Frank Field brought foresight and invention to the political discourse, in particular through his focus on poverty and deprivation. He was an active promoter of the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act 2008, alleviating the plight of elderly people affected by the collapse of their pensions schemes.
It provided the basis for Gordon Brown’s subsequent decision to also allow such dormant accounts to be used for funding to improve youth and community facilities, especially in deprived areas.
The comprehensive school of which I was head, Langdon Park, in Tower Hamlets, east London, was thus able to make a successful joint bid with Poplar Harca Housing Association for dormant funds distributed by the Big Lottery, to build accommodation for our new sixth form and a youth centre. It’s not true that all politicians are the same.
Chris Dunne
Frank Field’s work on food poverty led to the Feeding Britain parliamentary report in 2014, and the founding of the Feeding Britain charity. In 2015 I contacted him to draw his attention to our work as a GP co-operative in Lambeth, where we grow food together with patients and NHS staff.
He loved the simplicity of the idea, and we later collaborated on a Hunger and Health project. This was a practical expression of his understanding that the NHS had an important role to play in reducing hunger in Britain, which he recognised as a health emergency.
Ed Rosen
In 1983, having heard of the plight of a number of divorced clergy wives, Frank Field sent a letter to the Church Times inviting others to contact him. Surprised by the size of the response, he called a meeting that was attended by 28 women, many of whom had been suffering desperately: marriage breakdown among the clergy is often hidden, especially when there has been domestic abuse. The outcome of that meeting was Broken Rites, a peer-to-peer support group for divorced and separated spouses and partners of members of clergy. Frank continued as our president for the next four decades, offering support and guidance. He will be much missed.
Margaret Wilkinson
When clergy marriages broke down in the past, the churches tended, almost regardless of the circumstances, to side both financially and morally with the minister rather than the wife – even when, given the tied nature of much of clergy housing, that could leave the women homeless.
Frank Field had set about raising these issues, and my mother, Audrey Maxwell-Timmins, contacted him. She agreed to go to a first meeting of wives in this position: he told them that they had to organise, and the result was Broken Rites. For Frank, a devout Anglican, this involved taking on his own church, but he never flinched – another, unsung, example of where he made a real difference.
Nicholas Timmins
In 2006 Frank Field read a story in the Times about a businessman, Johan Eliasch, helping to close down an illegal logging concession to protect a rainforest. His response was that he had “never seen so much consensus for action, but no one knew what to do”.
He emailed Eliasch and they met the next day. Six months later David Attenborough launched Cool Earth with two newspaper articles saying that support for the fledgling charity “might be the biggest difference we can make”.
Traditional conservation tactics such as buying up land and ringfencing it had a poor record. Whole communities with an interest in keeping their rainforests safe were ignored, and worse, removed from their land.
With Frank’s foresight, Cool Earth dealt with Indigenous communities at the sharp end of the logging and mining industries that threaten the Amazon.
Its work started in partnership with the people of Cutivireni, in Peru, with $10,000 for them to use however they wanted. This was less than logging companies offered them for their trees, but we made a promise – work with us to keep your rainforest standing and Cool Earth will support your community.
Frank’s vision as co-founder went on to become a reality and has, in the 16 years since, developed into working with 60 communities across the three largest rainforests in the world, the Amazon, Congo and New Guinea.
Fighting poverty is the best way of protecting rainforests and tackling climate change. As Frank said: “Work with the grain of human nature.”
Matthew Owen
