Alex Hepple, one of the founders and the first Chairman of both the Treason Trial Fund and the South African Defence and Aid Fund, died in Canterbury on 16 November 1983 at the age of 79. When he and his wife emigrated to the United Kingdom they offered in 1967 to set up the Research Department of the International Defence and Aid Fund. They directed the Department until their retirement in 1972. The principles which Alex Hepple established for research serve as a guide and a measuring standard for the Fund to the present day: a determination to expose the reality of apartheid and minority rule in Southern Africa with an insistence on accuracy of information.
Alex Hepple's parents were founding members of the South African Labour Party and he himself became a lifelong member. The defeat of the 1922 white mine workers by General Smuts took the right-wing Labour leaders into an alliance with the Afrikaner Nationalists to defeat Smuts and to cement the industrial colour bar. Alex Hepple was one of the few who decided to devote his life to the struggle to unite white and black workers for the common objective of a democratic socialist society. He was elected as a Labour member of the Transvaal Provincial Council and later as a Member of Parliament in 1948 and 1953. His election to Parliament in 1948 coincided with the victory of the present Nationalist regime and he made a courageous contribution to the parliamentary resistance to their policies of racial discrimination and the violation of human rights. The South African Sunday Express (17 June 1956) commented on his record in the years that followed: 'Who will deny that he was the militant champion who always spoke up for the underprivileged and for social justice?' His forthright anti-apartheid policy contributed to the defeat of the Labour Party by the white electorate in 1958.
He had close links with the Congress movement and with Chief Albert Lutuli, President of the African National Congress, and took part in the Congress of the People in 1955 when the Freedom Charter was adopted. His active role as Chairman of the Treason Trial Fund and later the Defence and Aid Fund were an indication of his determination to assist those who suffered so grievously for their opposition to apartheid. In the trade union movement he assisted the non-racial South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), and was readily accessible at times of crisis.
