In 1968, an 800-page memorial book arrived in the post at Theo Richmond’s west London home – a book of remembrance for a Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust, put together by the few survivors. This one commemorated the Jewish community of Konin, then a small Polish town on the river Warta. Theo’s parents had lived there before emigrating to Britain just before the first world war, and Theo and his father had subscribed to a donation for the book’s publication. Since it was written in Yiddish, which at that time he was unable to read, Theo put it aside.
Twenty years later, he picked it up again, looked at its closing list of the 2,000 Konin Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and found he could decipher the names of at least seven of his relatives, including two of his grandparents. As he later wrote: “I turned over the pages and knew that the decision had been made for me: I must write a book of my own about the Jewish men and women of Konin, a book that would interweave past and present, that would be a confluence of two rivers, the Thames and the Warta.”
The result was Konin: A Quest (1995), an extraordinary work of social and cultural history, which won both the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann award.
Over seven years Theo learned Yiddish, travelled to interview surviving Koniners scattered in locations from New York to Omaha to Tel Aviv, and assembled a vast documentation on the life and death of their vanished community. From this mass of material he was able to recreate, street by street, even house by house, the Jewish quarter of 1930s Konin clustered round its market square, the Tepper Marik.
He also recreated its inhabitants, even down to their nicknames, from Leibke the Scribe to Dokonch the Burper. By telling the story of their lives as well as their deaths, Theo, who has died aged 93, ensured they would be remembered as individuals rather than statistics.
Theo was born in Forest Gate, east London, to Samuel Richmond (born Ryczke), a businessman, and his wife, Bertha (nee Sarna). He was educated in St Albans, where his family moved during the second world war, and did two years’ national service teaching in the RAF before studying international relations at the London School of Economics.
He then embarked on a career as a film publicist. He began at the Rank publicity office at Pinewood in Buckinghamshire, encountering such household names as Richard Attenborough, Dirk Bogarde and Brigitte Bardot (to whom he once offered a wine gum she found “disgusting”). He then went freelance, working with MGM and particularly the Boulting brothers. In 1957, while publicising the film version of Lucky Jim, he met Kingsley Amis, who became a lifelong friend.
In the 1960s Theo moved away from publicity into directing for television programmes including The South Bank Show, Man Alive and This Week. For the Shell Film Unit, he also researched and directed a number of documentaries. Two in particular appear well ahead of their time from today’s perspective: Time for Energy (1982), about alternative energy sources; and For Want of Water (1983), about developing countries’ urgent need for clean water. Making For Want of Water took him on adventures ranging from the dangerous to the comic in remote corners of the world. While filming in Nepal, he slipped in a rock fall and broke his finger. There was no hospital within two days’ journey, so Theo ended up in a mountain hut, with a local nurse setting his finger by torchlight and a goat nibbling at his left foot.
From the 70s onwards he also wrote much newspaper journalism, mostly for the Guardian and the Telegraph magazine; he contributed more than 40 profiles to the Guardian alone. Among the figures he interviewed were Yehudi Menuhin, John Berger, Sir Huw Wheldon and James Lees-Milne.
Theo was an unforgettable character, warm, extremely kind, an excellent host and a great raconteur. He had a brilliant sense of humour, with a flair for transforming angst into laughter. He was also deeply erudite, with a vast crosscultural frame of reference, capable of long, not entirely serious, disputes about such arcane matters as the date of the last British cavalry charge (it was at Toungoo in Burma in 1942).
In 1955 Theo married Diane Souccar, whom he had met at the LSE. She died suddenly in 1961, leaving him to bring up their two young children, Jonathan and Sarah. In 1965 Theo married the novelist and screenwriter Lee Langley. He is survived by Lee and their son, Simon, and by Sarah. Jonathan died in 2020.
• Herbert Theodore Richmond, writer, born 7 May 1929; died 25 August 2022
