(August 19, 2025)

La Pethick, an 89-year-old retired psychotherapist, became the poster granny of the August 8 Parliament Square protest when a photo of her in her white hat being carried away by police spread like wildfire across the internet. Pethick, a retired psychotherapist from near Hastings, East Sussex, told the Times, “We are having our right to peaceful protest being taken away.”

Claudia Cotton, 89, a Jewish refugee also interviewed by the Times and whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, told the newspaper: “I am prepared to be arrested. In fact, I think it’s a good thing because it shows how ordinary people are willing to go to prison to oppose governments that are doing evil things.”

Grandmother Manji Mansfield, observed in an interview with Al Jazeera during the August 8 protest, “This isn’t the Britain that I grew up in. We are now living in an alternative universe.”