Joe Richards

.

14 June 1931 – 4 July 2025 Obituary by Mark Ladbrooke

I met Joseph Richards when I moved to Oxford in 1996, working with him through the Cuba Solidarity Campaign which was sending ambulances to Cuba. Joe was a newly retired car worker, full of enthusiasm to use his liberated time for the betterment of humanity.

Picture above Joe and Diane with ambulance for Cuba.

He had campaigned against the Vietnam War, he had worked with the Black Friars to set up a blood donation centre and had sent his own blood to napalmed Vietnamese children.

Joe went on work with activists to dig up pitches to protest against Apartheid cricket teams – narrowly avoiding arrest by organising mass disobedience when the police came for them. 

Joe had been a member of the Communist Party – perhaps he had been shocked by the brutality of empire he had seen during his military service in Egypt (he said with irony he was defending Egypt against the Egyptians), or perhaps he had been inspired by the idea that working people could, together, run society. He was a self educated worker activist – copies of Tom Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ were on his bookshelf as was Ilan Pappe on Palestine and, of course, Marx and Engels.   He was interested in the plays of Brecht and the art of Käthe Kollwitz and he loved rebel songs and the big orchestras of André Rieu.

Joe was keen on photography but would admit, perhaps reluctantly, that Diane, the car factory night shift cook who he loved and shared his life with was a better photographer than he. 

Joe was appalled by racism, he was an internationalist, he joined a union delegation to Belfast for a united Ireland and he travelled the world. He supported the National Pensioners Convention and was deeply concerned about the ‘work till you drop’ attitude of governments constantly increasing pension age for future generations.

Joe had proudly stood as a Communist candidate in council elections. He was a committed member of the TGWU (now UNITE). As President of the local Trades Union Council he had been a controversial figure, battling it out at times with fellow union delegates. But in later years he commented thoughtfully that those who he had fought were now often his allies, that the Soviet Union in which he had held such great hope was no longer, and that his support had been rather uncritical. He did remain an avid reader of the Morning Star. 

Joe lobbies MP

Joe was fired up by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and argued within the Labour Party for socialist ideas, voting time and time again for socialist candidates. He represented the Socialist Health Association as a delegate in Oxford East Constituency Labour Party and felt passionately about the injustice faced by the Palestinians – he helped fund the escape from Gaza of a young medical student and his family.

Documentation discovered in his flat from Labour HQ indicates Joe was under investigation for his heretical views. 

Joe appeared in the local paper, the Oxford Mail, from time to time. Archive. He was interviewed on standing for council, questioned by a journalist on a trip he took to the USSR and in recent times he featured in articles on health inequalities and the plans to demolish the sheltered council accommodation where he lived with 20 other pensioners.  

In recent years Joe saw first hand a collapsing and increasingly broken up and privatised health service. He experienced crumbling social care where staff struggled to compensate for an underfunded, fragmented system. But his concerns were not just for himself – he cared deeply for the workers he met encouraging them to join unions and to organise. He paid to translate campaigning material into Tetum to reach and organise marginalised East Timorese workers. He was delighted to discover when admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital that the majority of the nurses on his ward were from the Indian state of Kerala which boasted a self proclaimed Marxist Leninist government – which, believed in training future health workers and incidentally in using effective public health measures to combat Covid

Joe inspired support and solidarity from his family and friends. He will be missed by us all, he was a person who was larger than life in every sense of the word. 

Joe’s funeral will be at the Barton Crematorium, Oxford (OX3 9RZ) Monday 4th August at 2pm to be followed by a wake at the Blackbird Leys Bowls Club (OX4 6EU). No flowers please. Donaions to Medical Aid for Palestinians. https://www.map.org.uk/ or Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders https://www.msf.org/