Silvia Rodgers; writer, artist & political activist
Hyfler/Rosner
They had legendary summer parties, thronged with
politicians, journalists, writers, artists and academics.
They danced exuberantly. There were marvellous holidays in
Italy, with children and friends in a constant moving
seminar of discussion. They were brilliant dinner party
hosts. Although Silvia's food was great - herrings and red
cabbage, lentils and duck - it was the conversation that
really mattered. They always managed to produce, around
their wobbly round table, proper talk about proper things.
It was the kind of engaged discussion - the exchange of, at
times, strong disagreements of a high intelligence - that
helps both make and change the world."
Silvia Rodgers
Fierce, radical spirit whose creative energy helped launch
the SDP
Jean Seaton
Monday October 9, 2006
Guardian
Silvia Rodgers, who has died aged 78, came from the dark
heart of turbulent 20th-century European history. She had
politics in her blood, and it gave her the restless creative
energy that brought her close to the centre of British
political life for more than 50 years. Having rebelled
against her parents' communism by becoming a committed
social democrat in the Labour party, she went on to be a key
and defiant intelligence behind the founding of the Social
Democratic party in the 1980s.
She was born Silvia Szulman in the Jewish hospital in
Wedding, a working-class district of Weimar Berlin. Her
mother, whom she described as "a revolutionary by vocation",
had escaped arrest in her native Poland by taking refuge in
Berlin; her father was a stateless tailor. Both came from
observant Orthodox families, but Marxism and feminism were
the religions Silvia was brought up in. Of the 25 children
in her class in 1938, only four survived the Holocaust. With
her mother and brother, she followed her father to Britain
in 1938, after an agonising wait when the SS searched their
flat.
Silvia had a profound sense of dislocation, as she once
described herself: "I was always off-centre. I was a Polish
child in the German capital, a communist in a fascist state,
a Jewish child in a German school, an atheist child in a
Jewish Orthodox school, a refugee child in England."
The defining and happy moment in her life was meeting Bill
Rodgers, later Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank but then the
dashing young general secretary of the Fabian Society. They
married in 1955. It was never an easy marriage, but
something far better, a passionately interested one, in
which her ardour was balanced by his rational intelligence
in a common enterprise. It took Silvia into the aristocracy
of Labour politics as Bill became an MP and a cabinet
minister.
At Fabian conferences they met Hugh Gaitskell, and Bill was
one of Hugh Dalton's final proteges. They were friends with
the Croslands (before Tony met Susan), the Browns, the
Healeys and the Callaghans, and had a lifelong companionship
with Roy Jenkins and his wife, Jennifer.
The Rodgers were good at interesting fun: the best kind.
They had legendary summer parties, thronged with
politicians, journalists, writers, artists and academics.
They danced exuberantly. There were marvellous holidays in
Italy, with children and friends in a constant moving
seminar of discussion. They were brilliant dinner party
hosts. Although Silvia's food was great - herrings and red
cabbage, lentils and duck - it was the conversation that
really mattered. They always managed to produce, around
their wobbly round table, proper talk about proper things.
It was the kind of engaged discussion - the exchange of, at
times, strong disagreements of a high intelligence - that
helps both make and change the world.
Indeed, Silvia's background brought an un-British sense of
urgency to politics. She was convinced that Labour was
"finished" at a much earlier stage than her husband. During
the winter of discontent in 1979, she would phone Bill's
office to question whether he fully appreciated the anarchy
she saw breaking out. The unions' behaviour, and the refusal
of the legitimate Labour left to stand up to the Trots in
the party, was, as she saw it, redolent of the weakness in
the face of democracy's enemies that had led to the rise of
Hitler.
In retrospect, this view seems exaggerated, but many felt
something similar. Silvia was part of those innermost
deliberations around the setting up of the SDP, and was
proud of Bill's leadership as its vice-president (1982-87).
Yet her frustration at her non-official political status
also stimulated another creative side. She was a successful
artist, then found her true métier as a writer. In 1975,
when her husband was minister of state for defence, she was
invited to launch HMS Newcastle, a type 24 destroyer. It
took her three attempts to break the bottle over its bows,
the admiral hugged her and she became - to her own
surprise - greatly attached to the vessel, following its
26-year life closely, through to its decommissioning.
Her fascination with the rituals of launching a ship lead to
a PhD on the subject, under Rodney Needham at Oxford. When
Bill became a life peer in 1992, she wrote an original
anthropological account of the role (and space) of women in
parliament. In 1996, Red Saint, Pink Daughter, a gripping
memoir of her early life, got brilliant reviews; she was
elected to the Royal Society of Literature and won the
Jewish book prize. It is not a polite book, but it captures
her disconcerting honesty and vital intelligence, and is a
beautifully written piece of important history. She was
working on her next book, The Politician's Wife, right up to
her death.
There was always a whiff of cordite around Silvia. The early
insecurity took a toll. But it also produced strong
affections. Above all, she was a clever, warm, vivacious and
generous woman: a sensitive support to many in distress. She
got on very well with men, but she was also a close and
intimate friend of many women. She is survived by her
husband and their daughters, Rachel, Lucy and Juliet.
· Silvia Rodgers, writer, artist and political activist,
born March 3 1928; died October 8 2006