Minister’s amazing life, fighting for freedom

FREEDOM fighter . . . the Rt Rev Richard Wood and first wife Elsa and the car they drove from South Africa to England

AN Oldham-born Anglican minister who spent his life fighting black oppression in South Africa has died aged 88.

The Right Rev Richard Wood, was born on August 25, 1920, in the borough where his father, Alexander Wood, was the manager of the Oldham Knitting Co.

He was educated at Oldham Hulme Grammar School and trained as an electrical engineer before joining the Royal Air Force at the start of the Second World War.

He married first wife Elsa de Beer in 1946 and had twins, a son Alex and a daughter Irene.

While working in India after the war, he was inspired by a Tamil priest to become a devout Christian and was ordained in Salisbury Cathedral in 1951.

His first appointment as curate took him to Calne, Wiltshire, before heading to South Africa, where Elsa was from, in 1955. During his religious career, Rev Wood was appointed assistant to the cathedral at St George, Cape Province, and later Rector of Beaufort West, 300 miles from Capetown.

Following Elsa’s death in 1969, he spent his life travelling across southern Namibia taking the gospel to farm workers and miners.

In 1974, he initiated an action in the South African courts to stop the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo), a Christian-based liberation movement, from being flogged. As a result, he was kicked out of the country.

Back in England, he worked for Africa Bureau in 1975 and was chaplain at Hull University between 1977-79.

He moved to Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania in 1979 to teach, then to the US in 1982 as a parish priest with second wife Cathy, who he married 10 years before, and had two daughters, Rachel and Naomi.

The family returned to Hull in 1985 and retired to Itchen Abbas, near Winchester, in 1998. He died there on October 9.