AN APPRECIATION

Described recently by the Scottish permanent secretary Sir Peter Housden as being "Lion-hearted and courageous", Fred Riddell was, for 15 years, the fiesty Christian socialist chair of Nottinghamshire County Council Education Committee at a time when his left-wing policies came under considerable pressure from the Conservative Government in the south.

He was a popular figure on the broader labour stage, halving the majority of Airey Neave when he took him on at the 1964 General Election and only abandoning a promising national political career to help look after his young children.

Born into a hard grafting mining community, young Fred was frustrated when his parents couldn't afford to send him to the local grammar school. He left school at 14 to take a job pulling coal tubs off the railway at his local pit.

Determined to redress the situation, he took evening classes and obtained a scholarship to Oxford, where he felt culturally alienated and lonely, quickly marrying his first wife, Dorothy, with whom he had a daughter, Jane.

He was later to win a coal board scholarship to America, after which he studied for a degree at Nottingham where he married his second wife, Sheila, in 1959.

After such a challenging start to his own education, it was inevitable that he would turn to teaching, a profession he pursued until he was 50, when politics took over.

He was of the old school Labour activists, scrupulously honest and convinced that the Christian obligation was to toil in the fields of socialist activism. He joined the Iona Community in 1983 and was an active member until his death.

A great delight was spending time at his caravan on Mull and it is indicative of his feisty nature that he drove his final caravan there by himself, crossing ferries and rough terrain. He was 84 at the time.

His home life was a happy one and he took pleasure in his retirement, relishing his children and their young offspring, though often appalled at a habit of allowing their pet mice get under his feet.

He died in Glasgow and is survived by his wife, sister, two daughters, a son, five grandchildren, four great grandchildren, and against the odds a number of white mice.