Royston Clarence Todd

Roy (as we all knew him) was born on 29th April 1943 in Canterbury, Kent. His father, Les, was a maintenance fitter; his mother, Win, had been working in a baker’s shop until she married. Roy entered this world during Hitler’s “Baedeker” bombing raids on historic English cities in which Canterbury was badly damaged. Roy’s first outing, aged one week, was to a nearby bomb shelter. Later, when he was a little over two years old, his then new-born baby brother died after Win, when still pregnant, fell when she was hurrying with Roy to a shelter during another raid. Roy was young at the time, but he remembered this incident and the loss of his baby brother with great sadness all his life. Luckily other younger siblings came along - Rod, Christine, Pauline, Janice and Ivan. There was a sixteen-year gap between Roy and Ivan but even at a young age he was doing the duties of an older brother. Several times he took a note to a nearby midwife to say the next baby was on the way. The first time he did this he was about 5 years old.

His extended family comprised a large, tightly-knit, mutually-supportive group of grand-parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all living in or near Canterbury, with whom Roy always maintained warm-hearted contact. This theme of positive family relations continued as Roy and his brothers and sisters in turn built their own families. There have been many cheerful family gatherings over the years and wonderful family support for Roy himself, and for Frankie, Zazie and Stef during his last illness.

When Roy was about 9 years old, his family moved from an old terrace house in an area of Canterbury slated for clearance, to a new house on a Council estate on the fringe of orchards and fields. This move brought hot and cold water, a good fireplace, a bathroom and a garden, together with ample surrounding green space for the children to explore. Roy’s primary school was St John’s School in the center of Canterbury. He later passed the “Eleven Plus” national selective examination which won him a place at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, also in Canterbury.

Roy’s working career started early in life. When he was fourteen years old and legally allowed to work part-time, his mother found him two jobs. The first was as a weekday and Saturday paper boy delivering newspapers on his own second-hand bike. The other was as a butcher’s boy delivering meat on Saturdays, this latter, using a heavy bike, with a big basket full of meat piled high in front. In these two roles he worked a twenty-hour week throughout his secondary school days. His work helped the family but also gave him some personal spending money which he used to buy long-playing records, primarily but not exclusively jazz, and books from the Canterbury bookstore which fed his growing interest in social and political affairs. He met Stan and Philly Mercer and their family through delivering the Telegraph to the house next door, a valuable and influential friendship which continued throughout Stan and Philly’s lives.

Roy left school aged 18. He was keen to go on to university but first took a year out from studying while he worked for the gravel extraction firm where his father worked, driving a dumper truck and sharing in the task of lifting one-hundred-weight sacks of cement. During his school years he had been a member of an amateur dramatic group called Playcraft which Stan and Philly and their family were active in. He joined a group of young people who met to read plays aloud and discuss them. He acted in short films by the then amateur, later professional, film director, Peter Watkins. Roy had initially thought of studying engineering at university but the themes of the books and plays he read and political discussions with the CND-supporting Mercers turned his academic interests more to the social sciences and his own developing left-wing political views. He spent the summer of 1962 working as a builder’s laborer in order to learn building skills, then volunteered at a United Nations work camp in Austria where he helped to rebuild and repair dwellings for people displaced by World War Two.

In October 1962, Roy moved to Leeds to study for a degree in Psychology and Sociology at the University of Leeds. Roy enjoyed the lively political and cultural scene in Leeds. He supported CND, the Peace Movement, War Resisters International and the anti-capital punishment movement, alongside political activity directed towards the possibility of a more just society.

At the end of his second year, in the summer of 1964, he spent three months in the US, based at Antioch College, a small liberal institution, where as well as working to earn his keep he attended classes in small group functioning, participated in a week-long seminar on Peace Research held in the Rockies, went to Washington DC with a group of other students to attend a House Un-American Activities Committee meeting and participated in a conference jointly organized by several Civil Rights groups. He said later that the police supposedly protecting conference participants were as threatening as the pro-racist crowd demonstrating outside.

For some time, Roy and Frankie had been Neighbors and friends in the shared house where they lived when, thanks to a chance conversation on the stairs at around Easter time 1964 they decided to walk different stretches of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal together on successive Saturdays. They set off on these walks as just good friends but by the time they had reached the town of Skipton they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Roy’s trip to the States that summer was pre-booked and paid for but they wrote to each other throughout the three months he was away. When he returned, they moved in together. They married in June 1965 just after Roy graduated, moving to an unfurnished flat in Headingley. Their daughters, Zazie and Stefanie, were born in 1969 and 1971 respectively, leading to years of enjoyment of life with young people in the house.

Roy worked as a builder’s laborer that summer, at the Yorkshire Bank building in the center of Leeds and at Robert R. Roberts’ chemical firm just off the Kirkstall Road. His new career as an academic began in September 1965. He taught part-time courses on Peace Studies at the Swarthmore Centre in Leeds and on General Studies at the (then) College of Technology.

Soon he became a researcher employed in the Department of Psychology at the University of Leeds. He worked on a variety of externally-funded projects, some for the Road Research Laboratory, some for Professor Meredith for whom Roy researched and wrote a paper on Dyslexia, using Irving Goffman’s work, which was incorporated into the drafting of the new Disability Act. Still with the Department of Psychology, the University asked him to research and teach an Efficient Reading Course for academic staff and students. In this early phase of his career, therefore, Roy was more involved with the discipline of Psychology than of Sociology. He was learning and practicing increasingly sophisticated quantitative research skills.

Roy’s interests were already shifting more towards aspects of the social world rather than the focus on the individual of the discipline of Psychology at the time. Now his research competence led to a change of direction. In his next post he became a full-time Lecturer in Sociology at Trinity and All Saints College of the University of Leeds. His initial role was to teach quantitative and qualitative research methods. To this he soon added courses and publications on ethnic and racial discrimination which in their turn led to the Educational Advisor for West Yorkshire to provide In-Service Education for Teachers courses on Multi-Cultural Education. He went on to provide such courses for a number of UK educational authorities. Roy’s book on this topic – Education in a Multicultural Society, published by Cassell in 1991, was welcomed with positive reviews. One from the US noted that Roy had woven “. . . a lucid, compact account remarkable for its breadth and depth of knowledge regarding an intricate, heated, and controversial subject”, also mentioning “the author’s absolute and unconditional commitment to antiracism (…) making this book indispensable for novices and veterans alike.” The experience Roy drew on in this book was based largely on an English context. He had also conducted a study of multicultural education in Canada, while based at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

By the time this book was published, Roy had spent some years tackling a different aspect of ethnic discrimination which overlapped with his own life experience. When he was thirteen years old, Roy, out on his bike in Palace Street in Canterbury, happened to meet his grandfather, Jim Todd, a retired horse dealer. He stopped for a chat with him. Two men who obviously knew his grandfather came up and asked for his help which Jim gave. The whole of this encounter was conducted in a language that Roy could not understand. His grandfather explained that the two men were Gypsies, and that they had needed directions to the Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals. Roy asked what was the language that the men had used. Jim had replied to the men in the same language. Jim’s answer was “Romany”, a fact which Roy stored away in his memory but of which he did not realize the full significance at this time.

Years later, Roy and Frankie, then in their twenties, answered an ad appealing for help to gain stopping places for Gypsies in and around Leeds. They initiated a small support group which went on to gain experience as their activism grew. Roy gave a talk to Leeds City Council members and there were some small successes in obtaining site provision. Gradually more members of the Gypsy community became involved. Ultimately, a National Gypsy Council was formed by this Romany group, who unilaterally elected Roy as Secretary of this national group.

There was a puzzle here in that the group was determined to have only Gypsy members. In his capacity as Secretary of the group, Roy went to meetings held by the UK government’s Department for the Environment (DoE) which was considering the question of Gypsy site provision nationally. He also helped to negotiate site provision with Local Authorities. At a meeting at the DoE, Roy’s own Gypsy background became apparent when a civil servant pointed out that Roy was the only Gypsy person present at the meeting. The civil servant had worked with one of Roy’s uncles who gave support to Gypsies in Canterbury and in this way had learned about Roy’s family’s Gypsy background.

Roy had had an inkling tucked away in his mind since he was 13. This was now confirmed, a new realisation. Roy volunteered with the National Gypsy Council for about fifteen years, only resigning when he was first diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1979. He completed his Ph.d thesis (praised as a model of academic rigour combined with activism) entitled “Gypsies, the Community and the State “in the School of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in 1980.

During the 1990s Roy turned his research interests to Canada. he joined the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Leeds, later becoming its Deputy Director, subsequently its Director. He conducted research projects in Canada, firstly studying the anti-racist policy of Metropolitan Toronto Police over a number of years, then applying the same approach to a study of the Ontario Provincial Police and later of the Vancouver Police Department. Each of these studies led to publications in academic journals.

Back in the UK his Canadian research experience led to him being asked to chair the Research Committee of the Canadian High Commission in London, a role which he undertook for several years, combining this with being promoted to Head of Department of Sociology at Trinity and All Saints College of the University of Leeds. He taught research methods to M.A. students in Sociology at the University of Leeds, supervised Ph.d students to successful completion of their theses, and was an External Examiner at under-graduate level and of Ph.ds at several UK universities.

Roy had Visiting Professor appointments at the University of Toronto Department of Criminology and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In retirement he began a series of studies of young Indigenous people living in the city of Vancouver, resulting in a highly-praised collection of articles on Indigeneity in Canada edited jointly with Martin Thornton. During the last years before he became too ill to work in this way, Roy was planning a book of essays on the topic of “Practical Decolonizing” which would have drawn on the large body of empirical data which he had collected in Canada over the years.

Family, friends and colleagues spoke of Roy as a man of distinction, someone from whom they could learn, and who they could trust. He promoted the careers of younger colleagues and worked to achieve ant-racist practices in his employing institution. Outside work, as well as enjoying life with his much-loved family, he played five-a-side soccer and basketball and often went walking in the Yorkshire Dales. In his fifties he began training in T’ai Chi, to 8th Ban level, and ballroom dancing, in which he gained his Silver Medal. Music was important to him throughout his life. He bought one of his earliest jazz records (Gerry Mulligan’s “What is There to Say”) having read about jazz on the front cover of a copy of the BBC’s “The Listener” when he was delivering papers. He enjoyed contemporary classical composers such as Stravinsky and Villa Lobos alongside art exhibitions and theatrical performances in Leeds and in London. In 2013, he moved with Frankie from their family home in Leeds to Chichester, West Sussex from where they emigrated to BC, Canada in 2017. They lived initially in Maple Ridge, later in Wesbrook Village on the UBC campus in Vancouver.

As Roy sometimes said, all of this was an unexpected path for someone who started his educational life at St. John’s, Canterbury, which was then a rough school. When he passed the Eleven Plus, one of his teachers gave him a book as a prize, in which the teacher wrote “Do not rest on your laurels”. Roy did not at the time know what this phrase meant. But as this account shows, he exemplified its true meaning throughout the eighty-one years of his life.

He is Gone by David Harkins

You can shed tears that he is gone,

Or you can smile because he lived,

You can close your eyes and pray that he will come back,

Or you can open your eyes and see all that he has left.

Your heart can be empty because you can't see him

Or you can be full of the love that you shared,

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,

Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember him and only that he is gone

Or you can cherish his memory and let it live on,

You can cry and close your mind be empty and

turn your back,

Or you can do what he would want:

smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.MountPleasantFuneral.com for the Todd family.