A FORMER Oxfam director who “made the charity what it is” has been remembered for battling conflict and injustice.

Michael Harris, from Witney, died at a care home in Hailey on Monday, May 25, aged 89.

His daughter Janet Harris said: “In her book A Cause for our Times: Oxfam, The First 50 Years, Maggie Black wrote ‘Harris was a Quaker who detested conflict and injustice, a person of deep convictions, which he carefully hid behind an idiosyncratic style modelled somewhere between George Bernard Shaw and Bertie Wooster’.

“It was his Quaker convictions which influenced his career and his life. He was from a well-established Quaker family in Plymouth and joined the Friends Ambulance Unit as a nurse at 17, first in the Finnish-Russian war, escaping via Norway on a French destroyer in the spring of 1940 to join the blitz work in London.

“He then volunteered to join the China Convoy keeping the Burma Road open after the Japanese invasion. In 1942 he was working in a surgical unit in China. He then became General Secretary to the British United Aid to China, sitting on the committee with the wife of Chiang Kai-shek.”

Mr Harris joined Oxfam in 1964 as an overseas officer. In his 20 years with the charity he visited 73 countries, and was present at 12 major disasters and five wars.

Ms Harris said: “He was fiercely proud of his staff at Oxfam, and preferred action to bureaucracy.

“He obtained food supplies for the famine in Sudan by visiting the Emperor Haile Selassie, and often quoted the UN Secretary General at the time of the second Ethiopian famine, saying: ‘The worst thing about famine in Africa in the end is that it is not an Act of God, it is a political failure to counter the acts of God’.

Lord Joffe, who was a trustee of Oxfam when Mr Harris was overseas director, said he would always be remembered as one of the key individuals who made Oxfam what it is, combining a passion for justice with the ability to make a real positive difference.

Mr Harris retired from Oxfam in 1974 and became the chairman of the African Medical Research Foundation, and then chairman of the Anti-Slavery Society, as well as advising the Oxford Refugee Studies Programme.

He lived in Witney and was a member and elder of the Burford Meeting. Mr Harris is survived by his two daughters.