Dr William T. Martin Riches, who died in June 2024 aged 84, was a lecturer in American Studies at the Ulster Polytechnic at Jordanstown, later the University of Ulster, and a noted scholar of the US civil rights movement. Bill was born in born in Tintern, Wales in 1939 and grew up around the Forest of Dean. He read History at the University of Nottingham where, in 1959, he met Judy, the couple marrying in 1963.
Bill was a journalist in London and Toronto, before pursuing a PhD at the University of Tennessee. In 1973, Bill and Judy, now with two young children, Julia and Theo, took the bold decision to move to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, when Bill accepted a lectureship at the Ulster Polytechnic. Bill was a huge advocate of polytechnics and passionate about students and learning, commitments he maintained when Jordanstown became part of the University of Ulster. Bill built an enviable range of books and microfilm collections on American history, and, along with Bill Lazenbatt, Tony Emerson, Michael Klein and later Kathleen McCracken, championed American Studies as a discipline. To this end, Bill created student exchanges with US universities and had the foresight to enlist Ulster in the ISEP progamme. Along with many students, I was a beneficiary of Bill’s efforts, majoring in American Studies in the early 1990s and studying at the University of Mississippi.
In my first encounter with Bill in a lecture, he, with genuine outrage, slammed a chair on the floor to explain the ‘three-fifths’ rule, whereby slaves counted for three-fifths of a person for electoral representation in the new United States, demonstrating the inhumanity of enslavement with people regarded as mere property. I’m not sure the message of this necessarily sunk in at the time, but the memory has stayed with me! Bill put students at the centre of everything. He was always there for chats and feedback, especially when arranging the year abroad or dissertation supervision.
In class, tangents were common but never unwelcome: for example, Bill predicted the rise of consultants (‘become a consultant, then people will pay you to tell them the bleeding obvious’ (or words to that effect)). Bill would allude to his own time as a journalist and PhD student in the States in the 1960s, and his involvement in civil rights and anti-war protests. On one occasion he spent the night in a Southern jail after a protest. Thankfully, the other prisoners proved curious, rather than hostile to this long-haired hippie with a British accent!
Bill’s support enabled me to spend a transformative year at Ole Miss. Bill – not necessarily with the express permission of the powers that be – would visit his students in the States to see how we were getting on, and came to see me in Oxford, Mississippi. There he arranged for me to join the class of legendary Southern folklorist Bill Ferris; he also tried to order a BLT at legendary local vegetarian café, The Hoka… Bill was very pleased to learn that I had interviewed James Meredith for my dissertation, and then impressed at what I, in my first ever interview, had managed to elicit from a civil rights legend with a notoriously prickly reputation.
One of my favourite memories, which encapsulates Bill’s commitment to his students, came during the pressure of finals and dissertation writing when I bumped into an agitated Bill in the Jordanstown library.
‘You’ve been working!’ Bill thundered. I thought to myself, ‘of course I have, finals are only weeks away’. He elaborated: ‘I’ve heard you have a part-time job! If I’d known about this, I would have phoned your employer and had you sacked, because your degree is too important!’. Changed times!
After completing my MA at Sheffield, and with an eye on doing a PhD, Bill encouraged me to rewrite my BA dissertation on the Ole Miss integration crisis as an article for the Irish Journal of American Studies (IJAS). This peer-reviewed academic piece, prior to even starting a PhD, undoubted helped me secure funding at Hull, and reflected Bill’s confidence in me as a scholar. Once I had started my PhD, he pressed me to revise part of my MA thesis for IJAS, which was also published, meaning that I had a body of peer-reviewed work prior to finishing my doctorate and entering the job market.
Bill was an early member of the Irish Association for American Studies, and co-founder of IJAS, while his well-regarded 1997 book The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance study ran through several editions and remains popular among academics and students alike. He and I had discussions about my writing an updated edition; however, issues with publishers meant that unfortunately this came to nothing.
Bill retired at the turn of the millennium, frustrated at higher education’s increasing bureaucratisation and management-speak. An example of this came when he and experienced colleagues had to go to a teacher training session where the instructor helpfully explained what a student was, and how to teach. Bill’s response was a mixture of incredulity, contempt and hilarity. Perhaps the final straw came when administrators started talking about ‘educational throughput’ instead of ‘students’!
Bill and Judy retired to Newnham-on-Severn, close to where he grew up. I was able to visit them from time-to-time in their lovely home, Middle Watch House. I was delighted, amused and entirely unsurprised, to see him make headlines in July 2017 when, in response to Brexit, he declared his home the Independent Republic of Middlewatch, with Judy as its president, telling the BBC ‘the rest of the country will leave the European Union but we won’t!’ Bill’s radical tendencies remained resolutely untamed by old age!
I am hugely indebted to Bill. On a very personal level, I loved his company, his stories, and his insights, and I miss him enormously. Professionally, without his encouragement and support, I would not have had the rewarding career I have enjoyed, but beyond the loss of my friend and mentor his passing represents a huge loss to the wider intellectual and scholarly community.
Dr Simon Topping, Associate Professor of United States History, University of Plymouth