ELISABETH Hibbert Beckett, who has died at 84, was a champion of organic farming who ran restaurants in Oxford and Bristol.

She was also a proponent of education based on the principles of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and operated a nursery school in Oxford.

Born in 1924, Mrs Beckett lived in India but attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In 1942, she married Richard Oswald Hibbert in Lahore Cathedral. She returned to England in 1944 where she worked for the Picture Post and on BBC Publications before her husband joined her in 1947.

Following the breakdown of her marriage in 1956, the family moved to Oxford, where Mrs Beckett became a member of the local soil association and was involved in the campaign to prevent the demolition of terraced houses in Jericho.

She was subsequently asked by the local Labour council to investigate the issue of water fluoridation. As a consequence of her report, the council decided against fluoridation of the local water supply.

In the late 1960s, Mrs Beckett started the Ark Nursery School in a small cottage in Headington.

In the 1970s, she owned and operated restaurants in Oxford and Bristol that served organically and biodynamically grown foods. The Bevers restaurants were supported by her own smallholding which supplied organic meat and vegetables to the restaurant.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she operated biodynamic farms in Essex, Devon, and Wiltshire.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she researched and drafted two books on India, one on the Amritsar riots and one on the formation of the East India Company.

In 2003, she helped lead a protest against legal practices that disadvantage fathers in parental rights cases, culminating in an occupation by Fathers 4 Justice of the High Court.

Mrs Beckett later refused to pay the local tax on her home in Cumbria in protest against the illegalities of the council tax under constitutional and case law.

For this, she was threatened with eviction and bankruptcy.

Mrs Beckett is survived by four children, 12 grandchildren, and a great grand-daughter.