Farewell to ‘grande dame of pickets’ Ellen Luby

Published: 29 July, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THE gentleman had fallen asleep in a café at Euston Station, and sitting next to him was Ellen Luby, who was about to catch a train to go to a conference for tenants.

At Ellen’s funeral on Friday, mourners heard a story by her friend Wilf Dixon that summed up her abilities – and it described how a sleeping stranger found himself helped by an unlikely champion.

Mr Dixon, who met Ellen 20 years ago, recalled: “The police showed up and were going to move on this man who was catching a much-needed 40 winks. Ellen leapt to his defence and was eventually arrested for her troubles. She missed her train. It was typical of her.”

Ellen, who died last week aged 87, spent a lifetime campaigning: she fought Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s, took to the streets for a welfare state in the 1940s, helped organise rent strikes in the 1950s, protested against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, backed civil rights and anti-racism campaigns in the 1970s, supported the miners in the 1980s, campaigned for pensioners in the 1990s, and shouted from the rooftops against war in Iraq. 

While her appearances in the public gallery at the Town Hall were legendary, just one councillor came to say goodbye: the St Pancras Labour veteran Roger Robinson, who had known Ellen for 45 years and helped her with many of her campaigns. 

But many people from across years of campaigning did come to say goodbye, and offer thanks. 

They swapped tales of her deeds and bravery when confronted with authority, of a life marred by personal tragedy when she lost her first husband and her son Roy, and of her love of music and politics, epitomised by the playing of a Stevie Wonder version of Bob Dylan’s classic protest song, Blowin’ in the Wind. 

Monty Goldman, who had known Ellen for 50 years, recalled her anti-fascist credentials.

He said: “I remember her reaction to meeting survivors of the Holocaust when we went to a protest against the writer David Irving. She simply could not tolerate fascism in any form.” 

When still in school, Ellen’s parents met her and some fellow pupils to walk them home because of the menace of Mosley’s Blackshirts. One day, aged nine, she hid in a church yard with friends to spy on Mosley’s henchmen and see why their parents were hurrying them off home and indoors: the experience of seeing uniformed thugs strutting through London made a deep and life-long impression.

It was not so well known that around 30 members of Ellen’s mother’s family were murdered by the Nazis. This came on top of the tragedy of losing her first husband, who was killed near the end of the war by a German sniper.

Other facets of Ellen’s life emerged, from her grassroots activism that meant she never missed a full council meeting and storming into the Town Hall on numerous occasions to take up a case, to her internationalism. She travelled to China in the 1960s, which she paid for herself in instalments: no mean feat for a single parent of two, working as a cleaner.

But there was another side to Ellen, which her granddaughter Selin Taylor spoke of. She said: “She was not a typical grandmother. You’d listen to her stories or hear a political debate with a Hitchcock film on in the background. She was not one for convention.”

And as Mr Dixon succinctly summed her up, she was “the voice and conscience of Camden, the indomitable Mrs Luby, the grande dame of pickets and protests.”