Barbara Champion
A graduate in history from Oxford University, she became secretary of the Communist Party’s University Students’ Group. Having joined the Daily Worker in 1943, soon after its ban on publication was lifted, she stayed with the paper for 19 years, with a break to have children.
Immediately after the war, she played a leading role in the North Kensington squatters’ movement. For some two decades she was a key figure in the organisation of the Hampstead Daily Worker and Morning Star bazaars.
She returned to the paper in 1956, after a number of members of staff had resigned and was made chief sub-editor in 1965, the first woman to occupy such a post in a British national newspaper. She then moved on to work for the Soviet Novosti Press Agency in 1971. A life long member of the Communist Party, she supported the re-established Communist Party of Britain. Barbara died aged 70 in 1991.
Source: Morning Star December 2nd 1991
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