Who was Leonard Cheshire?

Leonard Cheshire was born on 7 September 1917, the son of an Oxford Professor of Law. He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, at Stowe School, and at Merton College Oxford where he took a degree in Jurisprudence, also known as legal theory.

He was commissioned in the reserve of the RAF on joining Oxford University Air Squadron in 1936. He took a regular commission in 1939 and during World War II served almost without interruption in Bomber Command, including taking command of 617 Squadron “the Dambusters” (after Guy Gibson) in 1943. His record of 100 operational bombing missions was unequalled. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1940 (with two bars in 1943 and 1944), the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1941, and the Victoria Cross in 1944 for sustained bravery throughout the war. He was selected by Winston Churchill as the British observer at the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki in August 1945.

He was medically discharged from the RAF after the war to a psychiatric hospital, but soon discharged himself. He struggled to adjust to peacetime and worked as a journalist, sharing his experience of war and calling for people to work towards peace. As a solution, he attempted to set up a community life for ex service men and women like him, first at Gumley Hall in Leicestershire and then at Le Court in Hampshire. This experiment soon failed and collapsed in debt. People moved away and Leonard was left sorting out the aftermath until May 1948, when a telephone call from the local hospital changed everything. He agreed to look after one of the former members of the community who was dying of cancer and had nowhere else to go: as well as starting his humanitarian work, it was contact with this man, Arthur Dykes, which initiated Leonard Cheshire’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith.

Leonard found others coming to him for help, and so started what was to become the world-wide disability charity Leonard Cheshire. By the summer of 1949 Le Court had 24 residents. Referrals came from the new NHS hospitals already struggling to cope with waiting lists. Disabled people were at the very bottom of the list, often left on geriatric wards, and as Le Court became established, people from different parts of the UK and then the world began to rally to Leonard’s cause, in response to local need.

Leonard’s work became a Trust in 1951. Leonard remained a trustee, with the position of Founder, up until his death in 1992. He founded other charities in his lifetime, including Ryder-Cheshire with his wife, Sue Ryder and the World Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, famous for staging The Wall- Live in Berlin concert in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin wall.

After many years of turning down honours, his award of the Order of Merit was announced on 5 February 1981. He accepted this because it was a personal honour from Her Majesty The Queen, who later became our Patron. On 15 June 1991 Leonard was elevated to the peerage as Baron Cheshire of Woodhall Spa. He chose Woodhall Spa (his base as Wing Commander of 617 Squadron) because he considered it the place where his life’s work began.

On 5 April 1959 Leonard Cheshire married Sue Ryder whose own international charity, the Sue Ryder Foundation, was already well established helping those in need of relief from persecution and illness. Together, they also established the Ryder-Cheshire Foundation to take on projects for which there was a clear need but which lay outside the scope of their separate foundations. Lady Ryder died on 2 November 2000. Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder had two children – a son Jeromy and daughter Elizabeth. Leonard Cheshire died from the effects of motor neurone disease on 31 July 1992.

Find out more

• View more photographs of Leonard Cheshire’s childhood and his life as a teenager
• Find out more about Leonard Cheshire’s RAF career with our Spotlight on… article
• View more photographs from Leonard’s RAF career
• Find out more about first resident Arthur Dykes here
• Read a journal article about how our charity came to be, written by our Archivist
• Watch a documentary about Leonard Cheshire on YouTube