ELISABETH Hibbert Beckett, who has died at age 84, was throughout her life an exponent of ideas and concepts frequently well ahead of their time.

In her last years, as one of several constitutional cases that she spearheaded, she refused to pay her council tax in protest at the expenditure of funds for activities she claimed were not properly approved by Parliament.

Born in 1924, Elisabeth was the second daughter of Nora Ford and Ronald Brymer Beckett.

She lived in India until age four, when she returned to England to attend Vyne Stratton and later Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

In 1942, she married Richard Oswald Hibbert, a district officer, in the Lahore Cathedral. She returned to England in 1944 where she worked for the Picture Post and on BBC Publications before her husband rejoined her in 1947.

The marriage was dissolved in 1958 and the family moved to Oxford, where Mrs Beckett became a member of the Soil Association and was involved in the campaign to prevent the demolition of the terraced houses of Jericho.

A report she compiled for the local Labour council led to the decision against the fluoridation of the local water supply.

In the late 1960s, Mrs Beckett started the Ark Nursery School in Headington. The school, which ran for more than a dozen years, followed an integrated approach to early education, which included daily bread-making and gardening.

In the 1970s, she ran two Bevers restaurants in Oxford and Bristol that served organically and biodynamically grown foods and in the 1980s and 1990s, she operated biodynamic farms.

In 2003, she helped lead a protest against legal practices that disadvantaged fathers in parental rights cases, culminating in an occupation by Fathers 4 Justice of Court No. 1 of the Family Division of the High Court in London. She was threatened with eviction, confiscation of her property and bankruptcy. The case earned her a place on the Brits at Their Best website.

She is survived by four children, 12 grandchildren and a great granddaughter.