When Frank Judd became secretary general of International Voluntary Service in 1959 it was running 12 projects. In 1966, when he left following his election as an MP, there were 120 of them, and opportunities for long-term volunteering had been opened up at home and abroad.
During these years, IVS changed from “pick and shovel” action to responding to the changing needs of social communities across the world. Frank was a brilliant administrator and an inspiring speaker, and his achievements in these years set the scene for his future work with VSO and Oxfam.
Anthony Bradley
Once my husband and I met Frank Judd at parliament to discuss a refugee project my husband was involved in. He had assumed that we must have been motivated by some sort of religious interest. When he discovered this was not the case, he turned to a colleague and said with great delight, “Hooray, they’re not religious!”
He left us listening to a debate in the Lords. Trying to exit, we told an usher who our host had been. Considerably exasperated, he said that we should not have been left alone – “That Lord Judd, he’s always breaking the rules.”
A wonderful man.
Bridget Patterson
Frank Judd displayed remarkable political candour. When in 1970, as chair of the Labour club at what is now the University of Kent, I hosted him as our speaker, he was happy to be completely open about his boss, Harold Wilson, to whom he was parliamentary private secretary at the time.
“Harold,” he said, “is usually astute, but sometimes the mask can slip. At a rally in Chatham, then still a naval town, where I was accompanying him as PPS, he stressed how keen he was on funding the navy. ‘And why,’ he asked, ‘do I say this?’ To which the immediate heckle back was: ‘Because you’re in Chatham, you berk!’”
Both Frank and Harold collapsed in laughter, and both Frank and I liked to recall that rare slip in the facade of competency that was Wilson’s trademark.
John Burnell
