MAXWELL MacLEOD

Founder of Shelter;
Born January 18, 1920;
Died January 15, 2007
If you were a tourist wandering the white beaches at the northern end of Iona 40 summers ago, the chances are you would have noticed a remarkably fit man living with his family in a collection of tents surrounded by sea canoes and things such as typewriters balanced on shaky card tables.

In those days, when ministers of the Church of Scotland were usually respectable pillars of the Establishment, it might have surprised you to learn this Crusoe was no hippy. On the contrary, the Rev Bruce Kenrick was not only one of the world's foremost writers on applied theology but also the recent founder of what was then one of the most discussed charities in the land - Shelter, the housing pressure group that had galvanised the nation into action to improve inner-city dwellings.

The bravest of you would have approached the tents. The response from the great man would have been unpredictable.

If he was on good form, he may have sung to you and played his guitar, engaged you in confrontational debate on his hero, Fidel Castro, or invited you to drink tea served by a daughter. If not, you would have been chased good and proper, for depression was his chief enemy.

Bruce Kenrick was brought up in Liverpool in the hungry thirties by a businessman father. His first training was in accountancy. With the advent of war, he was to find himself acting as a stretcher-bearer for a busy parachute regiment. By the time he got to Edinburgh to study medicine he was hardly innocent of the ways of men. Soon he was to transfer to divinity and the Church of Scotland was blessed with a feisty young minister not well-suited to tedium and the negativity that was too often the hallmark of the Kirk in those difficult days.

Within months he was working and travelling in considerably more exciting places abroad and was struck by projects in East Harlem where pro-active young ministers operated out of shops, wore no dog collars and were as likely to be thumping the tables of their senators demanding new housing policies as they were to be praying about the lack of decent accommodation.

Back home, it was predictable that Bruce would be drawn to the Iona Community, a radical organisation much in harmony with such pro-action. He joined in 1957 and was still a member when he died.

In the sixties his work took him to Notting Hill in the days when immigrants struggled in what he had the courage to label "damnable" housing. Bruce's response to this was to announce he was going to raise enough money to restore one house which he would then re-let to poor families. To show he meant business, he opened a stall in the Portobello Road, making £24 on his first day. Within a year his Notting Hill Trust owned five houses, and within five it was managing 1000 as the government swung round to new types of housing association.

It wasn't long after that he founded the more campaigning Shelter, which drew huge support, largely through the public furore brought about by a television documentary called Cathy Come Home. Shelter was launched 10 days after its airing.

Bruce was not the kind of man to run such enterprises and was soon busy with other giants such as Donald Soper making waves in all kinds of fields and building on his reputation as a writer with classics such as Come out of the Wilderness and a book about Cuba.

Often the thrawn maverick, Bruce Kenrick could have raised a fight in a quiet cathedral, and indeed often did, but he was much loved for all his cussedness. On hearing of his death, one leader in the world of community housing observed: "It is incontestable that thousands of families now enjoy the benefits of decent accommodation as a result of his intervention in the housing scene."

Bruce moved back to Iona in the early eighties and had lived there quietly, not always in good health, since.

In his later days, he was made more comfortable by his former wife, Isabel, herself no mean academic, and the tender ministrations of his Iona Community family group.

He is survived by Isabel and his four children - Justin, Ann, Iona and Faith - and nine grandchildren.