During the 1930s, partly influenced by her friendship with Professor John Desmond Bernal,[2] Betty Rea was greatly involved in anti-fascist, leftwing politics.
For most of the war, Rea taught painting and model-making in evacuated children's homes in Huntingdon and other villages in the surrounding Cambridgeshire countryside.
The children's paintings from this time were included in several British Council exhibitions sent abroad and some are illustrated in Herbert Read's "Education Through Art".
It was not until 1942 that Rea would return to creating sculpture, when the members of the AIA, encouraged by the British government, staged the exhibition For Liberty to increase wartime propaganda and raise the public's spirits.
Betty Rea's 1959 Stretching Figure (bronze resin), was described by Gillian Whiteley as "expressing the diverse emotions, activities, and grace of youth".
[8] Posthumously, her work was included in the AIA exhibition, curated by Lynda Morris, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1983.