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Vernon Richards: Photographer, Publisher, Gardener & Anarchist

Vernon Richards, a self-portrait from the early 1960s

Vero Recchioni, later changed to Vernon Richards was born in London in 1915. He was educated at Emanuel School, and King’s College, London where he trained as a civil engineer. Although we have a set of his school reports, we have found little of his activities in the school. We know he was taught the violin in Soho by a very well known teacher of the time, but have no record of how he participated in school activities. His father set up the well known and respected Italian delicatessen King Bomba in Soho and Richards worked there on-and-off for years.

His early Anarchist activities began by helping his father with propaganda work against Mussolini, and as a result he was arrested in Paris in January 1935 and extradited from France. In 1936, he published in collaboration with Camillo Berneri a bilingual anarchist and antifascist paper Italia Libera/Free Italy. Although it was not proven, his father was associated with various plots to assassinate Mussolini. Both father and son were both seen as threats to both the Franco and Mussolini governments through their underground political activities.

As Richards grew older he became more and more involved in the struggle against fascism in Spain and founded and edited Spain and the World, and Freedom Newspaper from 1945. These were early examples of a huge range of politically driven anarchist publications which Richards was to be involved with for most of the rest of his life. He has edited some of the longest surviving Anarchist newspapers.

Because of his civil engineer training he avoided the Second World War draft, however, he was employed during the war by a private company as an engineer. However, he was imprisoned for nine months for inciting agitation among soldiers in 1945, despite a high profile defence campaign backed by the likes of George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Benjamin Britten. On the bright side prison gave Richards the chance to resume playing the violin from his childhood, and even formed a band with other jailed musicians. Friends regretted that he never played again after his release. He was never to work as a civil engineer again either, saying that the one thing he learned in prison was the folly of pursuing a "career". This was ironic, as he seemed to have several!

Following prison he returned to the family business in Soho, until it was sold in the 1950s. Richards was also a highly accomplished photographer, something he often kept on the back-burner. However, on occasion he did work freelance and had many published. Without doubt his most famous sequence of photos were those of George Orwell from the 1940s. They showed very simple images of Orwell working and playing with his son. Although Orwell wasn’t an anarchist both men were friends and these photos gave a rare insight into the life of a very private man. They have all been republished in the last few years.

Richards was never one to rest on his laurels and was always keen to try something new. One of these enterprises was returning to Franco’s Spain in the late 1950s and 1960s as a tour guide, as he was convinced that the links formed by tourism helped to open closed frontiers, he went to Franco's Spain. He was, of course correct, and as Franco aged Spain fell back in step with the rest of Western Europe. He tried similar ventures into the Soviet Union. Years later, in 1999, the Centre for Catalan Studies produced an album of his photos, taken after 1957 while he was escorting holidaymakers through the poverty-stricken Catalan villages. For local families, the book became an important photographic record of their grandparents and times long past.

In 1968 there was change again, he moved to a smallholding in Suffolk, where, for almost 30 years, Richards produced vegetables for the organic market. Whilst working as a commercial gardener, he continued his photography, did occasional tour guiding and worked in his father's wine and pasta store in London. It’s safe to say Vernon Richards never retired.

However, the crowning achievement of the life of this remarkable man was without doubt Freedom Press. It remains to this day one of the biggest, and longest running, publisher of anarchist literature. He edited the magazine “Freedom” until 1964 and, remarkably, still found time to manage the bookshop and the publications of Freedom Press for many further years.

Among his key publications are 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' 1953 and `Errico Malatesta - Life and Ideas' 1965. He wrote many books of the philosophy behind anarchism and was involved in running some of the biggest anarchist book fairs and conventions the UK has ever seen. A gifted linguist, he also translated some books from the French and Italian into English. Even after he retired from the editorship, he continued to manage Freedom Press financially. It was not until the 1990s that he finally stopped writing for the paper. Often he felt others were taking the magazine in the wrong direction, when this happened, he took over again. No authors, Richards included, were ever paid any royalties for the books they wrote under the Freedom Press banner.

Many researchers have tried to look for the source of Richards's single-mindedness, friends assumed that his father had set him in motion. But those who knew him best, said the single biggest influence on his life was the Italian anarchist Malatesta.

In his dedication to the anarchist cause, it has been said that Richards was a quite ruthless exploiter of others. None of the group he had inspired before and after the War were on speaking terms with him at the times of their deaths. Whether he was a manipulator or not, it’s not for me to say, he saw their withdrawal from his circle as proof that they had been seduced by capitalist values.

At the end of the 1990s, admirers sponsored the publication by Freedom Press of four books of Richards's photographs. Vernon Richards died in 2001.

The Archive has a signed copy of his amateur photography. We also have many of his other major Freedom Press books currently on display.