ONE of The Press' most prolific - and controversial - letter writers has died, aged 99.

Ida Mary Goodrick, who lived for many years in Woodlands Avenue, Tadcaster, until moving more recently to a Selby nursing home, will be buried in Tadcaster Cemetery tomorrow after a funeral service at 11am at St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church.

Mrs Goodrick, nee Hanby, provoked many a fierce debate in this newspaper's letters page with her strongly-held views on various topics, particularly Germany, and she also regularly rebuked politicians ranging from York council leader James Alexander to York Central MP Hugh Bayley.

In 2002, she revealed why she she would never forgive or forget Germany for its actions in the Second World War when she blasted a York school for laying a wreath at a Germany military cemetery/

She wrote to the school to condemn the gesture as a "misguided and unpatriotic act of honouring our enemy," and told how she was a still-grieving war widow whose husband Alfred had been mown down by a German Panzer division in the Normandy landings in June, 1944, when he was 35, leaving her with a two-year-old son.

She wrote: "There is steel in my heart still towards the Germans. I will never forgive or forget. His death ruined our lives."

In one of her last letters, in 2012, she told how her generation sighed with disbelief at what was 'nowadays referred to as children living in poverty.'

On a similar theme, she took Cllr Alexander to task in 2009 for his comments on a Government Budget, saying he overlooked elderly people who, against all the odds, had contrived to save money for their old age but whose interest on such savings had dwindled to almost two per cent.

She criticised Mr Bayley for using the phrase 'bog-standard,' and said WH Auden had not been a hero in her book because he had gone to the USA in 1939, when he was not over the age of conscription.

In another letter, she said Victorian parents of her generation would have been appalled that pupils at Tadcaster Grammar School pupils had been throwing wet sponges at teachers, even if it was for charity.