Rose Hacker
Rose Hacker (3 March 1906 – 4 February 2008)[1][2] was a British socialist, writer, sex educator and campaigner for social justice. At her death, aged 101, she was the world's oldest newspaper columnist.Hacker became a pacifist and socialist in her teens, having seen wounded soldiers returning from World War I, and hunger marchers from Wales and the Midlands in Oxford Street.[4] In the 1930s she worked against fascism and to relieve the sufferings of the working class during the Great Depression. In 1931, at the height of Joseph Stalin's purges, she visited the USSR along with the Sydney & Beatrice Webb. Writing of her trip in the Camden New Journal, Hacker said: 'of course we didn't know what he (Stalin) was doing then' seemingly indicating that, like many people on the left at that time, she did not believe the atrocity stories circulating about the regime. The phrase 'we did not know' in regard to Stalin's terror has to be set alongside the fact ...