Diane Brace

Diane was a life-long teacher. Her career began with a class of 40 seven-year olds and she claimed that ‘after that everything was easy’. She came to WILPF in her later years through her pen friend Phyllis Yingling.

She was the first member of her family to attend university where she studied politics with Karl Popper at the LSE. Her classmates included future cabinet ministers and global financiers and Derrick Brace whom she married and with whom she had two children, George and Catherine. She took a sabbatical from teaching to once again become a student where she took an advanced degree in sociology and politics at Birkbeck College under Sir Bernard Crick.

I first met Diane at a WILPF International Congress. She was there as a guest of her friend Phyllis and those of us from the UK delegation asked her, since she was from the UK, why she was not a WILPF member. She duly joined and threw herself into the activities of the Section. She became membership secretary and visited all the branches and helped set up some new ones. Membership grew under her efforts.

She also set up a series of Saturday ‘Connect’ sessions. She also was elected Section President – a role she served in briefly. She was also appointed by WILPF to be the convenor of the International Personnel Committee, a role that took her to the New York Office to work on some sensitive personnel issues. Diane hosted a vibrant seminar, up until a week before her death, with a group who came to her flat to discuss current affairs under the auspices of the University of the Third Age.

Although remaining a WILPF member, Diane threw herself into Labour politics where she became Islington Labour’s Women’s Officer. She was a friend of many of the major Labour leaders and her memorial took place on 8 December 2017 at Islington Town Hall, chaired by friend and MP Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry.