Obituary: Hazel Sabey, 1936-2024

James B remembers Hazel Sabey (1936-2024), one of the founding members of rs21 and a lifelong socialist.

Hazel Sabey, who died recently aged 88, was an indomitable member of the left in West London for many decades. 

Following an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Hazel spent the last three years of her life quite contentedly in a residential home in Surrey.

Her commitment began as a member of the International Marxist Group, then the British section of the Fourth International. Hazel subsequently joined the Socialist Workers Party in the early nineties, and in 2014 became one of the founding members of rs21. She joined with other comrades in building our organisation in West London, and participated in our National meetings and All Member Assemblies up until 2019.

Hazel was born in Kensington, West London, and evacuated to the countryside during World War II. Her father was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a small left party whose members were conscientious objectors to military conscription. She took much from her parents’ principles and commitment, including remaining a life-long vegetarian. During the 1960s and 70s she lived in Egypt and Cyprus, working as a teacher for the British Council.

From the 1980s Hazel was active in solidarity campaigns with Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well as being heavily involved with solidarity for the great miners’ strike of 1984/85. Many causes benefited from her dedication, and she was in particular a staunch supporter of Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, then based in North London’s Finsbury Park. She also maintained a correspondence with Black Panther Kenny ‘Zulu’ Whitmore – incarcerated in the notoriously brutal Angola prison in Louisiana, for close to 50 years – for as long as she was able. 

As a teacher of English as a Foreign Language at Hammersmith & West London College, Hazel was active in the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, a forerunner of the UCU.

The friends and acquaintances Hazel accumulated over her life attest to her commitment to both revolutionary politics and the study and conservation of the natural world; she was an expert botanist with a long-running commitment to the work of Kew Gardens. She counted Tariq Ali as a friend, and engaged in robust debates with David Attenborough, who respected her knowledge and abilities. At Kew she campaigned for improvements in the terms and conditions of the workers whilst maintaining her scientific interests.

Hazel was very amused by the 2004 release of MI5 papers on Sylvia Pankhurst’s anti-imperialist activities in Abyssinia, in which a diplomat at the Foreign Office (and later ambassador to Ethiopia) suggested ‘this horrid old harridan should be choked to death with her own pamphlets’, querying whether they could ‘discover any effective means of muzzling the tiresome Miss Pankhurst’. Hazel often noted how ‘ahead of her time’ and inspirational the lifelong activist had been, but the same could be said of Hazel and her parents – or perhaps more fittingly that she was ‘of her time’ in having led a life of resistance to the inequalities and injustices of the present.