Ann Prunella Stack OBE (28 July 1914 – 30 December 2010) was a British fitness pioneer[1] and women's rights activist.
[1] Her mother developed an exercise system that was brought to a mass market as the Women's League of Health & Beauty.
[1] Her father, born in Shillong in 1885, came from a line of Britons who had served in British India, her paternal grandfather having been the Indian Civil Service officer Edward Stack.
[6][7] She lived with her mother, maternal aunts and cousins in London during her childhood, visiting family in Ireland and the Isle of Skye for holidays.
In 1924 they moved from Maida Vale to a large house in Holland Park adjacent to the Ilchester estate where her mother started the Bagot Stack Health School.
This time initiated a love of the countryside as well as her decision to continue involvement with her mother's organisation, now called the Women's League of Health and Beauty.
[3] In 1936, during a visit to a social event in Oxford, she met a South African Rhodes Scholar medical student, Alfred ('Ally') Albers, who would eventually become her second husband.
Douglas-Hamilton, then a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, was killed in 1944 when his damaged airplane crashed following enemy action over France.
However, when the Second World War broke out he joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers in the British Army in 1940 and then remained in the UK working as a barrister.