My uncle David Young, who has died aged 100, spent his entire working life with the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement (now Initiatives of Change), an organisation that aims to promote peace, reconciliation and integrity in public life.
David joined MRA in 1950, and two years later was sent to India to help out with a lengthy touring stage show that promoted the values of MRA, turning his hand to anything and everything backstage as well as arranging accommodation for the performers and becoming involved in general administration.
As the tour drew to a close in late 1953, he volunteered to stay on in India in various roles, ushering in an itinerant life that later included work at the MRA’s European centre in Caux, Switzerland, its US base in Michigan, a six-month promotional tour of Canada, and further lengthy spells in India.
David was born in Dundee to Charles Bowden Young, a lecturer in English at St Stephen’s College Delhi, in India, and Ruth, a doctor who later became principal of Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi. He was born in the UK when his mother came back for a short family visit, but grew up in India until the age of 10, when he was sent as a boarder to the Dragon school in Oxford and then Oundle school in Northamptonshire.
Following an engineering apprenticeship in Manchester, David joined the Royal Engineers during the second world war, and thanks to his connections with India he served with the Bombay Sappers in Burma, where he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery after defusing an arsenal of explosives that the retreating Japanese had planted to block a tunnel in 1944.
After the war he went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and on completing an engineering degree he began working for MRA in 1950. He married Margot Meekings in 1958, and the two of them almost immediately set off for India together, settling in Pune, where they both worked for the MRA.
By 1963 David and Margot were running summer camps for young Indians under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Rajmohan Gandhi in a hill town south of Pune called Panchgani. This eventually led David to manage the construction of the MRA’s Asia Plateau training centre there, which opened in early 1968. Later, he and Margot went with the MRA to Chennai before moving back to the UK in the mid-1970s to be near David’s elderly mother. They eventually retired to Brighton, near where Margot had grown up.
Even in retirement David remained committed to the MRA, and as late as 2017 he was organising inter-faith sessions in Brighton between Christians and Muslims.He returned to India aged 96 to attend the 50th anniversary of Asia Plateau in 2018; and again in 2020 for an anniversary celebration of the Bombay Sappers in Pune, where he was the oldest attendee.
Margot died in 2018.
