It’s with the deepest remorse that we announce that Barbara Bentley, Survival’s Director 1972-1984, died on 28 December 2012. Obituary by Survival’s present Director, Stephen Corry.
Between 1972 and 1973, Barbara Bentley step by step moved from being the Basic Secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute to changing into Survival Worldwide’s first full-time Director. She was to turn out to be a magistrate and remained with Survival till her retirement in 1984. For a lot of this time she was the one worker, and the one particular person in our tiny workplace. Others (like me) have been volunteers and spent a great deal of time on fieldwork with tribal peoples.
Ours was the simple half. Barbara did the whole lot else: elevating the cash; arranging for publications to be written, printed and distributed; liaising with our supporters; preserving the accounts; managing the committees (who have been additionally all volunteers, as they nonetheless are); and dealing with all of the paperwork wanted for a charity to exist.
In these days, with solely a typewriter and card index information at her disposal, duties corresponding to sending newsletters to a whole lot of supporters have been extraordinarily laborious and time consuming. Frankly, nobody else concerned in Survival, other than Barbara, was ready to tackle these jobs – and everybody knew it. With out her dedication, there is no such thing as a doubt by any means that Survival would merely not have survived its first decade.
Removed from being ‘solely’ an administrator, Barbara did virtually the whole lot else as effectively. Utilizing her in depth data of anthropologists, the UK Parliament – the place she had labored for a number of years – and Fleet Road (when the papers actually have been produced there), she was continuously elevating tribal peoples’ points with politicians and urgent the media to cowl them.
When a big delegation of Canadian Indians visited London to petition the sovereign (the ‘nice white mom’) within the run-up to the ‘repatriation’ of the Canadian Structure in 1981, they showered Barbara with presents and accorded her the honorific title, ‘nice pink mom’.
The workplace was simply a few small rooms, on completely different flooring, at 36 Craven Road, the place Benjamin Franklin had lived from 1757-1775. This was just a few hundred yards from parliament, in a single path, and Fleet Road, within the different. In that sense we have been effectively positioned, but when it sounds quite grand, it wasn’t! Barbara cherished to recount how she was within the basement when she heard two passersby outdoors commenting on the blue plaque which introduced the constructing’s (different) function in historical past. To 1’s commentary, “Look ‘ere, Benjamin Franklin lived ‘ere,” his companion exclaimed laconically, “Poor bugger!”
Barbara and I have been there when an enormous IRA automobile bomb blew up close to Whitehall, leaving a sizeable crater. The blast swung down the walkway, Craven Passage, and slammed into our avenue, taking out a number of neighbours’ home windows and shaking the constructing’s, quite weak, brick cloth. Barbara didn’t pause from her work.
Her steadfastness, innate sense of justice, arduous work, and irrepressible humour shall be a lot missed. She is survived by her daughter, Judith, to whom all at Survival ship our deepest condolences.
