The Rev Richard Ellis obituary

My friend Richard Ellis, who has died aged 92, was a Methodist minister and a member of what was in his day a living tradition of Protestant liberation theology. Primitive Methodism was the most proletarian of all English denominations. Dick understood this great radical tradition, which found its cause in everything from Christian socialism to civil rights.

He was born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, into a family of devout Primitive Methodists. His father ran a pen-repair shop, and when that went out of business he worked for the local authority. Dick left school at 14 to find work in the wool-blending office of John Fenton & David Bradley Mills of Dewsbury. As a pacifist, he spent the war doing farm work in Selby, North Yorkshire.