Obituary: Alun Richards

Pacifist and theologian. Born in Wales in 1907. Died in Auckland on Tuesday, aged 94.

By JOHN ROUGHAN

The day Alun Richards arrived in New Zealand, disembarking at Wellington, the waterfront was in uproar. Farmers on horseback, designated special constables, were using batons to disperse strikers and reopen the wharves.

It might not have been the sight of "Massey's cossacks" that made the 6-year-old a lifelong rebel but something did.

The thoughtful, peaceable but headstrong and difficult man, who in latter years wrote theological stories in quiet Campbells Bay, Auckland, nearly went to jail in 1929 for refusing compulsory military service.

A last-minute outcry from Labour MPs forced the Government to accept a lesser penalty, and by resolution of Parliament Richards was stripped of his civil rights for 10 years.

Apart from the inability to vote, he hardly noticed the loss.

Two years later, by his own account, he was expelled from Knox College, Dunedin, for views that were a little too much for the Presbyterian theological school at that time.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Alun Richards grew up in parishes at Morrinsville and Takapuna and went to Knox College with a first-class honours degree and a diploma in journalism from Auckland University.

Despite his differences with the college and the law, he won a Government scholarship to go overseas and studied theology at New College, Edinburgh.

In Britain he met his future wife, Muriel, also a New Zealander, and they toured Europe on a tandem bicycle. They saw Germany newly under Hitler and much else that Richards would recount in articles for the Listener on the countries that were being drawn into war.

They took the tandem to China and Japan, too. That was before the bicycle had reached China, and he wrote with prescience about its possible impact there. In Japan they disturbed a law forbidding two people from riding the same bike.

Back in New Zealand and now qualified as a pastor, the Rev Alun Richards went to a parish on the West Coast but was not cut out for pastoral work.

In 1939 he became an organiser of extension studies at Victoria University but lost that job during the war when he spoke a little too freely to somebody who reported him for disloyalty. The professorial board voted to dismiss him.

He held that all war was futile and thought it better for countries to let themselves be invaded and respond with civil disobedience. They could, he argued, make it impossible for an occupying power to govern, much as the Norwegians were doing to Hitler.

He worked in the Internal Marketing Division, giving away products such as apples that could not be exported because shipping was disrupted by the war.

He thought it a good system and wrote a book on internal marketing for the Labour Government.

After the war he became an organiser for Corso and in 1947 became editor of the Presbyterian newspaper Outlook, where he probably did the best work of his life.

He transformed the paper from pious to punchy, introducing news commentaries, general book reviews and writers such as Denis McEldowney.

Richards, says McEldowney, was "an extraordinary intellect, widely read, and wrote well in an oddly abbreviated, convoluted style."

He always regarded English as his second language, after the language of his birthplace,Welsh.

In 1951 Outlook was one of few publications to speak out against emergency regulations, arguing that Christians could not refuse help to strikers.

But Richards never found it easy to work to instructions, particularly from committees, and eventually resigned from Outlook, returning to parish work at St James in Newtown, Wellington.

He retired in the mid-1960s to Campbells Bay, where he was still writing at age 90.

His theological views became outdated even among unorthodox thinkers in later years. But that never mattered to him. His mind was his own.