JIM RADFORD, the youngest participants in the D-Day landings has died aged 92, a victim of coronavirus.

Radford became a national hero in his 90s when he sang his own song The Shores of Normandy at two televised concerts in 2014. Released to raise funds for the Normandy Memorial Trust, the song topped the Amazon and iTunes download charts in the first week of June last year.

Radford was born in Hull in October 1928. After a very tough childhood he went to sea. At 15 he was galley boy on the Empire Larch, an ocean going tug towing troop carriers across to the D-Day Normandy beaches. It was his first ever voyage.

In his teens Radford also joined the Young Communist League (YCL), the start of a lifetime of political struggle. Strangely most of the many media tributes have focused on his D-Day history and songs and totally ignored the strong left-wing political values that dominated his life.

Later in life his YCL membership led him to join Ewan McColl’s communist singing and song writing collective. That early training would rocket him to showbusiness singing success only eighty years later!

After his navy service he worked in engineering, journalism, community projects and social action.

In 1957 Radford was one of the founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). 

His work in the peace movement lost him his job in 1963. “I was a group advertisement manager in Fleet Street getting more money than I’ve ever been paid before or since. I lost that job when I got a couple of months in prison for the Brighton Church demonstration.”

Radford and fellow demonstrators invaded the Labour Party conference church service. As Harold Wilson and George Brown read lessons, Radford and his Vietnam Action Group read an anti-war statement. As each protester was led away another carried on with the same speech. It was a protest technique that Radford invented.

They were to be charged with riot but ITN film showed it was stewards not demonstrators who had been violent. A very vindictive magistrate, Herbert Ripper, dug up an obscure and ancient charge of Indecency in Church that had not been used since 1860.

Radford served two months in Brixton prison. Of this time he said: “They seriously thought that those of us who did dangerous things like marching from Aldermaston, and occasionally sitting down, were dangerous subversives who had to be put away. They spied on us, and tapped our phones, and followed us around.”

He also remembered Britain after the war. “I think there was a general increase in political understanding, which accounted for the landslide which the Tories weren’t expecting. When I was not at sea I was campaigning with the YCL. 

“After the 1945 election we expected changes, and we got some. That Labour government delivered the National Health Service and the National Assistance Act.”

Radford was involved in many homeless campaigns including the squatter movement that took over posh London hotels. He also helped form the Committee of 100 radical peace group.  

Throughout his life Radford would play his part in community housing campaigns arguing for housing on a large scale, for better hospitals and schools. He watched social services being whittled away year after year and could never remain silent.

In October 2015 Radford was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honnneur by the French Republic “in recognition of... steadfast involvement in the Liberation of France during the second world war.”

Jim Radford died on November 6 aged 92 after a three-week stay in Lewisham Hospital. His death will be a real blow to Veterans for Peace UK, a peace organisation he founded for those who had served in the forces and countless other peace and progressive political campaigns he supported.

Fortunately he can still be heard singing his own songs on YouTube and other online sites.