Nona Byrne - Telegraph The youngest daughter of Lord Lawrence of Grately and the Punjab, Nona Georgette Lawrence was born on September 10 1922 at The Cottage, Greenford, Middlesex, a 15-bedroom Queen Anne house previously owned by Sir Edwin Landseer. Her father's title had been created for her great-grandfather, John Lawrence (1811-79) who, as Chief Commissioner of the Punjab in the 1850s, implemented numerous economic and social reforms, helping to prevent the Indian Mutiny of 1857 spreading to the province and earning the sobriquet "Saviour of the Punjab." Later he led the troops which recaptured Delhi from the rebellious sepoys. From 1864 to 1869 he served as Viceroy of India, promoting educational opportunities for Indians and resisting the temptation to become entangled in the internal affairs of Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Nona was educated at Francis Holland School, then at a school in Lymington, where she became head girl. During the war she served in the Women's Land Army at Hever Castle and then as a nurse in Brighton. In 1945 she married Wing Commander Vincent "Lucky" Byrne, an Irish-born Spitfire pilot and a devout Roman Catholic. At her own wish she converted just before her marriage. The Byrnes started their married life together living in Pont Street Mews in Westminster and soon became involved in caring for people who had been wounded or distressed by the war. Many were homeless, and women, they found, were particularly vulnerable. Some were war widows with families to support. In 1955, after newspaper reports about a homeless widow found living beneath a pier at Brighton, they donated a house they leased from the Cadogan estate in Redburn Street, Chelsea, as a home for eight war widows. The new home was opened by Eamonn Andrews. The same year, with Leonard Cheshire, they were instrumental in founding a Cheshire Home - St Bridget's at East Preston, West Sussex. The following year they persuaded the Church to lend them Gerston Manor at Storrington, West Sussex, as a home for Hungarian refugees. The Byrnes" efforts to help war widows find housing were hampered by the fact that most building societies of the day refused to lend to single women even if they had the means to make the mortgage payments. So in 1960 they opened the Catholic Building Society from offices on Harrington Road, Kensington, later moving to Strutton Ground, a short walk from Westminster Cathedral. From the outset the CBS set out to help people rejected by mainstream lenders, including single mothers and people on low incomes, to own their own homes. "Catholic" was a bit of a misnomer. While the Society embodied a Catholic commitment to social justice, a substantial proportion of its members and borrowers were of other religious persuasions or denominations. By the early 1990s more than 40 per cent of CBS's customers were female and in 1993, for example, it granted 12 mortgages to women whose marriages had broken down, with 25 children involved, all of whom were at risk of being made homeless because their existing lenders would not continue their home loans. In 1972 Nona Byrne became the first woman to be elected chairman of a building society, a role she carried out with energy and commitment for 23 years. Within the building society movement she promoted a wider understanding of the housing needs of women and campaigned to get more women appointed to building society boards . She always took a personal interest in the Society's borrowers, even visiting slow payers herself on occasions to see the real circumstances of the family. Meanwhile, she often turned up at board meetings with a dish of homemade lasagne. "We're very frugal," she explained. We have to be. With just 5,500 investors, 1,100 borrowers and assets of £27 million by the mid-1990s, the CBS was a relative minnow. In a letter to The Times in 1996 Nona Byrne deplored the "mad rush" by building societies to merge with banks, arguing, presciently, that "inflated payouts to bosses and investors" were "detracting from the principle of mutuality on which the building societies were founded." Though the CBS never succumbed to such temptations, it lost some of its "small is beautiful" appeal in 2008, long after Nona Byrne's retirement, when it merged with the Chelsea Building Society under the Chelsea name. In a further merger in 2010, the Chelsea merged with the Yorkshire Building Society. A member of the Red Cross for 20 years, Nona Byrne served as vice-president of its West Sussex branch from 1991 to1998. In 1997 she was made a Dame of Saint Gregory by Pope John Paul II. Vincent Byrne died in 1978, and Nona Byrne is survived by their four sons and three daughters. Another son and daughter predeceased her. Nona Byrne, born September 10 1922, died October 31 2012