The Guardian's obituary of Tony Richmond records the press-card fight that opened Parliament to all reporters

As The Guardian reported on 4 September, Tony Richmond has died at 82. The British newspaper published an obituary written by his son, and it records a South African career that ran from a Johannesburg newsroom to a confrontation with a prime minister over who was allowed to ask the questions.

Richmond was born in Durban to Arnold Richmond, a civil engineer, and Moyra Shaw, a librarian, and went to Michaelhouse in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. He studied English, political theory and government at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1960s, graduated in 1964, and joined the Star in Johannesburg as a cub reporter. The obituary records that his student years left him profoundly affected by apartheid and that he joined marches and protests, set up a multiracial church youth group, and mixed with freedom fighters and activists.

That is the background. The part South African readers will recognise as the working story is what happened when he became an editor.

What a parliamentary press pass actually controlled

Under apartheid, access to Parliament was not a neutral administrative matter. Press galleries, press conferences and the daily flow of official information were part of how the state decided which journalists could do the job and which could not. A reporter without accreditation could not sit in the gallery, could not put a question at a ministerial briefing, and could not file the ordinary political copy that a newsroom depends on. Accreditation was a form of gatekeeping, and it was applied by race.

Richmond moved to Cape Town in 1973 as editor of the Cape Herald. The obituary records that he hired reporters who were not white, that those reporters were frequently banned from events and detained without charge, and that he spent countless hours in police stations arguing with authorities to secure their release. Detention without charge was a routine instrument of the security apparatus in that period, and the burden it placed on an editor was practical as well as political. A newsroom loses a reporter’s work while that reporter is held, and the editor becomes the person who has to go and ask for him back.

The obituary records one concrete result. Richmond confronted the prime minister, John Vorster, directly about the exclusion of Cape Herald journalists from press conferences, and the door opened for reporters who were not white to obtain parliamentary press passes. That is the mechanism worth understanding. It was not a change in the law of the country. It was a change in who was admitted to a room, won by an editor who refused to accept the exclusion as settled.

It did not last as a widening of the rules. The obituary records that censorship tightened, a restrictive press code was introduced, and the dangers of honest reporting escalated. The press code of that era gave the state a formal instrument to act against newspapers it did not like, and the practical risk to reporters rose with it.

What the record does and does not say

The Guardian’s account is an obituary, written by a family member, and it is accurate as far as it goes. It is also a British newspaper’s farewell to a man who left South Africa in 1978. What it does not do is name the reporters Richmond hired, describe the Cape Herald’s coverage, or set out what the press code of the period actually permitted. Those details are not in the material available here, and this paper will not supply them from memory.

What the obituary does establish is the shape of the problem. A South African editor in the 1970s could hire across the colour line, and the state could then ban, detain or exclude the people he hired. The editor’s response was to negotiate, in person, for their release and their access. That is the ordinary, unglamorous work of running a newspaper under a system designed to stop it.

Richmond’s own family life ran alongside it. He met Lyn Moseley, a bank clerk, on a ship home, and they married in 1970. Their married life began in London, where he worked as the Star’s foreign correspondent, and they returned to South Africa in 1972. He was the Star’s Soweto correspondent during a turbulent period reporting on riots and arrests, before the move to Cape Town the following year. In 1978 he and Lyn emigrated to England with their two young children and settled in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

In Britain he worked for the Oxford Times and later for the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a charity he had first encountered in Soweto. He joined the civil service in 1990 as editor of publications at the Building Research Establishment, moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1994 as information officer and then head of the London Correspondents’ Service, and retired in 2002. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2020, and volunteered for Host Abingdon, which supports refugees and asylum seekers.

He is survived by Lyn, his children Tam and the son who wrote the obituary, and his grandchildren Joel, Isaiah and Mary.

Source: The Guardian, Tony Richmond obituary