A FORMER Oxfam director, who “made the charity what it is”, has been remembered for battling conflict and injustice.

Michael Harris, from Witney, died at a care home in Hailey on May 25, aged 89.

His daughter, Janet Harris said: “In her book A Cause for our Times: Oxfam, The First 50 Years, Maggie Black wrote: ‘Harris was a Quaker who detested conflict and injustice, a person of deep convictions, which he carefully hid behind an idiosyncratic style, modelled somewhere between George Bernard Shaw and Bertie Wooster’.

“It was his Quaker convictions which influenced his career and his life. He was from a well-established Quaker family in Plymouth, and joined the Friends Ambulance Unit as a nurse at 17, first in the Finnish-Russian war, escaping via Norway on a French destroyer in the spring of 1940 to join the blitz work in London.

“He then volunteered to go to join the China Convoy keeping the Burma Road open after the Japanese invasion. In 1942, he was working in a surgical unit in China. He then became general secretary to the British United Aid to China, sitting on the committee with Chang Kai-shek, wife of the generalissimo. He kept a picture of her sister, Soong Ching-Ling, also known as Madame Sun Yat Sen — the wife of the founder of modern China — above his bed until he died.

“He joined Oxfam in 1964 as one of two overseas officers. In his 20 years there, he visited 73 countries, was present at 12 major disasters and five wars.

“He was fiercely proud of his staff at Oxfam, and preferred action to bureaucracy.

“He obtained food supplies for the famine in Sudan by visiting the Emperor Haile Selassie, and fed his lions, and often quoted the UN Secretary General at the time of the second Ethiopian famine, saying: ‘The worst thing about famine in Africa in the end is that it is not an act of God, it is a political failure to counter the acts of God’.

“Lord Joel Joffe, who was a trustee of Oxfam when Harris was overseas director, noted that he will always be remembered as one of the key individuals who made Oxfam what it is, combining a passion for justice with the ability to make a real positive difference to the lives of people living in poverty.

“He retired from Oxfam in 1974, but continued his work for justice and poverty, becoming the chairman of the African Medical Research Foundation, and then chairman of the Anti-Slavery Society, as well as advising the Oxford Refugee Studies Programme and writing numerous letters to the papers and MPs on subjects as varied as the preservation of rural England to the war in Iraq.

“He lived in Witney and was a member and elder of the Burford Meeting, which brought him much comfort and joy.”

Mr Harris is survived by two daughters.