CAMPAIGNING socialist and trade unionist Betty Tebbs, who travelled the world in the cause of peace and the women’s movement, has died at the age of 98.

Betty was a legend in the labour movement.

She lived and worked in north-west England all her life, but was a leading and hugely respected figure nationally and internationally, campaigning for socialism, peace, equality and social justice.

She joined her first trade union in 1932 at the age of 14. She got a job at Wilds Paper Mill in Radcliffe in Manchester.

When she received her first wage packet she found it contained two shillings (10p) less than the young man she worked alongside, although they were doing identical jobs. He got more because he was a man.

It led to her signing up as a trade union member the same day, and also sparked the beginning of a lifetime of commitment to fighting for equality. It was also the start of her life as a trade union activist.

In the 1950s she asked her union office which was the worst factory to work in in her part of the north-west.

The officials directed her to a paper bag manufacturing factory in Warrington where conditions were appalling — the lowest pay in the district, shocking treatment of the mainly women workers, filthy toilets.

Betty deliberately took a job there and began to organise the workers. Three years later it was the best-paid factory in the district

The list of some of her political work and positions held over decades gives only a taste of her involvement in national and international campaigning: chair of the National Assembly of Women, first woman elected to the general council of the Trade Union Congress, delegate to the Women’s International Democratic Federation.

She took part in peace demonstrations and conferences in eastern Europe and Africa, picketed at Grunwick, joined the Greenham Common women, was kettled by police during protests against the poll tax, campaigned against apartheid.

Her daughter Pat went with her on many of her activities, and was picketing with Betty by the time she was 12.

In the 1960s the two cut through the wire at Greenham Common, gaining access to the US cruise missile base, where thousands of women were gathered in permanent protest. Pat told me Betty had kept the wire they cut, and was proud to have it.

Betty was also active during the miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-5, working with miners’ wives at the pits in the north-west.

Betty and Pat were at Wapping during the infamous 1986 lockout by Rupert Murdoch — a frightening experience, said Pat, as police attacked strikers and demonstrators.

Betty’s more recent experiences included being arrested at the age of 89 while protesting at Faslane nuclear base in Scotland. She was lying in the road securely fastened to other protesters when the arrest took place.

In September last year she spoke at a meeting at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, bringing audience members to tears and to their feet as she spoke passionately, saying: “There can be no peace without socialism, and no socialism without peace.”

Three months earlier a celebration of her life as a “radical hero” took place at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, where she was interviewed in front of an audience by her friend, actor Maxine Peake.

Betty was born in Bury on April 10 1918. Her father was a joiner, her mother a maid.

Her education suffered in childhood due to rheumatic fever.

She started work at 14 and at 16 met the man who, when she was 21, became her first husband, Ernie. When the second world war began, Ernie joined the army.

During the war Betty was a munitions worker, driving a crane which lifted anti-tank guns. She became pregnant with daughter Pat at that time, a fact which she hid because she knew she would be transferred from her crane-driving job to other work.

When her pregnancy became obvious she was indeed transferred, to “solid boring” of gun barrels, which she later said was an apt description of the job.

In 1944 she received news that her husband Ernie, who had survived D-Day, had been killed. Ernie had seen their daughter Pat only once, before he returned to the war.

A few weeks after Betty was told of Ernie’s death she was informed that as she was now a single woman, her allowance from the government would be cut from 28 shillings a week (£1.40p) to 18 (98p) and Pat’s from 12s 6d (60.5p) to 11s (55p).

Years later she told how she had felt betrayed by that — as were thousands of other families of soldiers killed. It fed her absolute determination to fight injustice, a determination which lasted all her life.

In the late 1940s her union activities and her beliefs brought recognition that for peace and justice to be achieved, the world would have to be transformed; that socialism must replace capitalism, through political action.

That development came about particularly when she met the man who became her second husband, a soldier, Len Tebbs, who had fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war. He talked about socialism, the need for radical change.

They married in 1947 and had a son, Glyn. Betty became active in the Labour Party, and later both she and Len were for a time members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most recently she rejoined the Labour Party to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Len died at 61 in 1979. Betty was 60, which was then retirement age for women. She started her life again, involving herself even more in the peace movement and women’s campaigns. She attended international peace conferences.

At one international conference during a break, she didn’t get chance to drink her coffee because so many people were talking to her. As delegates moved back into the conference, a woman approached her, saying: “Betty, you didn’t have a coffee. Stay there and I’ll get you one.” She returned a few minutes later with Betty’s coffee. The woman was a Russian, Valentina Tereshkova, the world’s first female astronaut, who became a leading peace campaigner.

Betty was asked just a few years ago if it was the death of her first husband Ernie in the war which had made her a pacifist.

“I’m not a pacifist!” she replied. “I’m a revolutionary!”

Despite her national and international activities, Betty’s roots remained in the north-west, where she lived her whole life.

She established a refuge for abused women in Warrington in a large, run-down terraced house, using her union contacts on the local trades council to call in volunteer plumbers, electricians and joiners to restore the building.

She dealt with victims of abuse personally, collecting them from hospital and taking them to the refuge.

In 1988, for her 70th birthday, she asked that instead of buying her presents, family and friends make donations to equip a women’s clinic in Palestine.

Betty was known for her sense of humour. Interviewed recently, she was asked if she was looking forward to receiving a telegram from the Queen for her 100th birthday. “Yes,” she replied. “So I can send it straight back and tell her to stuff it where the sun don’t shine.”

Betty’s campaigning work — including her practical, grassroots activities — continued until very recently, as she took part in protests and other events on her mobility scooter.

But although her mind and her humour remained as sharp as ever, a short time ago her physical condition began to deteriorate, leading to her death on Monday this week, January 23.

Peter Lazenby

n Betty’s funeral takes place at 10.30am on Tuesday January 31 at East Lancashire crematorium, Cemetery Road, Radcliffe, Greater Manchester M26 4EU. Her family have requested no flowers, but that donations are made instead to the Morning Star and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. A commemorative event is being planned later in Manchester. Details will be published in the Morning Star.