Marie received the Window to the World Award in 2001 – our very first year of giving the ‘Women of the Year’ Awards – for her bravery and raising awareness of the war in Sri Lanka.

Read Marie Colvin’s incredible speech, made in 2010, about the importance of reporting from war zones.

Kate said, “I am very honoured to receive the Barclays Women of the Year award – all the staff at Headley Court work very hard and it is an amazing opportunity to work with both the patients and the staff there. ”

Kate is a clinical specialist physiotherapist, and has worked at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre since 2002 in the Complex Trauma and Physiotherapy services. She is one of six winners of the Barclays Women of the Year Award, all of whom are dedicated medical professionals who have worked tirelessly treating injured and wounded military personnel and civilians in hospitals in the UK as well as in the field.

Kate was unable to attend the Women of the Year Lunch and awards ceremony in October as she was on holiday.

That vision remains the motivating factor behind the lunch. The invitees all come from diverse backgrounds and have followed a wide range of career paths. Take veteran anti-war campaigner Hetty Bower. She became a pacifist after seeing young men return from the trenches in the first world war. Now aged 106, she is still campaigning and was there in Trafalgar Square at the Antiwar Mass Assembly on 8 October. What a fantastic role model to us all.

From the eldest to the youngest: Holly Watson was just 16 when her brother was stabbed to death. To prevent other families going through the suffering her family experienced, she started the ‘I don’t carry a knife campaign’ to promote public awareness of the dangers of carrying knives and improve education in schools. Now 17, she was awarded a Rotary International GB Young Citizen Award this year for her efforts. Some use their own experiences to help others. Karen Sorab fought to set up the Rainbow, a special needs school in Wandsworth, after being told that her severely autistic daughter would never be able to communicate and was ineducable. The charity she founded, BeyondAutism, has recently opened its second school catering for up to 60 pupils aged 4-17 which is regarded as a centre of excellence.

Emma Parry co-founded Help for Heroes with husband Bryn after a visit to Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital where they met wounded soldiers. Inspired, they took on the challenge of raising £8m to build a rehabilitation complex at Headley Court. The public’s imagination was caught: a charity bike ride past the French battlefields raised a staggering £1.4m, and within eight months they had already reached their target. But the money kept pouring in and Help for Heroes was born.

Other women are pioneers. In May, councillor Naveeda Ikram became the first female British Muslim Lord Mayor. She presides over the council in Bradford where she has lived for most of her life. In April, Nicola Mendelsohn, chairman of Karmarama, became the first woman president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in its 94-year history. And in September, Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris became one of the first women to be appointed to head up a rabbinic college anywhere in the world.

You may think that British women’s tennis continues to languish in the doldrums but you’d be wrong: another 2011 woman of the year is Lucy Shuker, Britain’s number one – and seventh in the world – in wheelchair tennis. Paralysed from the chest down after a motorcycle accident in 2001, Lucy has risen through the ranks and is hoping for a medal in the Paralympics. And in another sporting first, Deborah Griffin became the first ever women’s rugby representative to be appointed to the RFU council in recognition of the growth in popularity of the women’s game. Also at the lunch is Elaine Vassie, holding her own in a man’s world as director of rugby at Manchester RC.

Women are the mainstay of the world’s longest running soap opera, The Archers, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. We are delighted that so many of the team could be at the lunch.

These are just a few of the amazing women in the room. Each of you has a story to tell and you are all ‘women of the year’ in your own right.

Breaking bread together today are women who are famous and women who are unsung; women who are older and women who are not so old; women who are political, women who are not; women from the world of business and from the public sector; women who are in the public arena but also women who labour quietly in the vineyard. But what all of you have in common is that you are, truly and utterly, amazing women. Each of you in your own way has made a huge difference to the lives of others. Every woman who is invited to this lunch has been the subject of discussion and debate. There is nothing random about your being here. Every single woman has done something special with her life and made an impact. Each of you is a woman who has used her special talents, gone the extra mile and inspired others. You are all women of the year.

The creation of this unique and amazing event came out of the genius of the late Tony Lothian – the Marchioness of Lothian – who started having these lunches back in the fifties, when women were being encouraged back into the kitchen after the Second World War. As a journalist, she was all too aware of the amazing contribution, paid and unpaid, that women had made to our country during that bleak period. She wanted to ensure that women in peacetime would continue to have opportunities to pursue careers or other passions and that women would not be pushed back into the margins. She saw that women were the great creators of social capital, the good stuff that binds our society. She recognised the importance of role models. She knew that celebrating achievement acted as an inspiration to others. And she knew that flagging up the extraordinary accomplishments of women helped embed these achievements in our society.

The first time I was invited to this lunch was back in the eighties. I was a young woman practising at the Bar, a profession where then only 8% of practitioners were women. I was trying to shine a spotlight on the ways that the law so often failed women and was campaigning for reform. I wanted reform of legislation, reform of the legal system, reform of prisons. I wanted more women practitioners, more women judges and better judicial training. There was no end to what I wanted. But what I was really after was fairness and a better world. Just like all of you. My campaigns brought me to Tony’s attention and I was invited to this lunch. I was utterly bowled over, sitting at a table with Cilla Black, a shepherdess from Cumbria, an Olympic shot putter and a coal merchant from Wales. The conversations were hilarious.

In among the sheer pleasure of being with such glorious women in all shapes and sizes, were their stories. In the room each year are dedicated women who have succeeded beyond imagining in their chosen sphere.

There are those who put their own good fortune in their career to the use of others through philanthropy. There are also women who put their own loss and tragedy to the most incredible purposes and refuse to buckle under their grief. Women who, after the death of their husbands in war, create charities to provide support for soldiers who are physically maimed. There are women who after cancer set up counselling groups or run in marathons to raise money for research. At your table will be women who look after disabled children or do battle with the authorities to improve their council estates for the good of their whole community. You will meet women who overcome their fear of failure and become successes in all sorts of endeavours.

People ask why we still want to have a women’s lunch. Well, you only have to look around the world at the position of women and the suffering women endure to recognise that we still have a distance to travel to achieve genuine equality. One of my own public roles in this last year has been to act as Investigating Commissioner into Human Trafficking. As a human rights lawyer, I thought I knew all there was to know about cruelty and inhumanity towards women but this inquiry has reminded me of the horrifying suffering that women still too often endure. Opportunities like this gathering remind us that women have the ability to make change, that we are powerful if we come together.

The other question that is thrown at us is how do we find all these exceptional women? It actually takes up the time and energies of a dedicated cohort of women on the Women of the Year council, who tirelessly scour the land to find all those who are honoured here today. I want to thank them all. They know who they are. This year we were greatly helped by the marvellous Lorraine Kelly, whose morning television show invited nominations. We also rely on the women who come here today to write with recommendations for next year. So please remember to do that for us.

I also want to thank our committed sponsors – Barclays, Good Housekeeping, Sacla’ and Sainsbury’s, and all the other people who really do make the event possible. I hope you will leave the Women of the Year lunch with your heart warmed and your optimism restored. There are wonderful women doing amazing things – and you are one of them.

Yours ever,
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
President

The 2011 Women of the Year winners in full are:

• Debby Edwards, Victoria Mulleady, Sgt Lauren Odell , Kate Sherman, Surgeon Commander Sarah Stapley and Sarah Winters – Barclays Women of the Year Award
• Dr Nawal El Saadawi – Good Housekeeping Women of the Year Outstanding Achievement Award
• Lulu – Sacla’ Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award
• Katie Piper – Sainsbury’s Women of the Year “You Can” Award
• Jackie Millerchip – ITV1’s Lorraine Inspirational Woman of the Year Award

The Women of the Year Lunch was attended by 400 extra-ordinary women from around the UK. Every guest at the Lunch is a ‘Woman of the Year’ and celebrated for her own achievements and contribution to the community. The guests represent not only themselves but the millions of extraordinary women who make a difference every day.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, President of the Women of the Year, said: “The magic of this event is that it does what no other awards ceremony manages to do. It brings together the most fabulous women from the widest range of geographical, social, ethnic and political backgrounds – from the very well-known to unsung heroines doing outstanding work in their community.

“Our special winners today highlight this: from the incredible Lulu, a national icon whose career has spanned decades yet continues to go from strength to strength, to a group of hugely talented medical professionals making a difference to the lives of wounded British troops; and from one of our most brave and active young campaigners, Katie Piper, to Nawal El Sadaawi, who – as she approaches her landmark 80th birthday – is still inspiring students and women to fight for their beliefs.

“Their achievements, dedication and passion are an inspiration to women everywhere, encouraging us all to fulfill our ambitions, support others and stand up for what we believe in.”

The winners are selected by a diverse cross-section of women represented on the nominating council, consisting of prominent figures from the arts, media, science, politics and a number of other major fields. Women on the council include Maureen Lipman CBE, Sue MacGregor CBE, Mary Nightingale, Dianne Thompson CBE, Nancy Lane OBE, Doreen Lawrence OBE and Virginia Wade OBE.

Katie Piper, 28, commented: “I feel honoured to have won the Sainsbury’s “You Can” Women of the Year Award. This is particularly special coming from so many inspiring women. It means a lot to me to have such support and encouragement along my journey, from women who I admire.”

Lulu said: “When I attended the Women of the Year Lunch last year I was so moved by the amazing women I met and the inspiring work they do in their communities, nationwide and indeed world wide. To be invited back again as a winner is beyond my wildest expectations and I am both humbled and thrilled. What I have learned is that when women roll up their sleeves, there is no end to what we can achieve.”

Dr Nawal El Saadawi added: “I am very happy to win this Women of the Year Award. It means that my creative work gains more and more recognition from my peers and others and it will help other groups in other countries to recognise my work, too. Winning this award encourages me to continue my creative dissident writing and fighting.”

Sergeant (Sgt) Lauren Odell said: “Winning the Barclays Women of the Year award is a great honour and we are so touched to be recognised for the day-to-day job that we love. Our aim is to provide the best care possible for the military and civilian patients whom we treat, and to be nominated for this award means so much, as it was truly unexpected.”

The 2011 Women of the Year Awards were hosted by Sandi Toksvig and were presented by Deanna Oppenheimer, vice-chair of Barclays Retail and Business Banking, Lindsay Nicholson, Editorial Director of Good Housekeeping, Clare Blampied, Managing Director of Sacla’, Gwyn Burr, Customer Service and Colleague Director at Sainsbury’s, and Lorraine Kelly, presenter of ITV1’s Lorraine.

The winners were introduced by Captain Martin Hewitt and Private Jaco Van Gass, of the Parachute Regiment and members of the North Pole Walking with the Wounded team; Bianca Jagger, human rights advocate; Anne Aslett, Executive Director of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and Pam Warren, survivor of the 1999 Paddington Rail Crash and Lorraine Kelly, presenter of ITV’1 Lorraine.

Other guests at the Lunch included Camila Batmanghelidjh, Shami Chakrabarti CBE, Ruby Wax, the author Joanna Trollope and Home Secretary Theresa May MP.

In September, Lorraine viewers were invited to nominate an inspirational woman in their lives, as part of a brand new partnership between the programme and Women of the Year.

The Lorraine production team selected a shortlist of entries from the nominees they considered best met the selection criteria. Each eligible shortlisted entrant was judged by a terrific panel: Lorraine Kelly, Baroness Helena Kennedy, President of Women of the Year, and Nina Barough, founder of Walk the Walk charity and a former ‘Women of the Year’ winner.

From the shortlist, the panel selected three inspirational finalists:

• Fiona Storer, 49, from in Newtownabby in Belfast was registered blind at 15. Since then she put herself through the University of Salford and qualified as a social worker. She currently works on a cross community project at the 174 Trust in Belfast helping young carers as well as her own two children.
• Gez Watson, aged 58, from Bognor Regis in West Sussex who has been nominated by her husband for her work in the local community. She has worked with the police, local authority and others to make the estate a better place for all ages to live.
• Jackie Millerchip, aged 46, from Hinckley in Leicestershire. Jackie is a childminder who looks after both able bodied and severely disabled kids.

Viewers were then invited to vote online for the women they felt deserved to win the award. The three women attended the Women of the Year Lunch in London today, where the winner was announced along with the winners of the four other special awards.

A word from Gill:

“In a moment of madness I agreed to join James for a second marathon just 3 weeks later on 6 November in New York , so Amsterdam will now be a 26-mile training run for that!

My battered feet and sore muscles, and your generosity, should ensure that many deserving women will have cause to thank us for the help that we will be able to give them as a result of our efforts.

Please sponsor me! Your support will spur me on to the finish line when my feet are ready to be divorced from my legs!”

Click here to support Gill and make a donation >

The best Camilla Parker Bowles moment at the wedding was not about the clothes or the wonders wrought by facials. It was at the blessing at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, when we heard her posh baritone firmly ‘acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed‘.

The Queen reportedly once referred to Camilla as being ‘rather used‘, but being ‘rather used‘ is what gives Camilla her edge. All that marital drama, pain and abuse in the press has been absorbed now under her feathered Philip Treacy hat. Camilla has wounds. She has memories. She has wisdom. It gives her self-confidence and the subtle glow of power.

The same thought struck me in New York recently during a star-studded lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The occasion was an annual ceremony known as the Matrix Awards, for the most powerful women in communications.

Last year Oprah Winfrey was the Queen Bee, even though she wasn’t in the running herself. She flew in from Chicago to present the award to Amy Gross, 63, the editor of her incredibly successful O, The Oprah Magazine, a monthly which now sells millions after only five years. Winfrey looked amazing. As she powered up to the podium there was something truly glorious about the confident roll of her behind in its tight couture suit. ‘When I interviewed Amy,‘ she said, ‘I knew right away she was a real woman, not an ageing female.‘ All the oestrogen in the room seemed to answer with a collective hot flash of recognition.

The Texas writer Mimi Swartz wrote in a magazine piece in 2000 that as she turned 45 she felt she was starting to disappear. (She should have tried living in Hollywood, where you’re in Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak after 35.) Men, Swartz noted, looked through her. ‘Boys in bicycle shorts, executives in pinstripes and countless males in between seemed to be nudging me aside and unless I was very quick, allowing the door to slam in my face.‘ But something has happened since Swartz wrote that piece. Women in their fifties are finally blowing past the men who didn’t hold the door. They’ve been in the workforce for 30 years and they’re unapologetic about their sense of success. All the powerhouse women on the dais at the communications award lunch in New York were so much more interesting because on the way to equilibrium they had suffered.

Dame Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson, talked about how a good failure goes a long way with women, because we honestly believe we can be successful. Linda Fairstein described how, as one of seven women on a staff of 200 lawyers, she panicked when all the guys went out to lunch and she was left alone to craft her first summation.

‘Only one response seemed natural. I sat at my desk and cried. The boss heard my sobs – “Who died?” he asked. I explained the problem and he gave me his wise solution.

“Do what we do whenever there’s a crisis. Go into the restroom and throw up like a man.” I rejected his advice – but I never cried at my desk again.‘

I have attended Women in Communications Awards ceremonies at which the acceptance speeches alternated between the embarrassingly grateful and the stridently self-promotional. But this year the remarks – by the likes of CNN’s foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who lives in London; Marjorie Scardino: and the fearless former Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor turned novelist Linda Fairstein – were honest, self-effacing and funny.

Women of a certain age can inhabit their achievements now, it seems, rather than brag about them. And many look better than they ever did at 35. Amanpour, 47 and fresh from covering the Pope’s funeral, was wearing a chic combat-like trouser suit with a T-shirt that read ‘SEXY‘.

Some of the gains in techno-grooming simply reflect the march of science. Beyond the access to all the new info about diet and exercise and style, there’s Dr Lookgood’s ever-more-skilful Filler. The first wave in the attack on wrinkles suffered heavy casualties. That Nancy Reagan face with wind-tunnel stare and rictus smile is no longer necessary.

George Orwell once said that at 50 we have the faces we deserve, but thanks to a bathroom cabinet full of new products or a lunchtime trip to the dermatologist, we now get the faces we can afford. Women are looking so good in their fifties they are dumping their husbands and moving on. In America last year two-thirds of divorces after the age of 40 were initiated by women. The old paradigm of the trophy wife of the high-flying male is quietly beginning to recede.

Perhaps the most radical reverser of all the old paradigms is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who introduced her old friend Linda Fairstein at the ceremony. Like Oprah, Hillary had carved out two hours in her schedule not for herself, but for another woman she happens to admire. Hillary looks three times as good as she did in the days when her strident style was unsuccessfully packaged in dress-for-success skirt suits and a prefect’s Alice band, but it’s not just about surfaces.

It’s easy to attribute Hillary’s evolution to her escape from the long shadow of Bill. There are other matters in play too. ‘Empty nest‘ has always been such a mournful phrase, evoking droop-feathered mother crows keening in some bedraggled tree. The dirty little secret is that for women who have struggled to do justice to their love for their children at the same time as their ambition, there’s a heady, cackling joy to being free of guilt at last.

Chelsea is off on her own. Bill has forfeited his rights to complain. Hillary has done with her makeover stage. She’s at home with the promise of what she wanted to be at Yale Law School, and it tastes good. Hillary’s clean-lined trouser-suit solution is the end of her negotiation with style. She seems to have gone down in size as she has grown in stature. She’s earned it. As her campaign for the White House slowly revs up, the ‘Stop

Hillary‘ campaign accelerates, too. But they won’t stop Hillary. Her scars are spurs. At the Women in Communications lunch the message was: nothing is sexier than survival.

Article written by Tina Brown in 2005 for the Women of the Year 50 years of recognition lunch.

Over the years, the lunch has donated around £2m to various external charities, including the Greater London Fund for the Blind and NCH Action for Children. Then, in 2001, the then WOY chairman, Gayle Morrison, decided to take Tony’s vision one stage further and the Women of the Year Foundation was born.

The aim of the new organisation was to help the women of the future in a tangible way, by offering financial and practical support through small grants that enable women, both in the UK and internationally, to improve their lives and contribute to their communities. And over the last 10 years it has been doing just that, giving out well over £120,000 in small grants both to individual women and to organisations that seek to support women, to help them fulfil their dreams and ambitions.

‘We all know that the first step in any process can be the most difficult,’ says Joan Armatrading, singer, song writer, erstwhile president of Women of the Year and the foundation’s patron. ‘The foundation represents that important outstretched hand of encouragement.’

Grants have gone to a wide variety of recipients – from harpist Bethan Hughes who used hers to pay for a harp therapy course in California to the Philippine Community Fund which built a healthcare centre for people living on Manila’s rubbish dumps, from Star Wards whose foundation-funded research led to fewer incidents of self-harming on female mental wards to Safe Hands for Mothers which used its grant to buy solar-powered DVD players to use to educate women in remote villages in Africa about childbirth and childcare. All in all, around 25 individuals and charities have received money which has gone to benefit literally thousands of people around the world.

This year the foundation has decided to renew its support for two of the projects that received grants in 2010. Both were highly successful in helping women many miles apart – in Hastings and Al Sadder city in Iraq – to change their lives.

The new grant will enable Tomorrow’s People to give out two Business Builders Awards to unemployed women based in Hastings and Glasgow to help them develop business ideas.

Women for Women International will use its grant to help women involved in two projects in Afghanistan. The first trains women to run kitchen gardens, both for sale and for food security, using sustainable farming techniques. Part of the money will help to extend the irrigation system at one of the charity’s two demonstration farms to a further 100 participants in the programme.

The rest will go to a second WfWI project which gives vocational training to Afghani women in agriculture, livestock, handcrafts and other trades. It will fund classes in basic business skills and finance so that they can turn their vocational training into an income generating activity.

A third grant goes to Women@thewell, a charity that works to improve the lives of vulnerable women in London’s Kings Cross. It will pay for the construction of a multi-media collage, organised by Cherie, a working prostitute who wants to get off the street, in memory of her friend Suzy who died recently.

The project will involve up to 20 vulnerable women ranging in age from 16 to over 60. Each will create self portraits using different art forms which will then be made into the collage.

As well as paying for the materials, the foundation’s grant will go towards supporting the women including the cost of providing food, shower and laundry facilities and counselling.

The first Women of the Year Lunch – which honoured, equally, 500 women who had done good work – was the brainchild of Tony (Antonella) Lothian, a 33-year-old mother of six. It took place at a time when Britain was radically changing as a result of the war and the Labour government that followed, which she voted for, and was the first of its kind. Fifty years later, all media seem to have competitions proclaiming one or several somethings of the year, to the discomfiture of many losers. It’s no wonder everyone asks of Tony’s lunch: ‘Who is the Woman of the Year?’ And why the organisers hoarsely explain…

‘Every woman who is invited is a woman of the year.’

Tony had championed the underdog since her early years in Italy with her Italian mother’s family, and school in Nazi Germany. Here, in 1938, aged 16, she found out from a cleaner about the persecution of the Jews but could not convince the adults that it was going on. She wrote: ‘Childhood loneliness was lifted by daydreaming, nearly always about my leading a campaign against injustice.’

She is still tuned in to campaigns, even from her wheelchair in the Borders of Scotland where she lives. She married the soldier Marquess of Lothian in 1943, when she was a nursing auxiliary. Both were 21. They had met in their cradles, their mothers being friends. Peter went on to work for successive Conservative governments, while Tony helped charities and wrote for The Catholic Mother, the magazine of the Mothers’ Union. She loved the readers – miners’ wives, farmers’ wives, Hull fishermen’s wives – they reminded her of the Tuscan villagers she had lived among as a child, and she knew how hard their lives were. In her husband’s life she saw how frequently the powerful men and diplomats met in pleasant surroundings and were able to iron out problems. Why shouldn’t there be a similar annual charity lunch for women achievers, at the Savoy and with a toast-master?

They all laughed when Tony Lothian said women made the world go round. She was told by both sexes she would not find 500 famous women – career women provoked shudders in 1955. Tony enrolled two friends as co-founders of the lunch: Lady Georgina Coleridge, journalist, and Odette Hallowes, British spy whom the Nazis caught and tortured in France. Georgina suggested inviting matrons and hospital administrators, and Tony sat on the floor, her customary desk, searching reference books for women not in white coats. The mixture still lacked any comprehensiveness. The co-founders made a list of 40 categories of work and found a woman in each whom they asked to nominate any outstanding colleagues. The lunch, on 29 September, earned money for the Greater London Fund for the Blind by the groundbreaking idea of women meeting other working women. It took 24 years before this was given a name – ‘networking’ – in the Oxford Dictionary.

Tony did not want to use the lunch to elevate the already famous; she prefers to find special women who have not been noticed. Many of her unknowns went on to become well known.

Tony has a particular respect for women who work with their hands – cooks, carers, cheesemakers, foster mothers. But in the digital age, we have to use the technology and tell a story. Since 2001, three special prizes a year have been awarded at the lunch, with the achievements shown on screens. We can all see, from the edge of our seats, how magnificently women are doing in sport, killing-field journalism and other tough jobs. Tony herself has attended as a video since 2001, in her black and red clothes and pirate’s patch  eye lost to cancer), with her gravel-voiced jokes and wake-up call about some injustice which she, confined to home in the country, noticed first. It was then that the Hon Diana  Makgill valiantly stepped into the breach and took on the role of president.

Georgina Coleridge, Odette Hallowes and Diana Makgill

Many of the lunch’s other speakers raised global issues long before they were aired in the international arena. In 1980, for example, Margaret Gowing, Oxford Professor of the History of Science, warned that the Earth could be destroyed by the atomic arms race. In 1984, Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in Space, begged the Women of the Year, as representing the women of Britain, to join Russia’s women to end the Cold War. Three years later, Valentina invited Tony to the World Congress of Women in the Kremlin, where they heard Gorbachev announce Glasnost and Perestroika.

In 50 years, women in this country have achieved a lot in work and at home. We can have a career and raise a family, often with the help of women from a less rich country, but it is hard. Under many of the Jaeger suits, backcombed hair-dos and court shoes at the Savoy in 1955 was the awareness of abortions which had been the only way the achiever could carry on. Under today’s straight loose hair, low necks and stiletto toes are fears that the 24/7 of the long climb stole the chance of finding a partner and of being able to conceive. Women of the Year cannot be complacent. Yet the charge has been made that we are complacent, ‘ladies who lunch’. This is to distrust our fellow women. Tony has always trusted the bringing together of high and low, global and local. The lunch is women of merit choosing others on merit. It has also raised money for various charities and in 2001 WOY launched it’s own Foundation to help underprivileged women in this country and abroad.

How is space found for all who should be lunching here? Replacing, or sometimes rotating, the guests was the original plan, and in the Guildhall today you will see many hitherto uncongratulated women who have seats because their famous predecessors gave them up to them.

This nurturing of newcomers remains more a female than a male virtue. Among Tony’s criteria for a woman of the year are unselfishness and usefulness. She would probably tell us to value the women helpers who care for our youngest and the old. Maureen Paton’s book about the lunch, The Best of Women: the History of Women of the Year, has a dedication by Tony: ‘To all the women whose work all over the world upholds communities now and in the future.’

Now in our 56^th year we are still upholding Tony’s vision and still watching as women increasingly make the world go round.