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Anna Berent, backing charities helping torture victims and asylum seekers |
Charity champion: Mayor gets her teeth into fundraising
IN her time, Anna Berent has courageously confronted young vandals and even bitten a burglar. Now, at 82, the Islington Lib Dem councillor is believed to be London’s oldest mayor.
She is using her mayoralty to raise money for local charities, The Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture and Room2Heal, which supports asylum seekers.
A widow and grandmother, she worked as a journalist and research technician in the health service and still found time for environmental campaigning.
Her father was an Austrian immigrant who came to Britain in 1906, but Anna was born and bred in Islington and has lived in Mildmay for 25 years.
Her English mother was a published philosopher who wrote a book called Morality and Happiness. Anna became Lib Dem councillor for Mildmay in 2002 at the age of 75. When you remark on her extraordinary energy, she puts it down to a combination of HRT and genes.
As reported in the Tribune last year, Anna is not scared of confrontation, be it political or on the streets. In Petherton Road, Highbury, she was faced with a group of youths goading a Staffordshire bull terrier to strip bark off trees to toughen its jaws.
Most people would have walked away. But Anna marched up to the group of boys, in their late teens and early 20s, and “in the nicest possible way” explained why what they were doing was bad for both dog and tree. In the end the youths “humphed” and walked away.
In a previous incident she bit a burglar and chased him out of her home. “The chap had got in through my bathroom window,” she said. “He slapped a towel across my face and told me not to make a sound. I had to decide whether to co-operate or do something. I decided to bite his hand hard. He dropped the towel and slapped my face. But I was able to yell the house down and he ran off.” Police arrested several suspects but Anna was unable to identify them.
Speaking about the charities she supports, she explained why they were chosen. “I chose the Medical Foundation because the deliberate infliction of pain for political or other reasons on other people is just the most disgusting thing,” she said.
“Room2Heal also does a wonderful job supporting asylum seekers who have been through desperate times in their own countries. They are often perceived by people who don’t know as scroungers in this country. The trouble is they are not allowed to work.”
A former Labour supporter who became disillusioned by the militants, she was a founder member of the Social Democrat Party and then a founder member of the Lib Dems in Islington.
Among her hobbies she lists walking, occasionally jogging and until recently rock-climbing. |
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