Author Archives: James Moore

Veteran Liberal Democrat campaigner and former Councillor, Annette Hendry sadly passed away on Wednesday 31st May after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 74.

It’s very sad that my first ever article for Lib Dem Voice should be this, but I wanted to celebrate Annette’s life and all she achieved. Annette was one of my local liberal heroes.

She met her husband Alan while she was reading English at University College London and the couple eventually moved to Reading for Alan’s job. Annette started her long service to the community in Reading by teaching English as a foreign language to the new arrivals from the sub-continent. They later had three children, Douglas, Anne and Neill.

Her passion for helping people led her to take on a second degree in Social Work at Oxford Brookes University, which meant she was able to become a social worker at what is now Bracknell Forest Council, where she worked with with troubled teenagers, dysfunctional families and children in care, which she found incredibly rewarding and life enhancing.

Annette was active in the Liberal Party, then the Liberal Democrats, and was a tenacious campaigner for the Party in the 1970s, 80s and 90s until finally becoming Councillor for Peppard ward on Reading Borough Council in 1999, a role she held until 2007. She was also a long-standing Chair of the Caversham Branch of the Greater Reading Local Party.

As well as being a Councillor she was a school governor and strong advocate for the Reading Citizens Advice Bureau which she became a trustee of.

I only joined the Liberal Democrats in late 2011, but Annette was one of the first people I met and we were soon friends. Ever cheerful, she simply got stuff done, both as a Councillor and as a general campaigner. I always knew I could rely on her to help organise an event or campaigning session. She was a liberal to her core. One particular moment will always stick in my mind when she took umbrage with another Liberal Democrat who was expressing some not so-Liberal views – I’ve never seen anyone go so white. Behind her cheery disposition was a very strong core liberal belief when things were wrong they should be fixed and addressed.

I asked some Local Party members to describe Annette: