Sue Ryder

Margaret Susan Ryder grew up in a comfortable Yorkshire family with a mother who took her to visit the poor and the sick. At the start of the Second World War she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry while still a teenager and was attached to the Special Operations Executive, working with the Polish section. She drove agents to the airfields from which they flew into occupied Europe, knowing many would not come back. It gave her a lifelong bond with Poland.

When the war ended she went into the wreckage. She worked in relief in France and then Germany, and became particularly concerned with people the world had stopped noticing: survivors of concentration camps, and displaced young men imprisoned for petty crimes committed while half-starved. She visited them in prison for years, taking them food, arguing their cases and writing to their families.

In 1953 she opened a home for such survivors in her mother's house at Cavendish in Suffolk, living there with them. That became the Sue Ryder Foundation, which grew into a network of homes for the sick and disabled across Britain and eastern Europe, funded partly by the charity shops that carry her name.

She married Leonard Cheshire in 1959 and the two ran their charities side by side. Made a life peer in 1979, she chose the title Baroness Ryder of Warsaw. In her last years she fell out with the foundation's trustees over its direction and resigned. She died in 2000.