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Ethne Rudd |
| Members will already have heard with great
sadness and with a personal sense of loss of Ethne Rudd's death in early
July, at the age of 79. As the ever-cheerful, ebullient, and wonderfully active Honorary Secretary of the Kensington Society 1995 – 2007, she was very much its public face – a role which she hugely enjoyed. Ethne Rudd will be especially remembered for her energetic and initiating part in organising an over-flowing and emphatic public meeting held, as it happened, on the darkest and most discouraging of June nights, in Kensington Town Hall, against HMG proposals in 1997 to create a £10m, 27-acre garden in memory of Diana Princess of Wales on the much-loved and much used greensward on the south front of Kensington Palace. By organising the Society's public protest meetings, by campaigning relentlessly, by enlisting the aid of Kensington's MP Alan Clark, and by the private ministerial meeting which followed, HMG was persuaded in 1999 to withdraw the scheme to Hyde Park - thus tacitly admitting the rightness of the Kensington Society's opposition to the original site. Ethne described herself as a 'doer', and she gave herself unselfishly and unstintingly to her many tasks, of which the Kensington Society was only one. She was great to work with, warm, cheerful, fun, practical, with a splendid sense of the ridiculous, and in her own inimitable, generous, and sometimes formidable way, a tremendous successor to the redoubtable Gay Christiansen. We have already received donations in her memory, and in due course the Executive Committee will decide where best to direct them. This is necessarily a brief and personal notice. A full appreciation will appear in the Kensington Society's Annual Report for 2008. Meanwhile we register and share our loss with the Society, with Kensington at large, and of course with her family Robin Price |
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Last Revised:03/10/2008