The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  As many of Moi’s political opponents simply vanished, Maathai suffered harassment from beatings and whippings to death threats and spells in prison. In 1999, after leading a protest against secret government land allocation deals and planting saplings in Karura forest in Nairobi, Maathai and her followers were beaten by police and Maathai ended up in hospital.

  On another occasion in 2001 while mobilising support against an illegal land grab in a village near Mount Kenya, her Land Rover was hijacked by the state police and she was driven to prison and locked in a cell. But by this stage international support for her movement had become so great that Kenya’s authorities were overwhelmed with complaints from around the world and released her without charge.

  In 1991 she won the Africa Prize, awarded for helping to eradicate hunger. Then in 2004 she won the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee described her as a source of inspiration for those fighting for sustainable development, democracy and peace. Her award also acknowledged the significance of environmental projects in preventing conflict over limited resources, a concept whose importance Maathai had long since argued. “In managing our resources, we plant the seeds of peace,” she once said.

  After 24 years in power President Moi was ousted in 2002 and replaced by Mwai Kibaki. Maathai was elected an MP, serving until 2007, and appointed deputy minister for the environment. However, having called for a recount of the 2007 elections, in 2008 she took part in a protest in Nairobi against Kibaki’s plan to increase the number of ministers in the Cabinet and was tear-gassed by police.

  Maathai became increasingly involved in environmental affairs internationally, including in 2007 managing a fund to save the Congo basin forest, where 6,000 square miles were being destroyed by deforestation and war. She also campaigned for the cancellation of debt for African countries, having become co-chair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign in 1998.

  Remembered fondly by supporters for often sporting muddy knees from showing so many people how to plant trees, Maathai published a biography, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story in 2006.

  She is survived by her three children.

  Wangari Maathai, environmentalist and social activist, was born on April 1, 1940. She died of cancer on September 25, 2011, aged 71

  SHIRLEY BECKE

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  FIRST FEMALE POLICE COMMANDER WHO CAMPAIGNED SUCCESSFULLY TO BROADEN THE ROLE OF WOMEN WITHIN THE FORCE

  NOVEMBER 15, 2011

  Shirley Becke, the first woman to reach the top British police ranks, never accepted any distinction between male and female police officers and maintained that there were few, if any, places where a woman police officer could not tread.

  Becke originally became a police officer during the Second World War, intending to return to civilian life in peacetime. Instead she stayed 33 years, retiring as Scotland Yard’s first woman commander, equivalent to an assistant chief constable.

  She was a key campaigner in the battle to end the limitations on the work of women police officers and bring them into the forefront of police work. “There is no such thing as a lady policeman,” she once declared. “We are police officers who just happen to be women.” She had little time for senior male colleagues who were reluctant to deploy female officers, and she was equally impatient at female officers who held back.

  Becke, who had herself worked for years in the vice-ridden streets of Soho and Piccadilly, said: “Maybe some of the senior men still feel reluctant to send a woman out on certain jobs. But in fact today there is only one thing a policewoman cannot do — she cannot opt out of a situation; she cannot say, ‘Not me. I’m a woman’, especially if she’s in uniform.”

  When Becke joined the police, women officers were regarded as limited specialists, reserved for dealing with children and female prisoners. They could not marry, were paid less than men and numbered a few hundred in a London force of thousands.

  Seventy years later police and public take the appearance of women in a wide variety of functions, from senior anti-terrorist detective to chief constable, as normal. That progress is due to redoubtable pioneers like Becke. She once said that river patrols were the only duty women were still not doing, and that was purely because the work could be too physical.

  Shirley Cameron Becke, née Jennings, was born in 1917 in London. She was the daughter of a gas engineer who encouraged his daughter to believe that she could do whatever she wanted, regardless of her sex. Educated at Ealing Grammar School, Becke followed her father’s advice and his profession, training as a gas engineer at Westminster Polytechnic from 1935 to 1939. She was the first woman to pass the Institution of Gas Engineers’ higher grade examinations.

  When war broke out she decided to join the police as her contribution to the war effort. She went to Scotland Yard in 1941 merely to ask for details on how to apply. Once there she decided on the spot to join and after a rudimentary four weeks’ training was posted to West End Central, which covered the fleshpots of Soho and Piccadilly. Years later she still ruefully remembered spending months watching illegal bars.

  At the end of the war she became one of a handful of women CID officers in London. In those days the work of policewomen was limited to shoplifting cases, taking statements from victims of sex attacks and theft incidents, provided the offence had taken place in a women’s toilet. Working in the West End again Becke and a colleague Barbara Kelley, who later became the first female detective chief superintendent, persuaded their boss to let them take on a broader cross-section of investigations.

  It brought unexpected consequences. Becke, promoted to detective sergeant, investigated allegations of theft at a Mayfair oil company. The complainant was Justice Becke, the firm’s accountant. The two married in 1954. He later took holy orders and became a vicar in Surrey (luckily the previous incumbent had been a bachelor, so the parish did not have great expectations of Becke’s availability to be a traditional vicar’s wife).

  By the time she moved from CID work in 1959, as a chief inspector, Becke had earned 13 commissioner’s commendations and made hundreds of arrests. She admitted that she had been involved in more than one “scuffle” but was never seriously hurt. “There is always an element of physical danger,” she said, “but I tried to get the best possible results with the least possible risk.”

  Transferred to Scotland Yard, she was appointed chief superintendent in 1966 and was put in charge of A4, which was then a separate department for women officers. She commanded 483 women and launched a vigorous campaign to increase the numbers, declaring that police work was one of those rare jobs where a young woman could “come straight in and do something positive and make her own decisions”.

  She also tried to broaden the appeal, urging women in their thirties who had already married, had families and still wanted a career, to join up. She launched advertising campaigns for women recruits featuring officers in new, smarter modern uniforms designed by Norman Hartnell and she widely publicised the policewoman’s role.

  In 1969 Becke was appointed as a commander in the Metropolitan Police. She was not only the Yard’s first female commander but also the first woman to join the ranks of the Association of Chief Police Officers and the highest-ranking woman in the country. In 1970 she was included in a volume of biographies of distinguished women including Barbara Cartland, the novelist, and Barbara Hepworth, the sculptor.

  Becke herself eventually appeared in print after campaigning for a better deal for children held in custody and was the author of papers printed in a collection by the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.

  In 1973 A4 was dissolved by Sir Robert Mark, the Met Commissioner. New equal pay legislation and the pressure for change meant a separate women’s section was no longer acceptable and women could serve in any police branch. Becke moved to the Yard’s internal inspectorate.

  By the time she retired in 1974 women police officers had for the first time taken part in public order duties at Trooping the Colour and others were training as dog handlers and
police drivers. They were accepted into the river police in 1980.

  In retirement Becke was a regional administrator for the London region of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service and a vice-chairman in 1976-83. She was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in 1972 and appointed OBE in 1974. She was predeceased by her husband, the Rev Justice Becke.

  Shirley Becke, OBE, QPM, police commander, was born on April 29,1917. She died on October 25, 2011, aged 94

  MARIE COLVIN

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  RESOURCEFUL AND COURAGEOUS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT RENOWNED FOR HER INTREPID FORAYS INTO SOME OF THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACES ON EARTH

  FEBRUARY 23, 2011

  In August last year, after a sweltering day covering the gunfire and chaos of the battle for Tripoli, Marie Colvin and a group of Western journalists found themselves outside the high walls of the mansion of Muatassim Gaddafi, son of the fleeing dictator. The other journalists, all much younger but worn out after a long day of intense reporting, said they could not be bothered to scale the wall and sneak inside.

  But Colvin, who had been covering wars for more than a quarter of a century, and had lost an eye on the front line of Sri Lanka’s civil conflict in 2001, jumped out of the van and threw herself at a ladder that some helpful locals had procured. Indefatigable, unafraid as ever, she was the first over the top, as the other reporters reluctantly clambered after her.

  It was a shock then, but no surprise to colleagues, that Colvin, an American reporter for The Sunday Times who became a legend on Fleet Street, was killed yesterday in the terrible slaughter of Homs, a city that has been besieged and bombarded by the Syrian Government for more than two weeks. She had filed a moving report from the city just days before her death in the rebel-controlled enclave of Baba Amr, describing the plight of women and children huddling for elusive shelter in the so-called “widows’ basement”.

  One of the most resourceful and courageous foreign correspondents of her generation, Marie Colvin had made her name for her intrepid forays into some of the most dangerous war-torn regions of the world, and through the graphic copy which these perilous forays produced for The Sunday Times for which she had worked for the past 25 years. She was killed along with a French photojournalist Remi Ochlik when shells and rockets hit the house in Baba Amr where both were staying.

  Since losing the sight in her left eye while covering the fighting between government troops and Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka in April 2001, Colvin had been instantly recognisable for her trademark eye-patch.

  It was the result of what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to silence her. Lucky to escape with her life when Sri Lankan government soldiers fired on her and a grenade was lobbed in her direction, she sustained four shrapnel wounds in shoulder, chest, thigh and eye, for which no medical treatment was tendered to her for ten hours after the incident. Given the hostility towards her from government quarters, colleagues took the decision to have her flown out of the country in spite of the seriousness of her injuries.

  Colvin’s reports were always redolent of the violent atmosphere of life in the front line where, as she was always candidly aware, the dangers that eventually claimed her life were part and parcel of the desperate existence of a population on the ground that simply had nowhere to flee from them. Only recently, while reporting, she had not hesitated to confess herself “more awed than ever by the bravery of civilians who endure far more than I ever will. They must stay where they are. I can come home to London”.

  One of her last pieces of commentary from the conflict in Syria, whose bloodshed she described as “absolutely sickening”, was of a piece with the immediacy she brought to her reporting. “I watched a little baby die today,” she told BBC television by phone from Homs. “Absolutely horrific. His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”

  The plight of children and women in wartime was among her particular preoccupations as a correspondent. During her career her coverage had ranged over the conflicts in such countries as Syria, where she died, Chechnya, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, and more recently the uprisings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. She had also covered the Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and conflict in Sierra Leone and East Timor.

  Marie Catherine Colvin was born in 1956 in Oyster Bay, New York State, a small town in Nassau County on Long Island Sound. She was educated at Oyster Bay High School from where she went to Yale University in 1974 and took her bachelor’s degree. Beginning her journalistic career in the United States, she came to Europe in 1984 as bureau chief in Paris for the agency United Press International (UPI). In April 1986, just before President Reagan launched airstrikes on Libya and while working as a reporter for UPI, Colvin was awakened at 3am and escorted to her first of many interviews with Muammar Gaddafi at his Bab al-Aziziya compound in the centre of Tripoli. She recalled the Libyan leader as dressed in a red silk shirt, white silk pyjama trousers and lizard skin slip-ons, obsessed with security and living in his bunker (which was garishly decorated) in isolation from world events. In 2011 she was to see the compound looted and in chaos while covering the uprising that overthrew him.

  Later in 1986 she joined The Sunday Times, working as Middle East correspondent for nine years, after which she became Foreign Affairs correspondent. Her area of specialisation was the politics and culture of the Arab and Persian worlds, but as time went on she came increasingly to be present in countries where conflict was destroying societies, particularly the lives of the weakest members of them.

  The human misery left in the break-up of the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia was a reporting imperative for her. She exposed herself to danger in Chechnya where she was attacked by Russian jets while reporting on the rebels. On one occasion she went missing for several days and there were fears for her safety. In the Balkans she went on patrol with the Kosovo Liberation Army as it took on Serb forces.

  Colvin won many awards throughout her career, including Foreign Reporter of the Year in the British Press Awards (2001 and 2010); the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism, 2001; the Foreign Press Association’s Journalist of the Year award, 2002; and Woman of the Year (Britain) 2002.

  She set out her journalistic credo in a starkly moving address that she gave to the congregation during a service, “Truth at all Costs”, which was held at St Bride’s Church, London, “Fleet Street’s church”, in November 2010, to commemorate journalists and media workers who had died this century while on assignment.

  To an audience containing many of the most distinguished journalists of the day she said: “Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death… and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. And yes, it means taking risks, not just for yourself but often for the people who work closely with you.

  “Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes… the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burnt houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers, children.”

  She concluded: “We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?”

  She provided the answer for herself and her audience. “Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can, and do, make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians… The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people — be they government, military or the man on the street — will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”

  It was the credo which led her to expose herself to danger in the pursuit of truth right to the end of her life.

  In her periods of relaxa
tion Colvin was a glamorous host at her London house, presiding in a black cocktail dress and a special eye-patch studded with rhinestones, over parties full of actors, politicians, writers and journalists. An expert yacht skipper, she also liked to take time off in the summer to go sailing.

  Marie Colvin was three times married. She had no children.

  Marie Colvin, journalist, was born on January 12, 1956. She died in an artillery bombardment in Syria on February 22, 2012, aged 56

  BARONESS THATCHER

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  INDOMITABLE PRIME MINISTER WHOSE UNSWERVING BELIEF IN FREE ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMED THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPE

  APRIL 9, 2013

  Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest British politicians of the 20th century. The first woman prime minister in Europe, she held the job for 11 years. In the 20th century no other prime minister had been in office for such a long unbroken period, and no one since Lord Liverpool (1812-27) had had such a long continuous run as Prime Minister.

  She led the Conservative Party for 15 years, won three general elections in succession, and never lost a significant vote in the House of Commons. Since Walpole in effect invented the role, only six men have served for longer than her as prime minister: Walpole himself, Pitt, Lord Liverpool, Lord Salisbury, Gladstone and Lord North. She fully earned her place in this company.