INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day was celebrated by a group of extraordinary ladies at the Gurkha Durbar in Grayshott, hosted by its owner, Sudha Rai for the fourth-year running.

The event raised £615 for Woolmer Hill and Bohunt School’s Red Box project in connection with Haslemere Food Bank.

Guest represented a dozen nationalities, as well as village groups and organisations, who were entertained by singer Sasha L Brook, Waverley Ensemble violinist Ishani Bhoola and amateur stand-up comic Anna Lubelska.

The guest speaker was Dr Jane Orr, who has just completed a voyage on one of the Juliblee Sailing Trust’s tall ships, which took her from Auckland in New Zealand to the Falkland Islands, via Cape Horn, in just 11 days.

Dr Orr is a specialist in the history of the Spanish Flu pandemic 1917-19 and its military impact, and works as a GP in Camberley.

She was a Captain in the Army, stationed at Sandhurst, and managed to get the Queen’s Regulations changed for married women to be allowed quarters equal to their husbands, a campaign, which was covered in the national press at the time.

Her first fundraising trip took her to Nepal, where she used her skills to practice midwifery and assisted operations in a Mission Hospital.

While she worked as a GP at St Luke’s Cancer Hospital, in Guildford, she decided to take part in a sponsored walk along Peru’s Inca Trail, raising £5,000 for the hospital.

Another trip to the Great Wall of China raised £9,000 for St Luke’s, after which Dr Orr embarked on a trek through the Costa Rican rainforest, sleeping in a small tent, which was part of her baggage allowance.

Her latest voyage on the tall ship “Tenacious”, which caters for blind, disabled and deaf people as well as wheelchair users, provided an unforgettable hands-on adventure, passing within 20 miles of Point Nemo – the furthest place from land at sea, where the International Space Station was visible as it passed across the sky 28 miles above.

Dr Orr said: “We never saw any other ships crossing the Pacific Ocean. You really learn to appreciate nature and the team of people around you.”

She spent one week in the Falklands captial Port Stanley, before flying back on an RAF military plane, since no commercial flights are available.

•The Jubilee Sailing Trust has been changing lives since 1978, when it became a registered charity, integrating physically disabled with able-bodied people on a tall ship. It stil remains to this day the only organisation of its kind in the world – www.jst.org.uk

•The Red Box Project aims to ensure no young woman misses out on her education because of her period.