Notices
Ethne Etain Rudd (née Fitzgerald)
In College 1943-47 Hatherley Court, St Bridget's, St Austin's
Taken from The Times (9 July 2008)
It took courage and bravery to take on any plan made in the name of the Princess of Wales after her death in August 1997. But when the formidable Ethne Rudd, the secretary of the little-known Kensington Society, heard of the proposal for the Diana Memorial Gardens, she embarked on a single-handed campaign to stop it in its tracks.
The government proposal would have meant concreting over several acres of grass in Kensington Gardens to create the formal garden in the Princess's memory, and would have involved extending Kensington High Street Tube station to deal with the influx of hundreds of extra visitors. Rudd felt passionately that the local community did not want the gardens to become a mecca for the late Princess, and persuaded the Kensington Society to oppose the proposal.
When journalists and TV reporters went knocking on the doors of the society wanting to talk about the campaign against the gardens, no one else on the committee was prepared to put themselves forward. Rudd, with a very strong sense of right and wrong, relished the opportunity to lead the local fight against the proposal. At the society's annual general meeting in 1998 she astonished her committee by hiring the Town Hall, which could take 1,500 people, even though the society had never previously had more than 100 people in attendance at an AGM. Even though it was pouring with rain on the day of the meeting, and there was a Tube strike, there was standing room only. The campaign against the formal gardens became unstoppable. Two months later the Government hammered out a compromise - with the Treasury's representative negotiating directly with Rudd in her flat in Kensington Square. The upshot was the creation of the Diana Walk and children's playground, which left the landscape of Kensington Gardens untouched. "People will be able to picnic and play on the grass as they always have done," Rudd said.
Ethne Rudd was born in Kensington in 1929, the third of five girls. She was educated first at Queen's Gate in Kensington, and then at Cheltenham Ladies' College and St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she met her husband, Anthony. She even had a dog called "Kensington".
Rudd described herself as "a doer", who got things done. When she took on the running of the local church magazine, the Kensington Parish News, she said: "It was a pathetic little thing before I took it over. Now I've got some good people to write for it and I've organised advertising and it's completely self-financing." It continues in its strengthened format. She lived with the motto of her mother, "Intelligent women are never bored".
For 25 years she was a magistrate in London and a chairman of both the adult court and the family court, and of the Betting and Gaming Tribunal. As a resident of Kensington she was the honorary secretary of the Kensington Society for 14 years. She was also an active member of her local church, St Mary Abbots, Kensington, and a leading member of the parish church council for many years.
Rudd is survived by her husband, Anthony, and her son and three daughters.