Tony Richmond, the Star editor who fought to get black reporters into parliament, dies at 82
He hired journalists the state banned from events and detained without charge, then argued them out of police stations. His obituary has been published in London.
Tony Richmond, the South African journalist who edited the Cape Herald and spent years arguing with apartheid police to get his reporters released, has died at 82.
As The Guardian reported on 4 September, 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 what was then Natal.
He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1964 and joined the Star in Johannesburg as a cub reporter. At Wits he had joined marches and protests, set up a multiracial church youth group, and mixed with activists. He then studied for three months at Perugia University and hitchhiked across Europe, meeting his future wife, Lyn Moseley, on the ship home. They married in 1970.
By 1972 he was back in South Africa as the Star’s Soweto correspondent, reporting on riots and arrests. A year later he moved to Cape Town as editor of the Cape Herald.
The Cape Herald under Richmond hired non-white reporters at a time when they were routinely barred from events and detained without charge. Richmond spent long hours in police stations arguing with the authorities for their release, and he took the exclusion of his journalists from press conferences directly to the prime minister, John Vorster. That confrontation opened the door for non-white reporters to obtain parliamentary press passes.
It was a narrow win in a closing system. Censorship tightened, a restrictive press code came in, and the risks of honest reporting grew. Richmond and his family left for England in 1978.
South African readers who followed the press in that decade will recognise the shape of the story. The parliamentary press gallery, the press code, the banning orders and the detentions without trial were the machinery that decided which South Africans could report, and on what terms. The Cape Herald’s fight for accreditation is one of the small records of that machinery being pushed back.
In England, Richmond worked for the Oxford Times and 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, and moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1994 as information officer and later head of the London Correspondents’ Service. He retired in 2002.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2020. He volunteered for Host Abingdon, which supports refugees and asylum seekers. He is survived by Lyn, his two children, Tam and the Guardian writer who wrote the obituary, and his grandchildren, Joel, Isaiah and Mary.
Source: The Guardian, Tony Richmond obituary.
