HARRINGTON cannot run this “character” series without recalling a woman who travelled the globe protesting against war.

We lost Peggie Preston, who lived in Covent Garden, in 2008 but she was an inspiration to many.

“We were told during World War II that this was the war to end all wars and I believed it like everyone else,” she told me a couple of years before she passed. “We found out distressingly quickly this was not at all true.”

She was to be no armchair pacificist. In a lifetime dedicated to helping the victims of war and battling injustice, she popped up everywhere from Vietnam to the Balkans, South Africa to Iraq.

Often she would use her therapist training to help the injured, including in what was then Saigon at the end of the 1960s.

You could take her for a cup of tea the Crypt café in the basement of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields and be rewarded with so many stories.