Tony Richmond, the Star editor who fought to get black reporters into Parliament, dies at 82
The Durban-born journalist hired reporters apartheid barred from events, spent hours in police stations getting them out, and took John Vorster on over press passes before leaving South Africa in 1978.
Tony Richmond, the South African journalist who hired reporters the apartheid state would not accredit and then fought the police and the prime minister to get them into the room, has died aged 82.
As The Guardian reported on 4 September 2026 in an obituary written by his son, Richmond died in England, where he had lived since 1978. He was born in Durban to Arnold Richmond, a civil engineer, and Moyra Shaw, a librarian, and was educated at Michaelhouse in Natal, now KwaZulu-Natal.
He read English, political theory and government at the University of the Witwatersrand, graduating in 1964, and the 1960s shaped him. He joined marches and protests, set up a multiracial church youth group, and mixed with freedom fighters and activists.
His first newspaper job was as a cub reporter at the Star in Johannesburg. He then spent three months at Perugia University and hitchhiked across Europe. On the ship home he met Lyn Moseley, a bank clerk, whom he married in 1970. Their married life began in London, where he was the Star’s foreign correspondent.
He returned to South Africa in 1972 and spent a turbulent period as the Star’s Soweto correspondent, reporting on riots and arrests. In 1973 he moved to Cape Town as editor of the Cape Herald.
What he did at the Cape Herald is the part of the record that South Africans who never met him should know. He hired reporters who were classified as non-white. Under apartheid those reporters were routinely banned from events and detained without charge. Richmond spent hours in police stations arguing with the authorities to get them released.
He also took the fight to the top. He confronted the prime minister, John Vorster, directly about the exclusion of Cape Herald journalists from press conferences, and the pressure worked. Non-white reporters were able to obtain parliamentary press passes. That was a real opening in a system built to keep them out, and it was won by a man with a newspaper behind him and no legal right to be there.
It did not hold for long. Censorship tightened, a restrictive press code was introduced, and the dangers of honest reporting escalated.
In 1978 Richmond and his wife emigrated to England with their two young children and settled in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. He worked for the Oxford Times and later for the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, now USPG, a charity he had first encountered years earlier in Soweto.
He joined the British civil service in 1990 as editor of publications at the Building Research Establishment, and moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1994 as information officer and later head of the London Correspondents’ Service. International journalists who used that service stayed friends with him long after his retirement in 2002.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. The invasion of Ukraine affected him deeply. He volunteered for Host Abingdon, which supports refugees and asylum seekers, and his last years were, in his son’s account, enriched by the friendships he made there.
For a South African reader the shape of that life is familiar. A white journalist of his generation could have taken the press card and the access and stayed quiet. Richmond used the access he had to widen it for people who had none, and when the state closed the door on him he left rather than report what the state wanted.
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.
