Tony Richmond, the Star reporter who fought to get black journalists into parliament

Tony Richmond, who has died aged 82, hired reporters the apartheid state had banned from public events, then spent his working hours arguing with police stations to get them out of detention.

The Guardian published an obituary of him on 4 September, written by his son. Richmond was born in Durban to Arnold Richmond, a civil engineer, and Moyra Shaw, a librarian, and went to Michaelhouse in Natal, now KwaZulu-Natal.

He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1964 and joined The Star in Johannesburg as a cub reporter. At Wits in the 1960s he joined marches and protests, set up a multiracial church youth group and mixed with freedom fighters and activists.

After a stint studying at Perugia University and hitchhiking across Europe, he met Lyn Moseley, a bank clerk, on the ship home. They married in 1970 and began married life in London, where he worked as The Star’s foreign correspondent.

The family returned to South Africa in 1972. Richmond spent a turbulent period as Soweto correspondent for The Star, reporting on riots and arrests, before moving to Cape Town in 1973 as editor of the Cape Herald.

It is that Cape Town period that South African readers who never met him will recognise as the substance of the man. At the Cape Herald he hired non-white reporters who were routinely barred from events and detained without charge. Richmond spent countless hours in police stations arguing with authorities to secure their release, according to the obituary.

He also confronted the prime minister of the time, John Vorster, directly about the exclusion of Cape Herald journalists from press conferences. That confrontation opened the door for non-white reporters to obtain parliamentary press passes, a change that outlasted his editorship.

The context is worth stating plainly for anyone who did not work in that newsroom. Under apartheid, a press pass to Parliament was not a formality. It was the difference between reporting a decision from the gallery and hearing about it second-hand. Denying reporters of colour that access was one of the ways the state kept their readers out of the room where laws were made.

A reporter banned from events and detained without charge had little recourse. The law under which people were held without trial allowed for it, and the police stations where families queued for news were the places where an editor with a press card had to make his case.

The window Richmond worked in did not stay open. Censorship tightened, a restrictive press code was introduced, and the dangers of honest reporting escalated. In 1978 he and Lyn 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 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 then head of the London Correspondents’ Service. He retired in 2002.

His Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2020 coincided with the Covid pandemic and, soon after, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which affected him deeply. He volunteered for Host Abingdon, which supports refugees and asylum seekers.

Richmond was also an amateur naturalist, a winemaker, a Scottish country dancer and a committed Christian. He is survived by Lyn, his children Tam and the son who wrote the obituary, and his grandchildren Joel, Isaiah and Mary.

The South African reporters he hired at the Cape Herald, and the readers they went on to write for, are the part of that record this country can still check. The press passes he argued for are the part that stayed.