Obituary: Robin Langdon-Davies (original) (raw)

My uncle Robin Langdon-Davies, who has died in Bristol aged 84, was a wartime Royal Air Force pilot who went on to become a member of the council, or governing body, of Oxfam in the 1950s, and was honorary treasurer of the charity from 1960 to 1973. And as a 15-year-old in the late 1930s, he rode across Europe to the Spanish civil war on the back of his father's motorbike.

His father was a News Chronicle reporter, and Robin's vivid, funny diary of that experience, now at the Imperial War Museum, describes being "perched on the pillion seat with a knapsack on my back and a Union Jack fluttering on the handlebars". He observed "two little boys happily playing with the smouldering remains of a bonfire of all the church furniture, vestments, etc." Later, they met some freshly arrived Italian anti-fascists, who described the "many Italian, German and French comrades come to help ... We took our leave, raised our fists and pushed on."

Born in Southampton in 1920 to pacifist Quakers, Robin and his family sailed on the Lancastria for New York in 1925, and lived fleetingly in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and then, very happily, from 1926 to 1928, at San Feliu de Guixols in Catalonia. He and his older brother - my father - led lives of enviable freedom even if not allowed to play warlike games, except cavaliers and roundheads. Robin was the roundhead. Their parents' marriage broke up and they moved to Devon, but the boys ran away from the progressive Dartington Hall and were sent to Leighton Park.

Back in England after the Spanish civil war, Robin began studying chartered accountancy, and while taking his articles in Oxford he met Cicely Dyer. They married in 1941. The civil war had deeply affected him, and he devoted himself to campaigning for the Spanish republic.

In July 1940, he enlisted in the RAF and went on to fly Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mustangs. His favourite plane was the Bristol Beaufighter, which he flew with 6 Squadron in the Adriatic in 1943 on anti-shipping missions. One day, out of four fighter-bombers two, were lost. Retaliatory action was taken and his co-pilot recalled Robin observing "this is worth a posthumous DFC". Robin got the medal two months later and became officer in charge of 6 Squadron in 1944.

After the war, back in Oxford, he joined the group of Quakers that had founded Oxfam and took up his profession as an accountant. He remained devoted to Spain all his life, and became more pacifist as time went on, with robust views on the latest forays into the Balkans and Iraq. Though courteous and humorous, he did not stand nonsense, and when, in his final illness, doctors offered counselling and asked if he was afraid of dying, he recovered enough strength to retort: "Certainly not."

He is survived by his wife Cicely, children Anna and Michael, and six grandchildren.

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