Obituary: Sir Bob Hepple QC, FBA (11 August 1934 – 21 August 2015)

Abstract

We were deeply saddened by the death of Bob Hepple, who made an outstanding contribution to labour law scholarship and the promotion of labour standards both in the UK and overseas and was the recipient of numerous honours and awards. He was the founding editor of the Industrial Law Journal and Honorary President of the Industrial Law Society from 2012, having been a vice president since 1975. His enduring commitment to equality and human rights was manifest in both his life and his work. Bob Hepple was born in a South Africa beset by racial bigotry.1 By his own account, two experiences in his early youth shaped the course of his life. The first was when, at the age of 12, his mother took him to see the horrifying documentary films about the Nazi death camps, in which two of his Jewish maternal ancestors had perished. This demonstrated in graphic terms where anti-semitism and racism could lead. The second occurred a few weeks later, when his aunt took him to the shanty towns near Johannesburg, with their open sewers, hessian and corrugated iron shacks, and ill-clad children suffering from malnutrition. These experiences motivated what was to become his life-long struggle for equality and democracy. Bob’s own family, too, inspired him to fight for social justice. His paternal grandfather, a patternmaker who had fled unemployment in England, was a branch secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, blacklisted for leading a strike. He and his wife, a Johannesburg pioneer and suffragette, were founding members in 1910 of the South African Labour Party, of which Bob’s father, Alex Hepple, was later to become Leader. Both Bob’s parents gave up their business careers to work for unity between black and white South Africans in pursuit of a democratic socialist society. In doing so, they faced hatred and violence from their fellow white South Africans. In 2011, Bob published a memoir of his father’s life in the South African History Online Lives of Courage Series, under the title Alex Hepple: South African Socialist.