Dr Richard Stone, OBE
Campaigning philanthropist who fought for Arab-Jewish understanding and equality in society
THE PHILANTHROPIST and activist Dr Richard Stone, who has died aged 87, was a man with a dream. A dream that came to him back in 1972, when he qualified as a doctor and joined a London surgery covering Paddington and Notting Hill. He became focused on a radical mission: disease prevention. But it led the young doctor on a route beyond medicine, alone, into healing a fractured society.
His campaign to boost public health, fight homelessness, and achieve racial equality made him a powerful voice for social change. From 2000-2004, Richard Stone chaired the Runnymede Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, which promoted greater understanding and inclusion of Muslims into British society. He was even credited with coining the word Islamophobia. He later became a trustee and vice chair of the Runnymede Trust.
His understanding of the Muslim community, combined with his leading role in many Jewish organisations, led to his founding in 2003 of Alif-Aleph UK (British Muslims & British Jews). Its imaginative combination of the first letters of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets aimed to heal divisions between these communities and led to his appointment as an Honorary Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Muslim-Jewish Relations.
Stone is probably best remembered for his role in the 1997-99 Home Office Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which changed the perception of racism in British society. He also sat on the panel of the David Bennett Inquiry into the death during restraint of the only black patient in the white-staffed Medium Secure Psychiatry Unit in Norwich, whose findings have been widely used to combat racism in the NHS.
He identified links between poor health and inadequate housing when he first started life as an NHS GP. He noticed his patients were not being housed, yet buildings were being boarded up for sale, and in 1986 he called in the District Auditor to investigate the sales policy of Westminster city council, led by Dame Shirley Porter, and blew the whistle on the council’s gerrymandering of local elections. He called it morally and financially wrong to keep out people in housing need. Porter was later ordered to repay £26.5million wasted in Westminster council’s “homes for votes” affair.
As a philanthropist, Dr Stone donated between £1million and £1.5million annually for the last 20 years, from his family’s charitable trusts, principally the Stone Ashdown Trust and Lord Ashdown Trust, to combat discrimination, notably racism and Islamophobia, supporting homeless families and intercommunity interfaith initiatives. Between the 1980s and 2008, grants were made to Reform Judaism, the Joint Israel Appeal, the Cambridge Centre for Muslim-Jewish Relations and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race Relations.
Home Office ministers and officials recognised his work on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1997, which saw the introduction of institutional racism as a concept. His role was acknowledged as having made a major contribution to combating racism in the UK police, and to developing greater social cohesion. He was made a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Westminster University.
Richard Stone was born in London, the son of Joseph Stone, one of the first doctors to enter Belsen when it was liberated in 1945, and who became Harold Wilson’s physician. He was made a life peer in 1976. Richard’s mother, Beryl Bernstein was the sister of Sidney, the founder of Granada Television. When the Second World War broke out, Beryl took him and his sister Adrienne to Canada and America, eventually returning to Britain, where they spent the rest of the war. He studied at University College School in Hampstead and did his national service as a sub lieutenant in the Arctic. He also learnt Russian. He studied jurisprudence at Wadham College, Oxford and began a career in the Granada family business, managing the Century cinema in Clapham, before moving to the Granada in Walthamstow, and later Manchester, as head of engineering.
Medicine was clearly in his blood, however, and five years later he was back in Oxford, this time to study to be a doctor. He married the musician and piano teacher Ruth Perry in 1970 and they had three children. A gifted cellist himself, he played in string quartets with her. They moved to Witney, Oxfordshire in 2018.
As a GP in a single-handed practice in the Notting Hill and Paddington area, his radical 1976 booklet Prevention of Illness and Promotion of Health included a far-sighted recommendation that short-term psychotherapy should be available on the NHS.
He implemented many of these policies in his general practice, and over a 20-year period he built the surgery into a five-doctor group practice. Backed by his law degree, he became a medico-legal expert in cases of eviction of elderly tenants, and assaults on black people in Notting Hill during the 1970s and 1980s. His NHS list registered five government ministers. He also served as a cabinet adviser to the Mayor of London.
After a busy day at the surgery, Stone would get to grips with social problems, working alongside local community leaders and organisations. He funded many community outreach and estate workers. He matched local authority grants, which were conditional on levels of other funding, then impossible for black and homeless groups to raise. It was this that earned him the Windrush Award in 1999.
Stone’s quiet, gentle nature did not impede his vigorous campaigning against government cutbacks and homeless families living in bed and breakfast hotels during the 1980s. One year before she died, Princess Diana spent over an hour with Dr Stone in the Families Doctors Surgery he had set up in support of these families. She was so engrossed that her aides almost had to drag her away to her next engagement.
He was appointed race adviser to three home secretaries: Jack Straw, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett. In 2005/06, he was one of only two non-Muslim members of the Home Office’s 120-strong Working Groups on “Preventing Extremism Together”. He was president of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality and was charged with the important task of forging links with other faith communities at the Board of Deputies.
Stone was considered exceptional as a white man standing up against racism, and as a Jew promoting an understanding of Muslims. His compassionate approach made him welcome in black and Muslim communities as a champion and friend. This relationship of trust proved beneficial to the Home Office, the police, the NHS, the Greater London Authority, and many other UK institutions.
He founded Alif-Aleph in 2003 with a manifesto proclaiming that “we have a common experience of having to address hostilities that derive from mistaken stereotypes of our religions and our cultures”. Its 2007 document A Mapping Report of Positive Contacts Between British Muslims and British Jews became a template for a similar undertaking in the European Union.
In 2007 Stone became an honorary fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations, which partnered the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations. In an interview there in 2010 he stressed the urgency of such co-operation in view of the rise of fascism in Europe. “If we attack each other, as it is happening all too often these days, our enemies..…can sit at home and laugh because we have done their dirty work for them.” In that year he was appointed OBE.
Those who worked with him at Alif-Aleph describe him as a deeply emotional person who was passionate about the causes he espoused. His great charm and commitment inspired many and won him numerous awards and appreciation from across the political divide. Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan described him as “a passionate anti-racist campaigner,” and former Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley admired his “stalwart nature”.
Dr Stone is remembered fondly as a doctor, philanthropist, mentor, and friend. As the chair of numerous charitable organisations, a government adviser and campaigner for minorities in and beyond the UK, he was a man who fought long and hard for 25 years to promote equality, social cohesion, and respect between faith and race groups. He is survived by Ruth, his children, Toby, Rebecca and Hannah, four grandchildren and his sister Adrienne.
Richard Malcolm Ellis Stone: born 9 March, 1937. Died 5 March, 2024