A socialite and pioneer for women's rights in the City has committed suicide at a controversial clinic in Switzerland which promotes voluntary euthanasia, after she discovered that she was terminally ill.
Elisabeth Rivers-Bulkeley, who campaigned for women to be admitted to the Stock Exchange and was a founder member of Annabel's nightclub, secretly flew to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich last December. A former newspaper columnist and stockbroker, Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley, 82, is regarded as the most prominent person yet to have used the clinic, and her assisted suicide is likely to reinvigorate the debate about legalising the right to die in the UK.
Nearly 60 terminally ill Britons have travelled to Dignitas, one of two Swiss clinics which allow people to kill themselves using a cocktail of barbiturates.
Attempts to overturn the ban on assisted suicides failed last year in the Lords, and the medical profession has remained deeply divided on the issue. Many GPs privately admit they have helped, or would help, a terminally ill patient take his or her own life, but the practice is opposed by most medical bodies.
Senior figures in the "right to die" movement said Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley had been meticulously planning her suicide for months after discovering that a cancer she had suffered twice before had recurred and that her condition was terminal. Shortly before leaving for Switzerland, she had put her husband, Robert, a former Lloyds underwriter who is understood to be seriously affected by dementia, in a residential home. The couple, who had retired to live on the grounds of Gosford House, a stately home in East Lothian near Edinburgh, have no children.
Michael Irwin, a prominent euthanasia campaigner with very close links to the Dignitas clinic and its founder Ludwig Minelli, a lawyer, said he counselled Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley by telephone in the weeks before her flight to Zurich. He persuaded her to take a close family friend along after Mr Minelli became concerned at her initial plans to make the trip on her own, he said.
"I have never met anyone on the phone who was a such a determined person, given all the plans she made for herself and her husband, and that was reflected by her career," Dr Irwin said.
Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924 and had won the Austrian women's ice skating championships. She visited England in 1939, but the outbreak of war prevented her return to Austria. Her father was an avowed anti-Nazi who disappeared during the conflict.
She stayed in Britain, marrying Lieutenant Commander John Langford-Holt, helping him become the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury in 1945. Already known as stylish party-goer, she divorced him in 1951 and soon married Major Robert Rivers-Bulkeley. After an unsuccessful stint as pig farmers in the Scottish Borders, the couple moved to London where Maj Rivers-Bulkeley became an underwriter in 1957.
Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley joined a stockbrokers firm, and began writing financial advice columns for the Daily Telegraph and appearing on the BBC as a commentator. A founding member of Annabel's who socialised with the Fiat head Gianni Agnelli and Noel Coward, she was also a fierce opponent of the historic bar on women joining the London Stock Exchange.
The Financial Times noted she "struck fear into the hearts" of sexist male brokers in the City. In 1973, by then a partner in a major City stockbrokers firm, she became one of the first 10 women to be elected as Stock Exchange members.
Her assisted suicide was arranged by members of a Glasgow-based pro-euthanasia group Friends at the End (Fate), which also has close links to the Swiss clinic and has been instrumental in advising many of its British clients.
Jackie Anderson, Fate's spokeswoman, confirmed Mrs Rivers-Bulkeley had used its handbook on preparing for an assisted suicide at Dignitas and had been given further help and advice by Fate members. She said it was unfair that its members should be forced to travel abroad, at a cost of roughly £3,000 each time, to exercise the right to end their lives.
Ronnie Convery, a spokesman for the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, said: "There's no need for anyone to die without dignity. My mother died in a hospice just two years ago, and if I had been a millionaire, I wouldn't have been able to get better treatment."
The church agreed it was acceptable to withdraw treatment for people being kept artificially alive but with no hope of recovery. Giving potentially lethal painkiller doses to treat unbearable suffering was also acceptable, but using drugs to end a life was not.
"Life is a gift from God. We're not the final arbiters of that gift and autonomy is not in itself a supreme good. We don't have the right to take someone else's life, and we don't have the right to take our own," said Mr Convery.
Where 60 Britons have come to die
Based in an anonymous block of studio flats in a residential suburb of Zurich, the Dignitas suicide clinic run by Ludwig Minelli is discreet. But over the past 10 years, nearly 60 terminally ill Britons have ended their lives there with a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Dignitas is the only one of two Swiss assisted suicide organisations which takes clients from abroad. Most are Germans, but two British organisations - Friends at the End (Fate) and The Last Choice - play a pivotal role in preparing British clients for their trip.
Both organisations indicated yesterday that they acted as Mr Minelli's clearing houses in the UK, and in some cases had given "grants" of up to £350 to help meet the costs - as much as £3,000. Fate is based in Glasgow and has about 300 members.
Michael Irwin, who was struck off as a doctor in 2005 by the General Medical Council for securing a fatal dose of painkillers to help a friend commit suicide, is a leading figure in Fate and runs The Last Choice, members of which had accompanied three people to Dignitas. Dr Irwin, who was arrested for conspiracy to assist his friend's suicide but never taken to court, said assisting a suicide had effectively been decriminalised. "If you don't enforce a law, it becomes a non-law."
