Tony Bowers obituary
My husband, Tony Bowers, who has died aged 77, spent many years working for organisations in West Yorkshire that were dedicated to improving the lives of ordinary people, including in the areas of housing and health.
Among other things, he established a community advice centre on the Walpole council estate in Huddersfield, drawing financial resources into the locality and giving a voice to tenants.
He also worked for the best part of a decade at Huddersfield Citizens Advice Bureau, and later was a housing benefits officer at Leeds Federated Housing Association, a homeless project worker at Halifax and district YMCA, and then a public health development officer at South Huddersfield Primary Care Trust.
In addition, for many years Tony was a local management committee member of Huddersfield Catholic Housing Aid Society (Chas, now part of Fusion Housing), and a school governor.
Born in Maidstone, Kent, he was the son of Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and May (nee West), a nurse. He went to Shoreham grammar school in West Sussex before beginning his working life in 1964 as a trainee in the executor and trustee department of Lloyds Bank in Guildford, Surrey. In 1967, he moved to work in the same field for Standard Bank of South Africa in Johannesburg, becoming a clerk on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange two years later.
In South Africa he was radicalised by the brutality of the apartheid system and became involved as a volunteer with various groups addressing social injustice. He also developed a friendship with the South-Africa-based English priest Cosmas Desmond, who documented the forced removal of black families in his book The Discarded People. Together they set off in a battered old car to deliver copies of the book as widely across the country as they could before it was banned.
Tony returned to the UK in 1970 to do a three-year teacher training course at Huddersfield Polytechnic (now the University of Huddersfield), staying on for a further two years as president of the students’ union (1973-75), during which period he represented students in academic appeals and disciplinary hearings.
Tony and I met at the polytechnic, where I was a member of the student union executive committee in Tony’s second year as president; we married in 1977.
After leaving the polytechnic, Tony eventually ended up spending a year at Age Concern, working on their community programme, before joining the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust in York in 1978 to run a community newspaper, the Colne Valley News. It lasted until 1981, when, with the help of the trust, Tony established the community advice centre on the Walpole estate.
He went to Huddersfield Citizens Advice Bureau in 1988, and after spells at Leeds Federated Housing Association and Halifax and District YMCA, worked at South Huddersfield Primary Care Trust (2002-05).
In retirement he volunteered for groups that worked with refugees and asylum seekers until his health failed him.
He is survived by me, our three children, Karen, Tassadat and Emilie, and two daughters: Rachel, from his first marriage to June Sellwood, which ended in divorce, and Elizabeth, from an earlier relationship with Margaret Bush.