My dad, Fred Reid, who has died aged 87, was a historian at Warwick University, author of several books and a campaigner for blind people.
Totally blind since the age of 14 from double detached retina, Fred helped to improve access to work and inclusive mainstream education for visually impaired people, through his roles as president of the National Federation of the Blind and Partially Sighted (1972-75) and trustee of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (1974-87 and 1999-2006).
The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, who was left partially blinded in a rugby accident when he was at Edinburgh University, several years after my father had graduated from the same institution, said he “benefited from Fred’s kindness when I faced operations to save the sight of my other eye. Fred was an inspiration, sending me a tape of history books.”
Fred wrote on a range of subjects, with publications including the critical study Thomas Hardy and History (2017) and a 1978 biography of the first Labour party leader, Keir Hardie, The Making of a Socialist. In a 2015 Radio 4 documentary on Hardie, Brown interviewed Fred and, in the same year, described him as “one of the great men of our time”.
He was born in Glasgow, to Margaret (nee Patterson) and Fred, a railway worker and National Union of Railwaymen secretary. Fred Jr attended Shawlands academy, then studied history at Edinburgh, graduating with a first in 1958. He obtained a PhD from Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1967. The previous year he had joined Warwick University as a history lecturer, and stayed there for 31 years. He retired in 1997, and was made honorary professor in 2019.
He had met his wife, Etta (nee Redpath), who later became an NHS physiotherapist, at the Royal Blind School, Edinburgh, when they were both 14. They married in 1963 and had three sighted children: Gavin, who became a scientist, my twin sister, Julie, a Guardian production editor, and me, also a journalist.
Julie, who died of a brain tumour in 2024, wrote a 2006 feature about growing up with blind parents, in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. She described how, while the community expressed near universal admiration for Fred and Etta, our family life felt both normal and special. Our parents were fiercely independent and energetic.
My dad skied and mountaineered; my mum rode horses, and passed grade 8 piano. They frequented classical concerts and the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Fred fought for blind people to hold influential positions, rather than having things done for them. He said: “Sight is a very misleading and beguiling way of understanding people. Philosophers have raised this question: Is sight misleading? Is it possible that listening and touching get you nearer to people than sight does?”
In retirement, he continued to write, including a biography of the grandfather he never knew, after visiting Ireland and touring Africa in the former soldier’s footsteps (In Search of Willie Patterson: A Scottish Soldier in the Age of Imperialism, 2002). His later hobbies included long cycle rides on a tandem, which he continued into his 80s, but “best of all has been my family,” he wrote.
In 2017, Fred and Etta received honorary doctorates from Warwick for their work for visually impaired people, including running a community readers’ service that still sends sighted volunteers to read in people’s homes.
Fred is survived by Etta, Gavin and me, and by six grandchildren.
