This Obituary by Jimmy Burns appeared in The Tablet on the 21/1/2010
Mike Richey’s death at the age of 92, three days before Christmas Day ,marks the passing into history of the last of a group of English Catholics who left an enduring mark on the 20th century.
On the day of Mike’s birth , his father George , a distinguished British officer who had fought in the Matabele War, the Mashona rebellion and the Boer War, wrote to Mike’s mother Adelaide,from the western front: “We are busy preparing for the biggest show of the war.”
The stoicism and bravery reflected in George’s letters before he was wounded at Ypres, would have a lasting influence on Mike and his older brother Paul , both of whom were also destined for distinguished wartime service.
Mike was educated at Downside and spent a short time with the Trappists at Caldey island where his admiration for the contemplative life struggled against a creative urge that had been stimulated by reading Eric Gill’s essays on art and life.
Mike learnt stone carving and lettering while living in Gill’s community at Pigott’s, later working on the huge panels at the League of Nations building in Geneva , and the Oxford playhouse where his lettering still exists above the main door.
He later recalled his good fortune in forming four important friendships, thanks to Gill, each friendship “of course particular, but at the same time interdependent, as they might be in a family or indeed a conspiracy”.
The four friends were David Jones, the poet and painter, Tom Burns, the Catholic publisher and future editor of The Tablet, who in WW2 became involved in espionage and propaganda Rene Hague printer and scholar and husband of Gill’s daughter Joan, and the BBC’s Harman Grisewood .
At the outbreak of WW2, Burns convinced Mike that the best way to reconcile his pacifism with his sense of patriotic duty was to serve on a minesweeper HMS Goodwill. Within the first year of the war, HMS Goodwill was hit by a German torpedo, and Mike penned a moving account of those killed or badly injured .
‘Sunk by a Mine: A Survivor’s Story’ was published in the New York Times magazine after Mike’s mother had submitted it for the Llevellyn Rhys memorial Prize for Literature along with her older son Paul’s RAF diary. Mike won the prize, while Paul’s diary was published later as a book Fighter Pilot.
The article survives as the most striking example of Mike’s understated and unexploited literary talent for it brought him neither fame nor fortune even if his insightful letters and other writings have found a distinguished home in Georgetown University library in the US, courtesy of the archivist Nicholas Scheetz.
Mike’s wartime service also took him from the Falklands to South Africa and eventually the French coast off Normandy in the D-day landings, where his acquired specialist knowledge as a navigator was put to good use in tracking German U-boats.
Once peace had been declared, old naval contacts asked him to form the Institute of Navigation (renamed the Royal Institute in 1972) where he served as director for 35 years.
It was a post that provided Mike in public at least with the independence he always craved for, although the Institute grew in international stature , with a membership of astronomers, oceanographers, radio engineers and others.
In 1965, encouraged by his friend Francis Chichester, Mike bought a 26ft engineless junk-rigged boat called Jester, and began to participate single-handedly in transatlantic races. Mike was always among the last to make it across the Atlantic -but make it he did, sustained by a diet of red wine, and pasta, and readings of Proust, and the Gospels.
His eventual landings at Newport, Rhode Island fuelled a growing constituency of American friends who looked on him as extraordinary brave while refreshingly uncompetitive.
It was at sea where Mike found the perfect balance to his life.The long periods of solitude , amidst the ocean’s great creatures, and the battling with the elements got him in touch with himself and closer to God. In 1988,Mike lostJester in a major storm. He would carry the remembrance of his favourite boat for the rest of his life in a cross made for him from part of Jester’s surviving wreckage by the captain of the ship that rescued him.
A replica Jester was later built with money raised by a group of Mike’s fellow-sailors.In 1992, aged 75, Richey crossed the Atlantic and back again, as he did five years later aged 80, by now well established as an example for young sailors with a taste for the sheer adventure of the sea.
While Mike lived most of his life with the simplicity of a hermit, he was no island. His humour and beautiful turn of phrase, the dedicated books and religious artefacts that occupied his otherwise cell-like living quarters, his never pious but deep sense of God in all things, attracted a growing following.
Two weeks before he died, Mike and I met for our periodical lengthy lunch at Sams his favourite bistro in Brighton where he lived.I was reminded of how much he considered his faith a matter of conscience,a personal relationship between oneself and one’s God. Our conversation had a drawing in feel about it, as if Mike wanted to turn the unresolved chapters of his life into a coherent whole.
His last days were characterised by the sharing of bread and wine, his last hours by his sudden instinctive embrace of his neighbour and dear friend the university lecturer Kai Easton who had so lovingly arranged his life and cared for him once his last boat Ballerina and his battered 2CV –a resurrected Jesteron wheels –had been sold.
Mike died, to quote from his favourite Joyce lines “in the full glory of some passion” rather than “fading and withering dismally”, and inwardly echoing the words he himself uttered when delivering a eulogy to his friend Harman Grisewood, father to his beloved goddaughter Sabina Bailey.
“We here in the church believe that this is not the end. But,for all the metaphors and theological abstractions, we know absolutely nothing about the after-life. This perhaps allows some innocent speculation and I like to think now of my friends in paradise. It would be a fine house party.”
