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Joe Mitty 1944.
Joseph Sidney Mitty was born in Islington, London, on 7th May 1919. His father, who worked at the Woolwich Arsenal, died when Joe was a teenager, and he was educated at a local school. Working as a Civil Service clerk, he joined the TA, serving as a private in the Royal Berkshire Regiment in the early stages of World War Two.
Selected for officer training, Mitty was commissioned from Sandhurst into the Royal Hampshire Regiment on 20th October 1944. Posted to the Far East, he transited through Calcutta, where he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed. Demobbed as a major, he returned to the UK and settled in Oxford, working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In 1947, he answered an advert for an ‘administrative assistant’ for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, becoming Oxfam’s first paid employee, on a salary of £8 a week.
His first role was organising the distribution of donated clothing to help those left destitute by the war in Europe. However, he soon realised that there was a market for selling quality second-hand clothing in austere post-war Britain, which would mean any profit could then be used to fund the charity’s objectives. Mitty started the first Oxfam shop in Broad Street, Oxford, which the Daily Telegraph described as: ‘The
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