From battling Nazis as a resistance fighter in occupied Denmark to making fun of businessmen and politicians as a Raging Granny, Inger Kronseth never backed down from power.
“She was a force of nature,” said Alison Acker, 88, a longtime friend and fellow Raging Granny. “Right up to the end, Inger was interested in what was going on and still working for a better world.”
Kronseth died peacefully in her sleep on Sept. 27. Her 95th birthday would have been today.
Friends described her death as a release. The past 10 years were hard, spent confined to residential care.
Kronseth was practically born with activism in her genes, the granddaughter of one of the first suffragettes in Europe, friends said.
In Canada, she pitched a tent on the lawns of B.C.’s legislature in the late 1980s to protest uranium mining, got arrested in 1993 while protesting logging at Clayoquot Sound — for which she would spend time in prison — and was ejected from the legislature gallery in 2002 for shouting in defence of universal health care.
She was a supporter of assisted dying and a member of the local Right to Die group that protested after Evelyn Martens of Langford was charged with helping and counselling two people to commit suicide. Martens was acquitted in 2004.
“A large number of aging people [including me] want the right to decide when it is time to leave this world,” Kronseth wrote in a 2006 letter to the editor. “Suicide is legal. Assisted suicide is not. Time is overdue for this to be changed.”
Kronseth was 17 when the Nazis marched into Denmark on April 9, 1940. Before the war ended, she joined the Danish resistance and distributed illegal pamphlets.
Part of her legend among friends was that she was taught how to fire a gun. But after she narrowly missed shooting a comrade in practice, she refused to pick up a firearm again.
She fled Denmark in a fishboat for Sweden before the war ended. Her brother was killed, her father was arrested — and her husband of only six months was shot dead.
After the war, she returned to Denmark and worked as a journalist before coming to Canada in 1956.
One of her first jobs was cooking at a dude ranch in the B.C. Interior, where she met and married a miner, Karl Kronseth.
He was killed in an accident in 1959, and Kronseth briefly tried homesteading.
She spent many years in the Kootenay, where she taught school and raised a granddaughter until her death in an accident. A daughter also died in an accident.
In 1987, Kronseth moved to Victoria, and before long pitched a tent on the legislature lawn to maintain a round-the-clock protest against uranium mining. She vacated only when a police officer hauled her out of the tent by her leg.
Two years later, Kronseth was in a cubicle in a public bathroom when she overheard two members of the Raging Grannies discussing an upcoming protest action.
Kronseth barely waited to introduce herself before asking if she could join them.
Carole Roy, an assistant professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, wrote her doctoral thesis on the Raging Grannies. In 2004, it was published as The Raging Grannies: Wild Hats, Cheeky Songs and Witty Actions for a Better World.
In an interview, Roy said the Raging Grannies, with their humour, funny lyrics and outlandish costumes, brought a wit to political protest often weighed down by earnestness.
After their start in Victoria in 1987, similar protest groups arose in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan and Russia. Many don’t last long, but Roy said that is likely the result of the Raging Grannies’ refusal to incorporate and only inspire.
“They redefined activism,” Roy said. “They brought creativity, imagination and humour to activism and that was not often the case in 1987.”
The Raging Grannies also redefined aging, she said.
“Generally, older women were mostly seen as medical cases and a social burden,” Roy said.
“But the Raging Grannies totally changed that into a notion of aging as a time of engagement and possibilities.
“They were remarkable.”
A wake for Kronseth is scheduled from 2 to 3:30 p.m. today at 250 Douglas St.
