WARSAW Anna Walentynowicz, who died, aged 80, in the recent air crash that killed so many of the Polish leadership past and present, was “in a way, the godmother of the Solidarity trade union”, according to the mayor of Gdansk. But she was more than that a recalcitrant and tireless activist in the union's cause, arguing feistily face-to-face with all comers, even with the national leadership. This included Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, who in 1990 became president of Poland.

All her life she liked to think of herself as a free trade unionist. Born in the city of Rowne (now Rivne, Ukraine) on 13 August 1929, and orphaned during the second world war, she became a communist party member after she started working at the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk - first as a welder, later a crane driver - in 1950. For a while, she was a model worker, but she rebelled when she encountered what she saw as corruption or any move against free speech, to the point of leaving the party. Indeed, her disillusion sharpened her resolve to distribute the underground newspaper Robotnik Wybrzeza (the Coastal Worker) to as many people as she could, including communist activists.

In the 1970s, she began to help set up independent trade unions, making no secret of her opinion that the political leadership of Poland - including former party colleagues - was doing little to improve workers' rights, freedom of speech or the social or political lives of ordinary people. The authorities were nonplussed by such behaviour, at one stage declaring that she had lost her mind. Meanwhile, she was quoted as saying that she felt free to take such risks because she was a widow and her son was in the military. It came as no surprise to those who knew her well when, in August 1980, not long before she was due to retire from the shipyard, she was sacked.

The angry and largely spontaneous reaction of her fellow workers, led by Walesa, then an electrician, made history. He leapt onto an improvised platform from which one of the shipyard managers was appealing for calm and called on the crowd, which responded at once, to stage a strike and occupy the plant. Within a few hours, a strike committee had been elected, and a list of demands had been tabled, including better pay and conditions as well as Walentynowicz's wishes for free trade union rights and an end to censorship of the local press. Within a matter of weeks, there were strikes in shipyards, involving roughly 1 million workers, all along the Baltic coast. Thus, Solidarity came into being, with Walentynowicz a key activist. It was the beginning of the end of Moscow-led communist rule.

Walentynowicz resumed her job but found Walesa, who had been made the leader of the new union and who was an equally obdurate personality, difficult to get on with. She stood up to him and criticised his thinking, but after communism was eclipsed in Poland in 1989 with semi-free elections, she withdrew from the union altogether. She finally retired from the shipyard in 1991. In 2000, she turned down an invitation to become an honorary citizen of Gdansk, though in 2005 she went to Washington to accept, on behalf of the union, the Truman-Reagan medal of freedom from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Walentynowicz appeared in a clutch of documentaries and played herself in the Polish drama Man of Iron (1981), directed by Andrzej Wajda. Her activism also provided the inspiration for a 2006 German/Polish movie, Strike, directed by Volker Schlondorff.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service