Madge Elliot (activist)

Elliot worked as a tennis coach by profession.^[1] Elliot campaigned against the closure of the old Waverley Line, which ran between Edinburgh, Hawick and Carlisle, before it closed in the 1960s due to the Beeching cuts.^[2] She relied on the train to Edinburgh when she was visiting her then three-year-old son in hospital.^[3] In 1968, she and her local MP David Steel delivered a petition to Harold Wilson on the route.^[4]

In 1999, she was given an MBE for her services to lawn tennis in the Scottish Borders.^[2] The same year she helped found the Campaign for Borders Rail.^[5] In 2015, a train on the Borders Railway was named in her honour.^[6] She was the first passenger on the new line.^[7] In 2017, she was part of an exhibition on accessibility at the Scottish Parliament.^[8]

Elliot died in May 2024, at the age of 95.^[9] She had Alzheimer's disease.^[10]