Peter Knowlson, who has died aged 79, was the Liberal Party's policy workhorse for over twenty years. He was occasionally infuriating, often badly treated by the party hierarchy, but always loyal and productive. He was a deeply instinctive Liberal, remarkably tolerant of others' foibles and wholly unaware of his own eccentricities!

Peter was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and Clare College, Cambridge. He remained in Cambridge where he met and married Toni Conan-Davies. Toni was a council candidate in Cambridge before Peter, eventually winning the Cherry Hinton ward in 1965. Peter fought three elections unsuccessfully. I suspect that he was much more suited to the backroom than the frontline, as he himself recognised.

In the early 1970s Peter arrived at Liberal Party headquarters as Head of Research, later retitled Head of Policy, from a research post with the CBI. Initially he had a number of bright young researchers on his staff, including Magnus Linklater, later editor of The Scotsman, but as money became tighter he was increasingly on his own, though still expected to service as many committees and to produce as many reports. His capacity for detailed work was legendary and he was almost singlehandedly responsible for the comprehensive body of Liberal policy that existed in 1987. In 1981, the third year of a careful renewal of party thinking, he and I were working on the document "Foundations for the Future" when the alliance with the SDP largely ended this programme.

In common with others who chaired the annual party Assembly or Conference committee, I found him indispensable in his remarkable ability to take rambling and even incoherent submissions from associations or delegates and rapidly to translate them into amendments capable of being debated the following day. Similarly, Peter would attend a committee or a working group which would go round the houses in its discussions and then find its deliberations written up in structured paragraphs and measured English.

Peter was a great encourager of talent, particular young talent, and a number of recruits to policy committees found themselves gently but persuasively encouraged to undertake more they originally felt possible. He was also a good feminist who promoted staff from secretarial ghettos into research jobs.

When, following the 1987 general election, David Steel pushed the Liberal Party into immediate merger negotiations with the SDP, Peter was elected to the negotiating committee. Over the four traumatic months of negotiations his knowledge of policy documents was invaluable. Although he had his own forthright views he had always taken his role as a key party "civil servant" as requiring him to work with all sections of the party. It was a surprise, therefore, when he resigned from the negotiating team with myself, Tony Greaves and Rachael Pitchford over the proposed name of the new party. It was perhaps significant that he had just been made redundant by the Liberal Party. He moved to Age Concern where he worked on policy issues for ten years until his retirement.

As a friend Peter was generous and warm with regular invitations to the big house at Wimbledon for Peter's often somewhat idiosyncratic concepts of cuisine, the enthusiastic involvement of his three daughters, Felicity, Rachel and Roz, and the increasingly dramatic appearances of Toni - despite their increasing estrangement in the latter years before her death in an appalling fire at the house. The garden was also the site for another of Peter's interests - water sculpture, with fountains which would somehow be in continuous transformation!

Peter and Liberal Democrat peer, Susan Thomas, lived together in Dorking for some ten years before Peter moved to Gloucestershire in 2006. Soon after, whilst at his house in Lanzarote, at which he had done much self-designed building work long before the island became a tourist haven, he suffered a major stroke. This was followed by prostate cancer in 2009 and, after further complications, he died on 20th August 2011.

Those who came across Joe Kitchen only as one of the Labour City Councillors for Leeds' Middleton ward without knowing anything of his background would be surprised at his history.

Born in 1922, he was the penultimate child of an extremely numerous Catholic family that had to pack itself into a small back-to-back house in Hunslet. At the age of fourteen he began his apprenticeship as a coach painter at John Fowler's local engineering company. Joe's skill was honed by hand painting the names on the Fowler locomotives that were exported worldwide.

Kitchen had immediately joined the General and Municipal Workers' Union at the age of fourteen and in 1937, after only a year at Fowler's, he formed an apprentices' committee which struck successfully for a rise of a shilling a week. Thereafter apprentices were automatically paid a percentage of the full adult workers' rate.

In 1940, as soon as he was eighteen, Kitchen joined up and was enlisted in the Royal Engineers, serving first in North Africa, then in the Italy landings of 1944, and finally at the carnage of Monte Cassino. At the war's end Joe Kitchen was attached to the War Graves Registration Unit and put in charge of 250 Italian workers with the task of carefully burying over 4,000 British soldiers on Italian soil. During this period he met his future wife Elizabetta Dibiasio, always known as Tina. They had two daughters, Anna Maria and the late Kathleen, and there are now eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 1948 Kitchen returned to England and to Fowlers where his commitment to trade unionism led to him becoming shop steward, branch secretary and eventually Regional Officer for the Yorkshire and North Derbyshire Region of the GMWU - since 1982 the GMB. In 1978 he was awarded the MBE for his services to trade unionism.

He was appointed a magistrate in 1969 and elected to Leeds City Council in 1971. On his retirement from the council in 1988 he was appointed an Honorary Alderman. Joe was one of the most popular members of the council and his friendships transcended party barriers. The twinkling eyes behind his heavy glasses always presaged another of his many anecdotes. An unassuming working man of great charm and dignity, he was one of the last representatives of that generation that had to struggle fiercely to prove their worth.

Never an extremist, he had a deep loyalty to the Labour party but was distressed at the strife caused by the ascendancy of the Left in the early 1980s. Joe Kitchen treated all his colleagues with respect and fulfilled his duties with integrity. In 2004 he returned to Tunisia with the British Legion to lay a wreath at the graves of two of his close friends. He will be buried in Italy alongside Tina.

Joseph Kitchen, born 6 April 1922; died 1 May 2007.

For fifty years Graham Kirkland, together with his GP wife, Joan, served the medical needs of his Otley patients and for over forty years he was a Liberal, and later a Liberal Democrat, Councillor on the Otley Town Council and on the Leeds City Council. In 1998 he became the first Liberal Lord Mayor of Leeds since 1942. In recognition of his long civic service, in 2013 he was made a Honorary Alderman of the City.

Born in Wolverhampton in August 1936 Graham Kirkland attended the Leeds Medical School where he met his future wife, Joan Watson, whom he married in 1961. On graduation he initially worked at Leeds General Infirmary and at the Leeds Maternity Hospital in Hyde Terrace. He had a brief period practising in Stoke on Trent before returning to Leeds in October 1963 where he and Joan soon became partners in the Westgate Medical Practice in Otley. They remained there until Graham's death.

Graham realised that the health of his patients required good housing as well as good medicine and he quickly became involved in politics, joining the local Liberal party. He successfully stood for election to the Otley Urban District Council in 1967, remaining a member of this council and its successor town council until 2012, including twice being the town's mayor. Following local government reorganisation in 1974, when Otley became part of the Leeds City Council, he became one of the Liberal, and later Liberal Democrat, councillors for the Otley ward, retaining the seat at a further eight elections until his retirement in 2012. His attention to local issues, plus his work as a local GP gave him a considerable advantage electorally.

Politically, Graham Kirkland was a very instinctive Liberal. He was not a natural orator, nor an effusive political advocate, but he could put his case in debate with a quiet persuasive authority which gained him the respect of his opponents. This, coupled with his warm personality and his wry humour, meant that when in 1998 the other parties finally recognised that they could not deny the Liberal Democrats their due turn at the Lord Mayoralty, Graham Kirkland was the natural choice of the party.

He was a long-term member of the West Yorkshire Fire Authority of which he became the Vice Chairman. He also served as the Chairman of Harewood Housing Trust and was a Governor of St Joseph's and Prince Henry's Foundation in Otley. He died on 15 October following a massive stroke.

Graham Peter Kirkland, medical practitioner and politician, born 27 August 1936 and died 15 October 2016. He leaves his wife, Joan, a son and daughter, Jonathan and Susan, and two grandsons, Joshua and Oliver.

Liberal Democrat History Group obituary

Born 28 November 1903, near Tonbridge, Kent; the only child of Horace Bradlaugh Lakeman (1874-1962), an excise officer, and Evereld Simpson (1867-1950); died 7 January 1995 at her home in Tunbridge Wells. She remained unmarried.

Being synonymous with the electoral reform cause for over forty years tended to obscure Enid Lakeman's lifelong commitment to the Liberal party. It was that commitment that led her to the advocacy of preferential voting, as her one book promoting the Liberal cause - When Labour Fails, published in 1946 - makes clear. Those who only knew her in later years were fascinated by the contrast between the apparently frail person and the powerful and fluent writing she consistently produced.

Enid Lakeman had a suffragist and feminist pedigree in that her grandmother, Jane Ann Simpson, was a campaigner for votes for women and in 1879 was the first "working woman" candidate for her local School Board in Brixton. After graduating from the University of London Enid worked first as a research chemist and later as a teacher. Then after four years war service as a radar operator in the WAAF she, in her own words, "forsook a scientific career for politics because of her feeling that more scientific knowledge was needed less than better government to secure its proper use."

She was planning to stand at the election due in 1940 but the war postponed her parliamentary election debut to 1945 when she contested the St Albans constituency, one of only three servicewoman candidates. She later unsuccessfully contested Brixton in 1950 and Aldershot in 1955 and 1959. Her only election success was in 1962 for a single term on the Tunbridge Wells borough council.

In 1946, after demobilisation, she joined the staff of the Proportional Representation Society (later the Electoral Reform Society), becoming its Director in 1960. The Society then had only a fraction of the income it has today but Enid performed an amazing sleight of hand in giving the public appearance of a significant lobbying organisation whilst fulfilling almost all the different roles singlehandedly.

She conducted an intensive campaign of letter writing to any newspaper that showed evidence of the iniquities of the First Past the Post system. This was accomplished by the employment of a good press cuttings agency combined with an ability rapidly to produce pertinent letters, in the knowledge that editors of newspapers in far flung corners of the country would be so impressed by a letter from an impressive sounding London campaign that they would always publish them. Enid was very ascetic and economic, labouring away in the semi-dark and usually unheated library, much to the anguish of her younger but less hardy colleagues there.

Whilst at the Electoral Reform Society she produced a number of books and pamphlets, including the standard textbook How Democracies Vote. The Society, with Enid at the forefront, played a key role in persuading the Irish Republic to adopt STV and in winning two referendums to retain it, against the wishes of the parties. Her efforts continued into Northern Ireland culminating in the reintroduction by William Whitelaw of STV there. On her retirement in 1980 she was made an OBE. She was a humanist, a vegetarian and an internationalist and fine linguist, attending international conferences well into her 80s.

The library at the Electoral Reform Society offices is named after her, and annual lectures at her old college and at the Politics Association ensure the memory of this doughty warrior.

The Independent obituary

Newspaper letter column editors will henceforth have a much lighter postbag. Few individuals have had greater tenacity for a single cause than Enid Lakeman had for electoral reform over the past fifty years. Her commitment to preferential voting and her ability to apply a rock solid foundation in theory to the practical opportunity of the moment, serviced by the simple combination of a good press cuttings service and an increasingly battered typewriter, enabled her to produce a swift and sharp response to each and every electoral nonsense or wayward statement. Not even the most far flung of local newspapers was immune from a Lakeman thunderbolt. Most of them were so surprised to get a letter from a London office that they printed them.

David Butler once commented that, however timorously he might dare to hint that there might just be circumstances in which a voting system other than the Single Transferable Vote could conceivably be justified, he would await the inevitable riposte. Though increasingly enfeebled physically in recent years, Enid Lakeman's letter writing lost none of its edge and I have no doubt that in the next few days further pro STV blasts will be appearing posthumously. Many supporters of STV attribute their initial interest to the clarity and thoroughness of her arguments. She appeared to be impervious to both darkness and low temperatures and would work in the half light in the library at the Electoral Reform Society offices in Blackfriars, with her lunch box at the ready, with younger colleagues shivering in the gloom but hardly daring to confront Enid's resentment at any waste of scarce resources on heating and lighting.

Enid Lakeman was intensely political and her reforming zeal, feminism and internationalism sat comfortably with her lifelong membership of the Liberal Party and, latterly, the Liberal Democrats. She contested four postwar elections in the Liberal interest and was briefly a Liberal Councillor on the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council. She wrote numerous books and pamphlets either on liberalism and electoral matters and was a familiar figure at Liberal Assemblies, limping strenuously from meeting to meeting. Through her Liberal Party connection she was made an OBE in 1980. She had appeared frail for many years but hip replacement operations gave her a new lease of mobility. Fiercely self sufficient she would struggle on her own on public transport to meetings, and only reluctantly accepted help, even in the last two years after a fall had impeded her progress still more.

Enid Lakeman loved to travel and was a fine linguist. When well into her 80s she would make it plain that she was intending to go, say, to Buenos Aires for a meeting of the International Association of Political Scientists and would suggest that her presence would be useful to the electoral reform cause. Would it be possible, therefore, to have a grant towards the travel? Trustees of the small charitable fund at Chancel Street, thinking that it would be nice to help Enid to go to one last conference, would produce a modest sum. This tactic carried on enabling her to keep going to "last" conferences right up to her attendance in Berlin in her 90th year! Both Liberal and electoral reform organisations honoured her with 90th birthday dinners in tribute to her work. An annual Lakeman lecture will ensure that this doughty warrior is well remembered.

Enid Lakeman OBE, politician and electoral reformer, born 28 november 1903, died 7 January 1995.

Eric Reginald Lubbock, 4th Baron Avebury, by Godfrey Argent - NPG x136Eric Lubbock - and no-one who had any connection with the Orpington by-election of 1962 ever knew him as anything else - was instantly likeable, unassuming and an espouser of a series of Liberal causes, the only consistent qualification for which was that they were all vote losers. He was the least likely aristocrat imaginable and yet he had a very distinguished ancestry of Barons and Knights going back over two centuries. As a consequence of a curious combination of circumstances he had greatness thrust upon him. Living quietly with his wife and three children in the small Kent village of Downe he joined the Liberal party in 1960. A year later he was elected as a Liberal councillor from the village on to the Orpington Urban District Council. Later in 1961 the Orpington parliamentary seat became vacant with the appointment of its Conservative MP Donald Sumner to be a High Court judge.

In the years before this the Orpington Liberals had built up a well organised political organisation and had elected a very able group of councillors. The party had seen a national upsurge in support under leader Jo Grimond and, in conjunction with party headquarters, who seconded its Local Government Officer, Pratap Chitnis, to be the by-election agent, it was determined that a broad-based and well financed campaign to win the by-election would be launched. The one problem was that Jack Galloway, the popular and articulate Liberal candidate in place, who had fought the previous general election, was beset by personal problems which were known to the press. It was clear that he would be a liability in the spotlight of a by-election and, eventually, he was persuaded to resign. The local party decided that it needed a solid local respected individual as its candidate. The lot fell on Eric Lubbock and he was catapulted into the limelight.

Everything else worked together for good: the Tories left the seat vacant for seven months and then selected a Central Office intellectual whom they thought could just be imposed on what they considered to be a safe seat - having a 14,000 majority in 1959. Although a brilliant candidate, Peter Goldman was wholly wrong for Orpington, particularly for a by-election in the special circumstances. Following a brilliantly run campaign, both tactically and organisationally, Eric Lubbock was elected with almost 8,000 majority. Very soon he was appointed as Chief Liberal Whip which was an ideal job both for his fast-developing political skills and personable style. He did this tough job for seven long years. He had a quixotic tilt at the Liberal party leadership in 1967 following Jo Grimond's retirement but it was not really his scene and he attracted only two parliamentary supporters in addition to his own vote.

He held the Orpington constituency in the 1964 and 1966 general elections and even in the disastrous Liberal year of 1970 he almost won and did, in fact, put up the Liberal vote slightly. The following year his cousin, the third Lord Avebury, died and Eric, as his cousin, inherited the title and a seat in the House of Lords. Eric pondered briefly whether to go with his instincts and disclaim the title or to take the pragmatic view that he would be more useful to the many causes he was involved with, and to the Liberal party, if he went to the Lords, given that it was likely that it would take some years before he could win Orpington back. He chose the latter option and for forty-five years - including being elected as one of the few "continuing" hereditary peers - used the position in the Lords to pursue human rights, immigration, race relations and minority causes around the world. For a time it seemed that wherever I was sent to on electoral missions Eric was already there battling with the government on behalf of one oppressed minority or another.

He was a very distinguished NLC member both on account of his long parliamentary career and for his consistent support of Liberal causes. His involvement with the Club led to the formation of the Orpington Dinner which regularly raises funds for Liberal Democrat by-election campaigns.

Lord Avebury 1928-2016

This enquiry led to my uncovering the remarkable history of Joseph Mellor, a member from 1920 until his death in 1938. The general impression of NLC members, past and present, is of a club that has attracted a preponderance of its members from the broad liberal arts - lawyers, writers, civil servants, artists and musicians, just as the world of politics has done. A much needed examination of the membership application forms would quantify the impression but certainly there have not been many visible scientists around over the years.

Joseph Mellor was, therefore, quite an exception, though by the time of his application, his position as Principal of the Central School of Science and Technology in Stoke-on-Trent rather masked his distinguished scientific career. Incidentally his proposer in 1920 was a rather shady individual, Rudd Chislett Rann, sometimes known as Chislett Rudd Rann! Rann himself had only been a member from 1916 prior to which he had been an entrepreneur who criss-crossed the Atlantic in following his business deals. In 1904, along with business colleagues, he had been sued in a New York court in relation to alleged "corruptly diverting" funds from share deals. He was acquitted by the court but there was no mention of his business background when he applied to the Club for membership.

Mellor was born in Huddersfield in 1869 and when he was ten the family emigrated to New Zealand. The family's poverty prevented him from continuing his education and at thi rtee n he was employed in boot making. However. in the evenings. by the light of a paraffin lamp. he studied borrowed chemistry books. The principal of the local technical school heard of him and. in effect, adopted him and aided his education. enabling him to enter the University of Otago in 1892 as a part-time student. Six years later he grad uated with Ist Class honours and took up a teac hing post. In the same year, 1898, he married the organist at the local Methodist chu rch and. later that year, they came to Engla nd. He earned his doctorate at Manchester University in 1902 and took up a teaching post at what was then the North Staffordshire Technical College. He became Principal of the College and in 1927 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He published 116 papers and held six patents in clays, ceramics and, particularly, refractories. He became known as the leading authority in the UK on the chemistry and physics of ceramics. Between 1927 and 1937 he published a sixteen volume work amounting to 15.320 pages! - on inorganic chemistry. He eventually retired in 1934 and died in 1938. He stated that his relaxation was chess. which he no doubt practised with the Club's active Chess Circle.

Yet another remarkable personality who had been tucked away in the pages of the Club's history.

My friend Min Marks, a communist activist and wartime Bletchley Park associate, has died at the age of 100. She and her husband, Jack, who died in 2017 aged 98, were associated with virtually every peace movement, anti-racism and anti-fascist campaign in Leeds for over seventy years. Despite her own sturdy Communist affiliations Min was ecumenical in her attitude to political campaigns, happily working with all who shared the objective in view. She and Jack were essentially secular Jews and their support of the Palestinian cause inevitably brought difficulties with some members of the Leeds Jewish community. Min also cultivated a wide array of friends and was a very convivial hostess.

She was born in Leeds to Isaac Druyan, a presser, and his second wife, Rachel, née Israel, and attended Allerton High School. During the second world war she joined the ATS, (the Auxiliary Territorial Service) becoming an Intercept Operator, taking down encrypted German morse code messages that were then sent to Bletchley Park to be decoded. She is included on the Roll of Honour there and is commemorated on the Codebreakers' Wall. She became very skilled at Morse code and retained the ability to read it until very late in her life.

She married Jack in 1946 and thereafter they were both active in the city's Young Communist League. Unlike a number of Leeds party colleagues they remained in the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Soviet regime's crushing of the Hungarian party's revolt against the rigidity of Stalinist control, saying that the cause was more important than any individual's deviation from it. Min deplored the UK party's 1991 decision to disband and she and Jack then put their efforts into supporting the Communist party's daily newspaper, the Morning Star, which had been able to continue independently.

Min worked for many years for the Social and Market Research Company, RSL, as an interviewer, trainer and area supervisor, not retiring until well into her 70s. She was a fundraiser for a number of charities, particularly the Yorkshire PHAB (Physically Handicapped and Able Bodied), who put her and Jack's names on one of the PHAB minibuses.

She is survived by their three children, Ruth, Estelle and Anthony, five grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.

Minnie (Min) Marks, née Druyan, born 12 December 1920, died 23 October 2021. Married Jack 2 July 1946.

Albert McElroyAlbert McElroy’s oneness with a fellow Liberal was instinctive and mutual. He neither talked down to younger colleagues nor deferred to anyone in authority. This callow youth always looked forward to his regular visits to Brook House in the early sixties. I knew it would mean rigorous debate into the small hours, and Albert would pounce on any shallowness of logic or shading of principle. His gift was to take arguments on their merits, whoever propounded them, and he could be assertive without being arrogant.

I thought at first that he enjoyed the debate for its own sake but I eventually realised that that was not so and that, in fact, he wanted to test you to the limit and in so doing to test himself. Because of this he despised the simplistic bigotry of those who substituted prejudice for persuasion. I recall his satisfied chuckle after a meeting at which he, nominally a Protestant, had been heckled as a “papist”.

He was a considerable influence on those who came within his wide circle of friends and his presence at Liberal Assemblies was always appreciated as evidence of Liberal constancy within the most illiberal area of our islands.

He had one commendable defect: he could not comprehend the duality of human nature with its varied-proclivity towards evil. It was this obstinate refusal to acknowledge the possibility of malevolent motivation that eventually undermined his peace of mind and his will to fight on into the 1970s.

He saw, | think, the narrowing opportunity for promoting Liberalism within an insecure, unstable and violent society, and found himself emotionally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms with what he saw.

He was also hurt by the drift away from the Liberal cause of those who continued to profess their Liberalism. but who argued that the Liberal Party could not be the vehicle for those values. To Albert it was patently obvious that only the Liberal Party could profess Liberal values and he felt understandably frustrated and isolated at the burdens which were heaped on him.

Gordon Gillespie has written an excellent, and beautifully produced, memorial biography. So often a volume like this can be syrupy and can annoy the reader who knew the subject well. Gordon Gillespie avoids such pitfalls and evokes the flavour of Albert McElroy’s personality with considerable skill — so much so that it distressed me to be reminded of aspects of his struggle for honesty and political justice in Ireland.

I stayed at Brook House with Albert and Jan shortly before Albert’s death. He was a very different man to ten years earlier. He despaired of change in Ireland and could see no future for the values that were absolutely intrinsic to his personality and his life. I still feel, as I felt at the time, that Albert McElroy died of a broken heart.

My selfish thought after that last visit was that I regretted seeing him in such deep gloom. I now feel otherwise. His example, even in extremis, encourages me to fight on with greater determination, to maintain the conditions for Liberalism and to maximise Liberal influence.

I’m glad I knew Albert McElroy. He helped and encouraged me in more ways than he realised. He lit many candles without ever pondering whether the darkness would be dispelled.

Two stalwarts of west country Liberalism

David Morrish was one of the very best of us. He had everything - an instinctive and innate Liberalism, considerable intelligence, great debating skills, always with a ready anecdote in his attractive Devonian burr, an immediate charisma and a political integrity and loyalty which meant that he had many opponents but no enemies. He was one of that band of Liberals denied a role in national politics by an electoral system that excludes all but a handful of Liberals from office. That he chose not to seek party office beyond the Devon and Cornwall Region was a loss to the Liberal cause. His death in February at the age of 86 brings a sense of what might have been.

David came from a Liberal background and his first taste of campaigning came as a fourteen year old in Plymouth in the 1945 general election. Also campaigning in that election was Joan Squire, a Liberal party member in Tavistock. She and David met at the Liberal Party Assembly in Ilfracombe in 1953 and they eventually married in 1959, with a courtship interrupted by David's year at Wisconsin University on a Rotary Foundation scholarship and time spent working with the United Nations in Iran. This latter post left him with a lifetime's interest in and concern for that country and its people. On his return to Exeter in 1959 his first - and last - teaching post was as a geography tutor at St Luke's College, now part of Exeter University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1990. His professional life was as an educator, particularly in the training of teachers. Their daughter, Claire, arrived in 1962 and a granddaughter, Emma, in 1996.

David's early personal involvement in Liberal politics in 1956 was even preceded by joining what is now the Electoral Reform Society and, just, by becoming a member of the Society of Friends in 1955. He retained a lifelong involvement with the Quakers and with the peace movement. He refused to undertake National Service in 1956 choosing instead to register as a conscientious objector and stating his willingness to serve in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

My friendship with David began in 1962, the year after David had first been elected to Exeter City Council. I went to the city as part of my regular tour of Liberal council groups as the party's Local Government Officer. I stayed overnight with the Morrishs and found that we shared the same radical Liberalism. Exeter and the Morrishs became a regular convivial stop on future tours. David was a member of Exeter City Council from 1961 until 1974 and from 1996 until his retirement in 2011. He switched to Devon County Council from 1973 to 2004, all the time representing the same Heavitree ward. His fifty years service was recognised by being made a freeman of the city of Exeter in 2011. He recalled his first city council meeting when he had been advised not to speak and not to challenge the Mayor - he did both! He fought the Exeter constituency five times and the Tiverton seat four times. He also contested the Devon constituency for the European Parliament election in 1994. During my time in parliament, the Chief Whip, David Alton, told me with considerable astonishment, that a Liberal councillor had turned down a knighthood. Knowing how much such honours were often coveted, even by Liberals, I could understand his surprise. I went through possible names in my head and I came to the conclusion that it must be David Morrish. The next time I was with him, I looked at him with a sideways smile and asked, "Did you turn down a knighthood, David?" "Ah," he responded, "you'll have wait for my memoirs!" Alas, he only reached page 12 of his draft! I fear that the concept of memoirs was also somewhat un-Quakerly to David!

In 1985, to the Conservatives' huge surprise, they lost control of the Devon County Council for the first time in living memory. David set about putting together a three party coalition - Liberal, SDP and Labour. Eventually the Liberals and SDP put together a two-party administration, with Labour supporting from the wings. It proved to be a fractious blend and David survived as leader of the council for only two years. Interestingly David's somewhat naive but typically "pure" antipathy to having a group whip was a contributory factor in the joint administration eventually petering out.

In 1987 David and I found ourselves in minority within the Liberal party, opposing the leaders' proposal to form a merged party with the Social Democrats. At the special Liberal Assembly in Blackpool in December David made one of the better speeches against the proposal, telling delegates that, "Our constitution, preamble, membership scheme and name are worth fighting for .... they are not memorabilia but assets for the future fight." The merger proposal was inevitably passed with a large majority. Rather than abandon the cause we became part of a small continuing Liberal party, huddling together for mutual warmth and comfort. David typically held on to his Exeter ward seat, "without prefix or suffix" and his wife, Joan, won the next door ward. Together with two other Liberal party stalwarts they had a group of four on the city council. Some twenty years later I made the decision to join the mainstream Liberal Democrats but David remained loyal to the "mighty handful" to the end of his life. It was typical of the high esteem he was held by all that Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP for Exeter, and a local Conservative Councillor visited David in his final nursing home and that Ben attended the funeral. His final years were accompanied by a great frustration at his increasing frailty.

Joan Morrish survived David by just six weeks. She was a Liberal Exeter City Councillor for the Barton and St Loyes ward for twenty years, eventually stepping down in 2012, and a Devon County Councillor for ten years.

David Morrish, 17 May 1931 to 14 February 2018
Joan Morrish, 18 July 1926 to 31 March 2018