My aunt Sybil Ashton, who has died aged 94, was a veteran member of the Socialist Workers party and a familiar face in UK activism. She was something of a local celebrity in north London and could often be spotted selling the party newspaper outside Finsbury Park tube station or Tesco in Crouch End. Sybil was driven by a sense of justice that kept her participating in protests well into her 70s.
In the 1980s she took part in the Greenham Common anti-nuclear campaign and the poll tax protests. What Sybil lacked in height she made up for in presence – she was vocal in the face of authority. The police often received the sharp end of her tongue, but she smiled and said that because she was “just a little old woman” she could “get away with it”.
Her presence on the campaigning frontlines throughout the decades earned her a place as part of an exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in London. In a video charting the contemporary history of protest, Sybil is shown flanked by her Socialist Worker comrades singing the Internationale.
The second of three children of Jewish immigrants from Europe, Newman Allen, a jeweller, and his wife, Mina (nee Glinert), Sybil was born in east London. During the second world war, she was sent to the Welsh countryside as an evacuee. She returned to London in 1945 to complete her education before in 1950 marrying Murray Ashton, a scientific civil servant working on wind turbines, who was also from an immigrant Jewish family.
The following year the couple moved to Israel. Sybil hated it, not the idealism or the socialist dream but what she considered unbridled nationalism. She was incensed by how religion could become weaponised. She may have been Jewish in culture and name but she was not a Zionist.
Sybil and Murray returned to the UK in 1963, now with two young children. They divorced a little over a decade later, and Sybil got a job as an assistant and editor to the psychiatrist Morton Schatzman. She also joined the SWP and in 1979 took part in the Barnet school strikes during the winter of discontent.
Her political fervour grew in the decades that followed. You may not have always agreed with her politics (she often chided me for being part of “the establishment” for my work at the BBC), but she was interesting and interested, and devoured books until she could no longer see. Sybil voted Labour throughout her life – last year she received a surprise visit at her care home from the former Labour leader and independent candidate Jeremy Corbyn. She lived to see the return of a Labour government a few weeks later.
Sybil is survived by her children, Danny and Mikki, and her granddaughter Saphia. Her brother, Michael, and sister, Enid, both predeceased her.
