My friend and mentor Russell Butler, who has died aged 88, spent his professional life running agriculture and development projects all over Africa, and his personal life pursuing fairness and equality, including as a Labour party candidate in Bexley in 1966, where he succeeded in reducing Ted Heath’s majority but not in winning the seat.
Russell was born on the Isle of Wight to Louise Stone. She registered him at birth as Leon Stone, father unknown, and arranged for him to be adopted immediately. He was brought up in Melksham, Wiltshire, as the only child of Arthur Butler, a commercial artist, and his wife Winnifred (nee Bull).
His days at University College London were formative; like many in the 1950s he was the first of his family to go to university, and he studied economics as a means to understand and improve working people’s conditions. He was president of the students’ union and made lifelong friends there.
He took his chosen path – leaving the UK to work in Africa, where he conducted surveys in Algeria, administered EU agriculture projects in the Central African Republic and secured funding for projects on fruit flies in Mauritius and and Madagascar, irrigation in Botswana and trade finance throughout southern Africa. I met him in Zambia in 1985, where we worked on a system to increase crop yields and farm incomes.
For most of the 1990s he was in Mauritius, living in an old sugar mill. In 2000 he moved to South Africa, though he kept a base in London. In 2017, Russell moved back to London, where he lived in Primrose Hill and again became active in local Labour party politics.
He had been diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s, at a time when outcomes for that condition were not optimistic. Chelsea and Westminster hospital initially helped to stabilised his condition so that he could begin working and travelling again, and then sustained his long life, for which he was grateful.
Russell loved to play the piano (Bach was a favourite), he wrote and read poetry (translating Catullus from the Latin was a daily hobby) and he was an avid theatre and film lover. He had a fondness for France and the French language, and was still enjoying going to Paris by train in his 80s.
