Michael Harris

Michael was from a Quaker family in Plymouth. His father had been a CO & imprisoned in WWI. It was his Quaker convictions which influenced his career and his life. He joined the Friends Ambulance Unit as a nurse at 17, first in the Finnish-Russian war, escaping via Norway on a French destroyer in the spring of 1940 to join the blitz work in London. . Another FAU member he knew, Richard Early (of Early Blankets in Witney) who was a Methodist CO did not, and we met up with him many years later when my parents moved to Witney. He became a prisoner of war for the rest of the war.

Michael then joined the China Convoy and was part of the first convoy to go to China in 1942. He also was a porter in Gloucester Hospital for a while - which he said was the only place he experienced anti-CO behaviour. He stayed in China and became the Secretary of the British United Aid to China organisation which had Lady Cripps as the CO, & Madam Chiang Kai Shek and Madam Sun yat Set (The Soong Sisters) as executives. He returned to the UK in 1947 and joined the Colonial Service, serving in Malawi for 15 years.

He joined Oxfam in 1964 as one of two overseas officers. In his 20 years there, he visited 73 countries, was present at 12 major disasters and five wars.

He was fiercely proud of his staff at Oxfam, and preferred action to bureaucracy.

He retired from Oxfam in 1974, but continued his work for justice and poverty, becoming the chairman of the African Medical Research Foundation, and then chairman of the Anti-Slavery Society, as well as advising the Oxford Refugee Studies Programme and writing numerous letters to the papers and MPs on subjects as varied as the preservation of rural England to the war in Iraq.

Read an obituary: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lives-remembered-michael-harris-1699434.html