A trustee of the grant-maker the Southall Trust is to step down next month after 60 years in the role.
Ninety-three-year-old Annette Wallis has announced she will step down on 14 March from a position she has held since 1962.
The trust was established in 1937 by her grandfather, Wilfred Francis Southall, using proceeds from the sale of the family’s pharmaceutical company, Southall Bros & Barclay, which invented the sanitary towel.
The Southall Trust gives grants of about £350,000 a year to UK charities in areas including social action, peace and reconciliation and sustainability.
The trust said it was Wallis’ “passion to support charities involved in peace and reconciliation that encouraged her to join the trust”.
It said she was inspired by her father, Corder Catchpool, who was imprisoned for his pacifist views during the First World War.
The trust said Wallis had vivid memories of living in Berlin in the 1930s and the Gestapo arresting and interrogating her father.
It said Catchpool was persecuted for trying to help Jewish people and others escape the imminent torture they would face.
He and his wife Gwen devoted their lives to promoting peace and human rights, the charity said, and Wallis had “continued her parents’ legacy through the Southall Trust”.
It said Wallis and her cousins ran the trust as volunteers from their homes from the 1960s until the 1990s, while also raising their respective families.
In the 1990s the Southall Trust recruited a staff member to help with its operation, but Wallis and her fellow trustees remained actively involved with its work by assessing all eligible applications in the background, the charity said.
Wil Berdinner, secretary of the trust, said: “It has been such a privilege to work with Annette during her final chapter at the trust.
“Applicants might not know that since the 1960s she has been an assessor for most applications.
“She continues to work with phenomenal dedication to the cause and, for me personally, she is someone who has always been at the end of the phone, or an email whenever needed. Everyone at the trust will really miss her wisdom and her presence.”
The charity said one of her six children and two of her 10 grandchildren remained trustees, alongside five other descendants of Wilfred Southall.