Christina Noble


Christina Noble, OBE, is an Irish children's rights campaigner, charity worker and writer, who founded the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in 1989.
Noble was born on 23 December 1944, in Dublin, Ireland. Her mother died when she was ten. She was sent to an orphanage and dishonestly told that her three siblings were dead. She escaped and lived rough in Dublin, where she was gang-raped. Her baby son was adopted, against her will. After discovering the state had lied about the death of her siblings, Christina located her brother in England moved there to live with him after she turned 18. This is where she met and married her husband and had three children, Helenita, Nicolas and Androula. She was a victim of domestic violence.
In 1989, she visited Vietnam and began to care for homeless children, after a recurring dream, during the Vietnam War. This eventually led her to create the Christina Noble Children's Foundation. To date, she and the Foundation have helped over 700,000 children in Vietnam and Mongolia.
She appeared as a "castaway" on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 15 June 1997. Despite being from Ireland, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
She is a recipient of the 2014 Women of the Year Prudential Lifetime Achievement Award.
A film about her, Noble, was released 8 May 2015. The director was Stephen Bradley.