SHE may have been dying from cancer but that didn't stop Joan Hammet from demonstrating against the Iraq war.
Life-long peace campaigner and ardent feminist Joan has died aged 77 at home in Sturminster Newton.
She grew up in a working-class home in the Midlands, leaving school at 14 and marrying at 17.
With absolutely no sex education, pregnant Joan had no idea how the first of her four children would emerge from her body.
It was that level of scary ignorance which made her campaign for women's rights - most notably contraception.
Joan undertook teacher training while bringing up her four children and later took an Open University degree.
Her third husband, Roger Bayliss, said: "She was an example of a working-class girl who showed enormous tenacity in overcoming adversity and fighting for the principles she believed in.
"She was a dissenter from the conventions, unafraid of policemen and always standing up to authority.
"Her whole career was based on fighting for the rights of women and the peace movement."
Joan opened the first Family Planning Association clinic in Birmingham in the teeth of opposition from doctors and churchmen.
Her daughter Giovanna said she would visit clients "on a daily basis to enable them to take their pill".
The family moved to Dorset in the 1970s. Roger taught at King Alfred's School in Shaftesbury and Joan at St Mary's Convent.
She left unwillingly aged 60, but not without winning compensation at tribunal for the sex discrimination which forced her to leave five years earlier than a man.
A Quaker since 1991, Joan had been a peace campaigner since the early CND marches from Aldermaston.
From her pushchair, Giovanna mixed with all the big names of the peace movement - including Bruce Kent, Canon Collins and Donald Soper.
Joan took part in protests against US nuclear weapons on British soil at Greenham Common and Faslane.
And she stood in Sturminster's market place to protest against the Iraq war.
"She kept a solitary vigil against the war despite already being terminally ill until she couldn't stand up any more because her back hurt too much," said Roger, also a peace campaigner.
"It was her beliefs and principles which took her to those lengths.
"That was the proudest I have ever been."
First published: May 18
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