The theme for our meeting last night was ‘Ruth’
Two grandmas were remembered. The first one was only 4ft 81/2 inches tall and known affectionately in her family as ‘Tiny’. She worked as a cook at Lambeth Palace and also cooked for the Pre Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones at his family home in Fulham. The second grandma lived in the same terraced house for 69 years and was faced with many tragic family losses in her long life.
One group member told us about Random Ruth in Reading. This was a very recent adventure which took place only the weekend before when travelling from Paddington to Devon by train, and because of a points failure and subsequent delay at Reading, she ended up having a picnic on the platform with Ruth, a complete stranger.
The actress Ruth Wilson is known for her TV roles in Luther and His Dark Materials. She also starred in the BBC drama, Mrs. Wilson, as her real life grandmother, Alison Wilson, who was the third of four bigamously married wives of novelist and MI6 officer, Alexander Wilson. Alison had been married to him for 22 years and only discovered he had another wife after his death. Alison herself died without knowing he had two further wives!
We are all familiar with the word ‘RUTHLESS’ meaning merciless or pitiless, not kind to someone or something and causing pain. However, how often do you hear the word ‘RUTHFUL’? Ruth is compassion, kindness, or sympathy shown towards others, especially during times of suffering or distress but according to the Collins English dictionary it can also mean grief or remorse.
Ruth First was a South African anti-apartheid activist, journalist, scholar and university contemporary of Nelson Mandela . Her parents were founding members of the Communist Party in SA. She was hated in her country of birth because she was a) a woman b) Jewish c) political. She was harassed by the state for years and imprisoned and held in isolation without charge for 117 days. On her release she was arrested and imprisoned for another 90 days. In 1964 she went into self exile in London where she remained active in the anti-apartheid movement. In 1978 she decided to take up a post in Mozambique as Director for Research into African Studies. She was assassinated in 1982 when she opened a parcel bomb.
Ruth Elizabeth Becker was one of the last survivors of the Titanic disaster. She was aged 13 when sailing second-class with her mother and her younger sister and baby brother to America. On deck, after the ship had hit an iceberg Ruth went back to their cabin to fetch blankets and became separated from her family. Fortunately all the Beckers survived albeit in separate lifeboats. Ruth lived to the age of 99 and was always adamant that the wreck of the Titanic should be left in situ.
Babe Ruth was an professional American base ball player between 1914 and 1935. At the age of seven he was sent to a reformatory and orphanage because of his uncontrollable behaviour . He began his career as a left handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox before becoming an outfielder for the New York Yankees. Considered the greatest baseball player of all time, he was known to be a womaniser and a drinker.
Most of us were familiar with Ruth Rendell CBE aka Barbara Vine. She wrote more than 60 novels, the majority of which are thrillers and psychological mysteries and was known as the Queen of Crime.. She is perhaps best known for her creation of Inspector Wexford.
Ruth’s Bader Ginsburg was an American judge who spent much of her legal career as an advocate for gender equality and women’s rights, winning many arguments before the Supreme Court. When she enrolled at Harvard Law School she was one of only nine women in a class of about 500 men excelling academically in every endeavour. In 1970, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women’s rights and she learned Swedish to co-author a book on civil procedure in Sweden. She was the second female and the first Jewish female justice of the Supreme Court. Ginsburg died of cancer in 2020/ and was the first woman and first Jew to lie in state at the Capitol.
Ruth Amos was a name unknown to all of us. She is a young British entrepreneur and inventor of the StairSteady www.stairsteady.net
This invention is an aid to enable people with limited mobility to use the stairs safely and confidently. Amos designed it as part of her GCSE resistant materials project.
In 2008 she won the young Engineer of the Year award in Britain and she was picked as the youngest ever ‘Heroines for Hard Times’ amongst several other awards. She has also co-founded the YouTube channel Kids Invent Stuff.
Finally we turned to the biblical Ruth and watched a cartoon describing the story covered in the four chapters bearing her name. You can check it out here.