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| April 16th | Helena Charles | |||||
Indian – born Helena Charles (16 April 1911 – 14 June 1997), humanitarian, activist and poet was the founder of the Cornish nationalist party, Mebyon Kernow, in 1951 and became the first elected representative of the party when she won a council seat in 1953. In the 1920s she worked in the slums of Bermondsey whilst, during the Second World War, she worked for the London Ambulance Service and organised assistance for displaced members of the population of Heligoland which had been occupied by the Germans and for Jewish refugees from the continent. Graduating from Oxford in 1948, she became the Cornish representative on the Central Committee of European Communities and Regions. Charles married the sculptor, Guy Sanders, in 1959 and in 1964, appalled by the treatment of cats in Venice founded the Dingo charity to care for feral cats. To fund the charity her husband even became a licensed gondolier and for her work, Charles was appointed a Knight of St Mark. |
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