As a teenager, she stayed with a French family at the Château du Grésil near Rouen, then at Heidelberg ("The Adopted Son", Blackwood's Magazine, January 1951).
In 1936 she wrote a series of pamphlets criticising the sectarianism of the Liverpool Conservatives under its 'boss' Sir Thomas White, which she described as a 'tripod of religious bigotry, class jealousy and caucus formation'.
[4] At the end of the decade she established the Progressive Democratic Union in Liverpool, and as its chair, she criticised Britain's 'nerveless foreign policy' in July 1939, calling for Winston Churchill to be prime minister.
[1] She carried out an effective propaganda campaign supporting Tengku Mahmud Mahyiddeen and the claims of Malay Muslims of Patani.
(She failed to get a blue plaque erected to them, but one has now been to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who lived in the studio at the back which Lady Benson used for her drama school.