saw “pictures of children dying in agony, with their seared skin hanging in strips ... It was then that I vowed that I would work for world peace and against such atrocities for the rest of my life.”

Betty has remained true to that vow. She joined the National Assembly of Women (NAW) in 1952 at its inaugural meeting and became active in it again, eventually being elected chair when US president Ronald Reagan deployed cruise and pershing missiles across Nato countries in Europe, including Britain.

Betty was due to take part in a women’s peace march across several European countries organised by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in response to this massive threat to the survival of the human race, when she was asked if she would represent WIDF in Geneva as part of a three-woman delegation, to speak to the US and Soviet negotiating committee on medium-range nuclear weapons. She agreed to go.

She asked a US member of the Nato delegation why it would not sign a “no first strike” agreement. She was assured that the US did not need to sign such an agreement, as they would never strike first. “But you bloody well have. Don’t you remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” she responded, scathingly.

After Geneva she rejoined the peace march and treasures the doves of peace given to her by Bulgarian children.

Another wonderful moment, around this time, was when Betty met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space and chair of the WIDF. She asked Betty to tell her about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and, while she was talking, Betty’s coffee got cold. Betty felt greatly honoured when Valentina made her another cup.

Betty was arrested during the 2007 Big Blockade at Faslane, where she lay down, locked together with other members of her pensioners’ peace group. They were all arrested and taken to the police station. “Have you any heart problems?” asked the duty sergeant. “Only when I look at those submarines,” replied Betty. “Because of your age, [she was 89 at the time] we’re not going to keep you,” he decided.

Betty joined the Communist Party after WWII. She was to leave over Hungary, but told me that she had some regrets over this decision. She went on to join the Labour Party, where she was elected to Radcliffe Council — the only woman.

Incensed by the anti-communism she experienced from right-wing Labour Party members, she later rejoined the CPGB. Perhaps deciding they were not left-wing enough for her, she went on to join the New Communist Party. No longer a member of a party, she continues to take a keen interest in politics and sometimes has letters published in the Morning Star.

Betty’s memoirs are amazingly detailed. Did you keep all your speeches, I ask, or maybe the minutes of the meetings she attended, or perhaps a diary, all neatly filed away? “Not at all,” she replies, “it’s all up here,” and she taps her head. I’m put to shame. I explain that I spoke once at my union’s national conference and have no memory of what it was about.

Copies of Betty’s memoirs have travelled the country in response to requests to read them. Actor Maxine Peake, a great admirer and friend, is now hoping to get the memoirs published. Let’s wish her luck, as Betty’s account of her remarkable life fighting for peace and socialism deserves the widest audience.