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Ruth Boswell (3rd May 1929 – 18th October 2015) was a TV producer, writer, publisher and anti-war activist.

Life
She was born Ruth Neubauer in Graz in Austria, daughter of William Neubauer, a businessman, and his wife, Regina. The family then moved to Brno, then in Czechoslovakia. In 1938 following the rise of the Nazi’s, Ruth travelled to Britain under the auspices of a sponsor in London. Ruth’s father followed but her mother, who had also intended to travel to Britain, perished in the Nazi concentration camps.

Ruth was educated in Britain at Springfield School in the Chilterns, followed by Kent College, Canterbury. In 1952 she married a farmer, Charles Abel, with whom she had three children, however the marriage collapsed.

In 1962 she met artist James Boswell, to whom she worked as an assistant. Following the separation of James Boswell from his wife in 1966 Ruth and James formed a relationship and lived together in Muswell Hill until his death in 1971. While never married Ruth changed her name to Boswell by deed poll in 1967. Ruth continued to champion James work following his death (guardian obituary) and donated a large number of his watercolours and drawings to the British Museum. (British Museum). Ruth met Greg Stewart, a psychiatrist, shortly after James’s death. They married in 1991 and remained together until her death in 2015.

Boswell began her Television career as a script editor at ATV where she went on to create the children’s science fiction programme Timeslip which aired in 1970. While still with ATV Boswell work on Escape into the Night in 1972, telling the story of a bedridden girl able to enter the world of her own drawings. This was followed by The Tomorrow People at Thames Television, where she produced the first three series from 1973 to 1975. Later in her career she moved into drama, where her credits included Maybury (1981-1983) and The Chief (1990-1994). She also produced a feature film, The Run of the Country in 1995, written by Shane Connaughton and starring Albert Finney.

Ruth was also a writer and a publisher. Her first book, Emmy, about a girl growing up in Edwardian England was published in 1979. She founded the Muswell Press in 2004 which published her other two novels along with 25 other titles between 2005 and 2014. Out of Time was published in 2005 and is the storey of boy travels to a parallel world and fights a cruel tyrant. A Faraway Country was published in 2015 and is the story of a Jewish family in pre-war Czechoslovakia, drawing on her own childhood experiences. The book was translated in to Czech and published in the Czech Republic under the title Nějaká Vzdálená Zeme.

In her later life Ruth became an anti-war activist and was involved in the Stop the War Coalition’s campaigning activities surrounding the Iraq War. This included organising the Pax Britannica, an exhibition of British artists, at the Aquarium Gallery, north London, in 2003. She instigating the Naming the Dead event in Trafalgar Square in 2004, which involved reading out the names of the thousands of Iraqi war dead. She was also involved in bringing the Moscow Piano Trio over to perform at a concert for the children of Iraq at the Hackney Empire, east London, in October of 2004.