My friend Brian Staley, who has died aged 81, was a Canterbury businessman, Liberal Democrat city councillor and Gurkha campaigner. I first met him when he was Canterbury’s Liberal party agent at the 1966 general election and I was a student at the new university there. We remained friends for 55 years.
For many years Brian ran the family fruit farm and vegetable wholesale business, and was active with the Federation of Small Businesses. However, in 1968, while other political activists were protesting, he flew to Vietnam to become involved in the country’s own peace movement. Financing himself through freelance journalism, he spent 18 months travelling the country, earning the trust of influential pro-American figures and Viet Cong leaders.
He experienced the horrors of war first-hand, once being blown from his bed by a Viet Cong rocket. He remembered comforting a 19-year-old American casualty who had regained consciousness to find that he was blind. Once, a small child died in his arms. In 1970 he returned to Europe to become involved in the Paris peace talks, going back to Vietnam twice more.
Brian was born in Deal, Kent, to Gladys and John Staley, a miner retired on medical grounds who became a smallholder and ran a greengrocer’s. Despite his father being secretary of the local Labour party, Brian was attracted to the radical Young Liberals of the time and joined. As a young man, he served on the Liberal party’s national policy forum. Educated at Canterbury Technical College, he later completed a Workers Educational Association sociology course at night school.
His political idealism was sorely tested in the 1970s, when he was membership secretary of the National Liberal Club. Brian uncovered financial irregularities, and bullying and abuse of staff. He was one of the first to hear about the scandals involving the MP Jeremy Thorpe, saying: “The whole business made me sick in the stomach.” However, he remained in the party and, in 2007, was elected to Canterbury city council, retaining links with Vietnam through charity work.
In later years Brian became a close friend of the Gurkha community that had settled in Kent and started the Gurkha Justice Campaign. He helped enlist Joanna Lumley to the cause and successfully lobbied the government for fairer treatment for Gurkha veterans. In collaboration with the Gurkhas, Brian started the Gurkha Peace Foundation, twinning British schools with schools in Nepal and funding welfare projects.
A man of scrupulous integrity who never lost the idealism of his youth, he is survived by his sister, Elaine.
