NELSON MANDELA once said: “What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”

My father, Mark Johnson, lived his life according to that belief.

His life was shaped by responsibility, principle, and care — a fusion most powerfully embodied in his lifelong commitment to his younger brother, Dominic, born in 1960 with Down’s syndrome.

When doctors advised my grandparents to place Dominic in an institution and forget about him, they refused. My father did not accept it either. Decades later, when Dominic developed Alzheimer’s, my father cared for him with unwavering devotion, until Dominic’s death a year before his own.

In the 1970s my grandparents founded Music For Living, a pioneering residential charity for adults with learning disabilities. At a time when hospital provision was often frighteningly poor, it was built on dignity, creativity, and care. My father developed those principles. He believed people deserved not just care, but meaning.

And that those so often disregarded gave meaning to the lives of others.

When he became ill, my dad gave me his old scrapbooks. Inside was the record of a politically active man of fierce and unbending principle: the secretary of Swindon Anti-Apartheid Movement; an organiser, agitator, educator.

My dad didn’t just enter a room; he changed its temperature. Formidable, defiant, and armed with a cut-throat wit that could disarm you as quickly as it could delight you. True to his republican principles, neither did he shy away from using his wardrobe as a political statement: after Wootton Bassett received its Royal title, his “Republic of Wootton Bassett” T-shirt made regular, provocative appearances.

On family holidays to southern France, Derry and Shell Island, he sang, argued and educated us. Where other parents taught their children pop songs on long drives, my father taught us the refrain of Bandiera Rossa, the Italian socialist anthem, somewhere between Calais and the Lot Valley.

Never afraid to act on principle, he once tipped over a table of “Hang Nelson Mandela” posters circulated by the Federation of Conservative Students on Oxford High Street. On another occasion, he dumped a container of toxic chemical on the steps of the Ministry of Agriculture in Whitehall, dressed in full protective clothing, in protest.

My dad wore many labels in his life: communist; trade unionist; alumnus of Ruskin College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford; charity director; therapist; loose-head prop; ballet dancer; beekeeper; herdsman; boater; melodeon player; volunteer; and an accomplished cook — at one point even turning his home into a restaurant. But above all, he was an educator. For him, politics was never abstract. It was about dignity, fairness and solidarity.

He fought cancer with the same clarity he lived with. On his NHS feedback form he wrote: “All staff — from the lowliest consultant to the most exalted cleaner — have been exceptional.” He added: “I fully endorse their need to take industrial action. Pay them properly.” That was my father, right to the end.

On New Year’s Day 2026, I sat beside the man I admire above all, as he confronted Shakespeare’s seventh age.

“Not long now,” he said. I wanted to thank him — for what he gave me, for what he gave others, and for the courage he showed even then. But I did not know where to begin.

If one day I have children of my own, I can only hope to shape their lives with even a fraction of the depth, care and integrity with which he shaped mine.

Hasta la victoria siempre, Dad.

By: Callum Ardley Johnson, his son.

Mark Johnson was chair of the Swindon and Wiltshire Branch of the Communist Party of Britain.