 I first went to work for Barbara in 1968 when she was made the Elbert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University and she never taught and so she needed a flunky, needed a research assistant, needed somebody to help you organize classes and so on. Barbara was the best public speaker of her time. She was brilliant but she'd been used and she was a good propagandist but she'd been used to sort of giving the same speech 300 different ways and you can't do that if we have the same students there every week so I was drafted in to help organize a program and how we do the research and so on and so forth and I was there when the UN had originally decided to organize what became the Stockholm Conference in 1972 on the basis of a resolution from the Swedish government and it progressed along and it was clear that it was going to be a meeting of developed countries. The developing countries didn't stand in this for them. They thought it was a threat, they didn't want to do anything. So the Secretary General at the time thought we'd better get somebody to run this thing who people will pay attention to in the developing world and so they persuaded Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada to release the head of the Canadian Aid Agency, Morris Strong as the Secretary General and Morris set out to try and find ways to make what looked like a rich man's agenda into something relevant to developing countries and our part of the story is that he turned to Barbara who was the only person he knew who wrote books that people in the developing world wrote because she'd spent her life writing about it to write a book about why developing countries should have a concern about the environment. So I was Barbara's research assistant so I was drafted in and I remember she came into my office one day and she knew nothing about the environment and I said no so we better figure out because Morris just asked me to write this book so in sort of I didn't and the one thing about Barbara was she wrote everything herself she was a professional writer it says Barbara wore at the bottom page she wrote I didn't write it I assembled stacks of books and notes and carried things down and read drafts and went up and downstairs and so anyway we eventually produced this thing called the home of man which was a big bestseller in 1972 it sold in 25 languages and so on and it did along with a number of the other things that Strong did it served to make development an environment into a not a dirty word to try and persuade the sort of young intellectual leadership of the developing world that environment wasn't just water pollution and air pollution but it was soil erosion and loss of cropland and crappy drinking water and urban can do the whole set of problems we now link between environment development Barbara basically defined all of those and so after the conference she was approached by the leaders of something called the international issue for environmental affairs which had been set up by an American oil man Bob Anderson as a kind of think tank about international environmental issues and he said I'll do with this thing whatever more strong wants because we wanted to act as a support system Morris by this time was ahead of UNEP so Barbara said yes I've been in the United States she'd been in the U.S. pretty much constantly says the war and she said well it'd be nice to go back to Britain and we'll move it because there were quite a lot of these things in the U.S. at the time so I got a guy came along with a baggage so I helped set it up and I put together the the initial staff and the program and I since he ran it under Barbara's direction obviously for well until I left in 1981 she almost all she was almost constantly suffering from one form of cancer or another and it was quite extraordinary to watch she would never admit it publicly she always had gastric flu or some other elaborate excuse but it was cancer and it was always a different kind and she went through all the various treatments and it was it was a very it was fascinating to watch because it was almost as if she willed it to go away she had someone would get very angry and then it would proceed and obviously Sloan Kettering and the King Edward the same than the hospitals all help but I convinced a certain amount of this was an act of will but it was quite fascinating to work for a particular the Benny because I'm a Hick from Canada suddenly here I am in Europe with this sophisticated woman who's called Lady Jackson and so on and Barbara was one of those people who literally knew everybody because she had gone after she had been the foreign editor the economist during the war she'd been used by the British government as a kind of acceptable face of Britain Lord Halifax who is the ambassador in the US was a stuffy old fool and fit the classic British aristocrat portfolio but Barbara was a beautiful young woman who was very funny and so she was used and she spent a lot of time in the United States and in other parts of the world Sweden and other neutral countries essentially just being Barbara but essentially portraying an image of Britain as a progressive and interesting and a place that deserves support of the war so she had this huge coterie of supporters and she was married or she eventually married Robert Jackson who was the head of the UN Refugee and Relief Administration which was the whole rescue agency for Europe partly under the Marshall Plan and ended up living in New York and she got befriended or she befriended or was adopted almost by the New York Liberal Democratic establishment largely Herbert Lehman who became the head of UNRWA and Herbert Lehman was the seal of the American Banking Community so here's Barbara as the kind of first transatlantic person wasn't David Frost it was Barbara equally acceptable both on both sides of the Atlantic and quite willing to do things for people without insisting on keep taking the credit I mean you know you get nowadays you get people to do that they ghost ghost-right stories for some of this and Barbara never did it and there are all kinds of strange stories told about her I don't know how many of them are true but she had and she was a socialist she was a lifelong socialist and she ran Ernie Bevin's campaign in 19 than they in the wartime election in 1945 in Lambeth South and Ernie Bevin who was the head of the TUC later became the Foreign Secretary and the story was told that I know this is true or not that when George Marshall got up and gave the Harvard commencement speech announcing what became known as the Marshall Plan and he essentially said you know we're prepared to do this if Europe responds well why on earth not everybody in Europe noticed what was going on because why on earth would somebody announce something like this at a university and Barbara it was said went to Bevin and said Foreign Secretary after this is quite serious you really if you don't do something about this will lose the opportunity to get this substantial flow of funds from the United States to to Western Europe now I have no idea whether that's an apocryphal story or not but knowing Barbara could easily have been true because she knew the players involved and so you and she would quite often pull these rabbits out of a hat and you'd suddenly discover I remember sitting I was doing a report for the book or that some some research for the book she came down gave me a letter very complicated I'd like to have your views on this and I looked at it it was it was basically theology more or less I went back down I said well I don't also see it's very persuasive to me but I don't really about this who's this letter written to well Pope I said what said yes I know the Pope quite well which did and I said well you know I'm just a kind of narrow-minded Presbyterian for the northern hemisphere I don't know what you say to his holiness but it sounds persuasive to me but she was a great friend of John the 23rd she was apparently the first woman to address a synod of bishops in the Catholic Church since 900 AD and she helped run this thing called the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace set up specifically by the Pope so here she is a very active lay person in the Catholic Church she wasn't sanctimonious about it she didn't seek to impose this on anybody she would be rolling around in her grave if she heard me saying that I knew she'd written this letter to the Pope but she was able to do things like this and and she knew and I asked her about this once and she said you know if you're ever going to do this if you're going to go straight things or if you're going to try and influence important people don't be standing around the front door saying why because that's the last time you'll be asked to help so there's a long history of Barbara herself having direct influence on people like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, Robert McNamara, the head of the IMF she actually knew all these people personally they paid attention to her because she actually had good ideas and because they were slightly afraid of her because she still wrote for the economist but but also because she didn't tell tales out of school and I think that IED when it got going had way more influence than anybody thought because if you did the normal kind of impact analysis it's very fashionable now with the aid agencies you wouldn't catch any of this you wouldn't catch the fact that Barbara actually went and got the prime minister and said yeah I'll write it for a rights cup of paragraphs. Harold Wilson's memoirs which must be the most boring book ever written there's a section in it and I swear this is true in which he reports having been taken to the LBJ Ranch when Johnson was president this was notorious Johnson got in the famous Lincoln with the long horns on the front and drew a drunk and drove them all around the ranch and Wilson reports that they talked about this and they talked about Vietnam and they talked about security policy and so they came down the last item which was foreign aid and Wilson got this piece of paper out of his pocket and started reading from it and Johnson said that looks like Barbara Warren's handwriting reached over and said I've got the same one and he she'd written almost an identical letter to both of them and had structured the whole discussion so she was quite remarkable in the way she did that and and people liked her because she was a delightful companion she was a great dinner party conversationalist she told very funny jokes about herself she was extraordinarily well-read and and she knew how to use influence I was to ask her this sort of you know what did you do during the war lady J and and the various things came out and essentially she had she was a Catholic her mother was a Catholic her father was a Quaker and Barbara really wanted to be an opera singer she loved music and she had a wonderful voice and she wanted to go study music and her father it was a very practical Quaker who also believed in girls education said well Barbara I'm not sure you have the voice for it but I'll make a deal with you you go to Oxford and get a decent education and if you still think you want to sing that well send you to school learn how to sing but at least you'll have some skills so off she went to Oxford and she did it in what 1934 and 1935 and he was well off so she was finished off so she was sent to Paris in the mid-30s to learn French and that was just at the time when the block popular the first socialist government came to power in France and then she was sent to Heidelberg just at about the time that Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and then she ended up in Rome when Mussolini was holding forth so here she was she could you could see European history passing in front of her eyes and she then came back and she was hired by Arnold Toynbee who was that professor at Oxford and who was running a unit that monitored the press in in Europe and this was in the phony war this was after the things that really started to die down after the invasion of Poland and Toynbee got a phone call from the editor of the economist who was a man but who was a paraplegic so he was in a wheelchair so he couldn't be drafted and essentially said I'm Arnold I need some help because they've drafted all my staff and can you help me and he Toynbee according to Barbara said well I've got this one young woman here on my staff who's supposed to be monitoring the Italian press but her Italian is awful maybe she could be useful so Barbara is shipped off to become one of the employees of the economist so she actually became there were two women essentially wrote much of the economist during the war Barbara and Nora Beloff but she was also the BBC had this classically arcane BBC show called the brains trust which was apparently the one of the most popular radio shows during the war and it was two or three Oxford intellectuals and Barbara and they were given this like a very high-class Clare's quiz show was extremely popular but Barbara was the hit because she kept making jokes and they were deadly serious so she was kind of a media star as well she was born in 1914 so she's what 25 well and maybe 30 at this point less in her late 20s and and very beautiful there's an Augustus John portrait which is absolutely fabulous so you have this very lively intelligent rather good-looking woman who kept giving these jobs and after the war she became the youngest governor of the BBC and she was hired she told this story was a wonderful story she was hired to be one of the board of governors of the old Vic and she couldn't understand why they'd hired her and I don't know who it was that hired and she later discovered her principal first job was she had to fire Lawrence Olivier as the artistic director because the rest of them couldn't stand him so she had this resident in today's terms in this resume which is long as your arm and she's like 30 years old so it it didn't I mean it I should say it set it up set her up for life that's not fair what it meant was you had a person of sort of uncommon sophistication and influence at a time when women weren't supposed to do this stuff and I think what did her did it to her as much as anything else was she was set by the commons to try to cover the Nuremberg war trials and she watched the whole thing of gearing and the other Nazis all testifying and so on she said it was she said I'll never never lose faith in democracy after that again so that plus a Catholic faith made her a very strong person anyway it was just a it was great fun to work for because you had thrown into endless situations and I remember being a graduate student in New York and she said well my husband is out of town and I'm giving this dinner party maybe you could sit in for nice well fine it's okay so I went nice sat there and greeted everybody and realized that I was sitting there with the head of the World Bank and the head of the IMF and Herbert Lehman of Lehman brothers and Adley Stevens I was ridiculous but it those were just the people she interacted with on a regular basis and it makes you sound like a terrible name-dropper and Barbara wasn't she really wasn't at all because she realized that by dropping all those names you lose your influence but it was just a very interesting exercise and and she brought a lot to my ID as well she brought her contacts she brought her ability to be able to write she brought her ability to be able to influence people and very very good political small-peak political judgment well I think the really obvious influence is that Barbara was a genuine friend of the developing world I mean she devoted most of her life after the the sort of the end of the war but say 48 1949 she devoted her entire life to trying to persuade the developed countries to make a sensible international economic system the one that was fair to developing countries one that was based on exchange of mutual respect one that was based on some massive transfers of resources so Barbara would always examine a even though she came from Britain and loved being in Britain she would always examine a proper point of view of the developing countries and it seems to me that's the sort of natural reaction of IED and Barbara would I think be very pleased with the discussion we've just had downstairs which is okay we're going to see what we can do about reforming the world financial system but it was largely about you know how does it affect developing countries how do you involve the G77 etc so I think although it's not always been particularly universally popular IID has been has remained very true to Barbara's ideals of the importance of the developing world the critical importance of eliminating poverty and inequality of endangering mutual cultural respect I mean what IED does now is essentially pure Barbara Ward and I think the Institute's board and Camilla and the rest of you should be very proud of the fact that you've carried on absolutely the kind of legacy that Barbara would have liked you to do