Born on July 3, 1923, Ryder joined Britain's First Aid Nursing Yeomanry at the age of 16.
After a three-week training, she was assigned to the Polish section of the Special Operations Executive, where she worked closely with an elite unit of Polish soldiers, the Cichociemni (Silent Unseen), preparing them for their parachute missions to join anti-Nazi resistance in their homeland.
After the war, Ryder volunteered to do relief work. In 1953, she established the Sue Ryder Foundation, which provided help to former prisoners of German concentration camps.
More than 8,000 former prisoners, mainly Poles, benefitted from rest-and-rehabilitation schemes. The foundation also helped the elderly and disabled, as well as children in India and Africa.
In 1959, Ryder married Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, and the couple worked together on more projects.
The Sue Ryder Foundation operates more than 100 nursing homes, hospital cancer wards and hospices, including 30 in Poland, and has several hundred charity shops.
Lady Ryder of Warsaw
Ryder treated Poland as her own homeland and referred to the Polish people as “we, the Poles.” When made a life peer in 1979, she took on the title Lady Ryder of Warsaw.
She was an honorary citizen of the Polish capital, the port city of Gdynia and of the spa of Konstancin near Warsaw. There is a Sue Ryder Street where the Konstancin-Zdrój Health Resort is located.
Warsaw has a Sue Ryder Museum, which contains her personal archive, documents, photographs, letters and memorabilia relating to her wartime activities and charity work.
In 2018, her biography Lady Sue Ryder of Warsaw: Single-Minded Philanthropist, by Tessa West, was published in the UK by Shepheard-Walwyn.
Ryder wrote about Poland in the memoirs: “I feel that I belong to Poland. It is a colorful country, so often misunderstood, relatively unknown, and due to its geographical location, exposed to attacks from its stronger neighbours throughout its long history. Poland is a country with which I have been closely tied for over 40 years. Owing to its folk tradition and expressed regional culture, as well as its unwavering spirit, Poland, despite frequent invasions and partitions, has never lost its self-determination and will to survive."
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