Peggy Duff

[3] During the Second World War, she joined Common Wealth, an idealistic socialist party to the left of Labour, which had been set up by Sir Richard Acland.

After the 1945 election, in which Common Wealth ceded its vote to the Labour Party, Duff was employed by Victor Gollancz's organization Save Europe Now, which sent food and clothing to occupied Germany and Austria from rationed Britain, and campaigned for the repatriation of prisoners of war.

[2] Briefly working with Gollancz again, Duff became the secretary of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, set up in August 1955, in part as a response to a number of controversial executions (including that of Ruth Ellis).

[4] She also supported the rights of tenants of council housing, but in doing so gave the green light to controversial architectural redevelopments and slum clearance programmes that are often considered to have blighted the ward she served.

[citation needed] At the Labour Party Conference in 1957, Aneurin Bevan, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, astonished his supporters by denouncing demands for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

She resigned from the Labour Party on 10 May that year over Prime Minister Harold Wilson's diplomatic support for the United States in the Vietnam War and refusal to condemn the Greek dictatorship of "the Colonels".