Prunella Stack

Ann Prunella Stack OBE (28 July 1914 – 30 December 2010) was a British fitness pioneer

Career Her mother developed an exercise system that was brought to a mass market as the Women's League of Health & Beauty. Stack had participated in these exercises since a young child and became an instructor. She and her maternal aunt Norah Cruickshank headed the league from 1936 after the death of her mother. Stack undertook teaching, performing and public speaking while Cruickshank dealt with administration and public relations.

She lived with her mother, maternal aunts and cousins in London during her childhood, visiting family in Ireland and the Isle of Skye for holidays. She was trained in her mother's exercise system from childhood and was included in lecture-demonstrations. In 1924 they moved from Maida Vale to a large house in Holland Park adjacent to the Ilchester estate where her mother started the Bagot Stack Health School. Stack attended Norland Place School, and then from the age of 13 attended her mother's school for training in dance and exercise, and also a private tutor for academic studies. From September 1930, aged 16, she attended the Abbey girls' boarding school in Malvern Wells for a year and gained perspective from a more conventional school life. This time initiated a love of the countryside as well as her decision to continue involvement with her mother's organisation, now called the Women's League of Health and Beauty. They had two sons, Diarmaid Douglas-Hamilton and Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Douglas-Hamilton, then a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, was killed in 1944 when his damaged airplane crashed following enemy action over France.

In 1950, Stack married the surgeon Ally Albers in South Africa. Albers died in a climbing accident in 1951, while climbing Table Mountain accompanied by his wife. In 1964, she married Brian Power. He had been born and spent his childhood in Tianjin, China to Irish/British parents who lived in the British Concession. In 1936 he went to study law at King's College, University of London, planning to return to China. However, when the Second World War broke out he joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers in the British Army in 1940 and then remained in the UK working as a barrister. He died in 2008.