Betty Tebbs, who has died aged 98, was an agitator, trade unionist and proud member of the working class. She believed in a free Palestine and an end to global nuclear weapons programmes. She was never one to follow the rules.
Her activism began at the age of 14, when she turned up on the first day of her job at the East Lancashire Paper Mill, Radcliffe, to discover the boys were paid 13 shillings while the girls barely got nine. Seventy-five years later, aged 89, she was still protesting, lying in the road outside the Faslane nuclear base in Scotland, chained to other demonstrators. The police officer who arrested her received a typical Tebbs put-down: “Does your mother know what you do for a living?” Answering his query about possible heart problems, she tartly remarked: “Only when I see those submarines.”
Born Elizabeth Smith in Bury, Lancashire, she was the youngest child of James, a joiner, and his wife, Maria. During her birth, a German Zeppelin attempted to bomb a train on the outskirts of the town. Betty’s mother later remarked that the labour had caused her so much pain that she had wished the bomb would put them both out of their misery.
Betty began working at the paper mill in 1932. When she found out that she was being paid less than her male colleagues, she responded by joining the National Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paper Workers (now part of Unite). She was less than 5ft tall, but what Betty lacked in stature she made up for in determination. She began to challenge everything. Why should the girls in the factory be made to go to the foreman’s house to fetch a jug of tea and slice of cake for his break? Why should she put up with some of the managers trying to grope her? She worked at the mill for 17 years and during that time led the women out on a successful strike for equal pay.
After joining the Auxiliary Fire Service during the second world war, she made such a fuss when she realised the women were expected to serve dinner to the men that the chief fire officer said he pitied anyone who married her. She wore the insult as proudly as her union badges, recalling it in her autobiography, A Time to Remember (1997).
She was married twice, first to Ernest Whewell, who was killed during the war, and then to Len Tebbs, a soldier whom she met on a visit to Devon in 1945. She credited him with lighting the touchpaper that ignited her life of radical activism.
There was little she did not protest against: council tax rises, party political broadcasts by the British National party, Tory cuts. In mid-life she deliberately took a poorly paid job at a mill in Warrington, Cheshire, just to organise the female workers. When she left after three years, the workplace was transformed and wages had soared.
She then went for an interview for a job as an invoice clerk, but turned it down when the interviewer asked her if her husband minded her working. “What’s it got to do with him?” she snapped.
Len died in 1979. Betty continued to fight for women’s rights and to campaign for peace. She joined CND and protested at Greenham Common. She served as chair of the National Assembly of Women and in 1986 went to Moscow to speak to 10,000 women in the Lenin stadium, pledging to fight for a world free of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. That never came to pass, but Betty never stopped hoping for a better world.
Later in life she ran a stall at Rawtenstall market, selling cane furniture and giving the proceeds to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Last year Betty was made a “radical hero” by the People’s History Museum in Manchester and she could still be seen at demonstrations on a mobility scooter, carrying a placard with a picture of Karl Marx and the legend: “I told you so.” Even in death she carried on the battle. A poster at the end of her coffin had a message for mourners: “Scrap Trident, save £100bn.”
She is survived by her daughter, Pat, from her first marriage, her son, Glyn, from her second, two granddaughters, Claire and Shakira, and a great-granddaughter, Hannah.
• Elizabeth Tebbs, campaigner, born 10 April 1918; died 23 January 2017
