Rose Hacker

Rose Hacker (3 March 1906 – 4 February 2008) 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 was born in central London. Her parents were middle class Jewish immigrants, and her father ran a business making women's clothes. She studied art, design, French and German at the Regent Street Polytechnic, but was a voracious learner outside formal education, aided by an incredible memory. After leaving polytechnic, she worked for her father as a model, designer and assistant, while keeping up a full social life in London. She had to give up her first love, a doctor, because the social mores and economic realities of the day forced him to choose between marriage and a career. She was outraged that life should create such situations, but later had a happy marriage with Mark Hacker, an accountant. They had two sons and adopted a daughter.

She developed her talents as an artist and sculptor, having a piece displayed in the British Museum. She remained active even late in life, practising belly-dancing, T'ai chi and the Alexander Technique, and swimming most days. In 2007, she and two fellow care home residents performed a dance choreographed specially for them at The Place, in Euston.

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. 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 that, also in 1931, a conference against 'slavery in Russia' took place at London's Royal Albert Hall. Hacker's activitism continued as she became involved with the Co-operative Correspondence Club, and she became more involved with education, counselling and helping the disadvantaged through her work as a relationship counsellor with the Marriage Guidance Council after the Second World War. This led to work in prisons, mental hospitals and with the disabled, and she also championed housing rights and equality for all.

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