Reverend James Richardson built his life around the Church. His faith is one of the things that remains intact, although some of the details of his career may be a little hazy for him now.
Dementia does that. It takes everything, eventually.
Still, the walls of his room in a Staffordshire care home are filled with pictures that remind him who he was – and still is.
‘It’s hard when you move a parent into a care home, particularly if they are resistant, which he was,’ says TV presenter Anna Richardson, his daughter.
‘It was like a military operation. We tried to keep the things that were important to him. He was adamant he wanted all his books, even though he can’t read any more. He wanted pictures of his family, so those are all there: his wedding picture, a picture of him getting his OBE, meeting the Queen, meeting the Pope.
‘All of these identities, touchpoints about who he is. Sometimes I can see him looking around the walls, checking.’
Moving their father – ‘this strong, vital, community-minded man’ – into this care home just over a year ago was heartbreaking for his children (Anna has two brothers), yet these are the decisions loving families must make.
Anna says: ‘We reached the point where it wasn’t safe for him to be on his own, even in an assisted living facility. He was falling a lot, and ending up in hospital.
Anna Richardson with her father James, who now needs 24-hour care
‘A fellow resident found him wandering outside in his underwear, which was undignified and wasn’t safe.
‘Dad didn’t want to go into a home. He wanted his independence. He fought tooth and nail for it. But he needed 24-hour care, so we had no choice.’
There was comfort in the fact that this home – partly funded by the local council; partly by his modest pension – was right by the church where he worships. ‘That’s another thing that is more difficult, because Dad is mostly wheelchair-bound now, so someone needs to take him there,’ says Anna.
Imagine her fury, though, when she received notification that the local authority wanted to move her dad to a cheaper care home 50 miles away.
‘I had to fight to get him kept here,’ she explains. ‘The social worker said, “Well, he’s got dementia. He doesn’t know where he is so it doesn’t matter”. I was enraged by that.
‘I put in a formal complaint. I have very little good to say about our experience of the care home system and social services. Imagine telling a family that it doesn’t matter what happens to their loved one, because they won’t remember it anyway.
‘It says everything about how people like my dad are thrown on the scrapheap when they get old. And it says everything about our attitudes to dementia.’
Few who have navigated the social care system will have been surprised by a damning new report which revealed that vulnerable dementia patients are being cared for by staff who have trained for fewer hours than a barista.
The findings, from Alzheimer’s Society, the Centre for Dementia Research and IFF Research, show that nearly half of care home workers have not received specific dementia training – even though around 70 per cent of residents have the condition. The study also revealed that half of all dementia courses last just one to two hours – shorter than the training time to make a frothy coffee.
Anna – an ambassador for Alzheimer’s Society – isn’t remotely surprised. ‘I’m so angry about the poor standard of social care and intervention care in this country,’ she says.
‘I have to be careful what I say about my father’s care home – but I will say that the things I’ve witnessed are shocking.
‘I’m talking of people being lined up in front of inappropriate TV screens – and made to sit there all day with no other stimulation. They are not given appropriate food. If you have dementia you need brightly coloured food because your appetite changes, as does your ability to distinguish food on the plate. It’s why many with dementia lose weight.
‘There’s also so much ignorance about how to talk to people with dementia. In Dad’s case, I’ve gone in to see him and had staff tell me, “Oh, he’s away with the fairies today”.
‘I’ve had to take them aside and tell them that it’s not appropriate to say that – not to a family member and certainly not in front of the person themselves. It’s one of the basics of dementia care.’
She’s angry, but weary, too, that it feels like such an epic fight just to get the basics in place.
In 2024, Anna made a documentary about her family’s struggles for Channel 4 – part battle cry, part elegy for her father.
As well as introducing viewers to his daily life (then in an assisted living facility), she met other families trying to navigate an often impossible path.
Her dad’s wide smile and sense of humour were a key part of that programme – but how is he now?
‘He still knows who I am, which is good,’ says Anna. ‘I will turn up and he’ll go, “Hello, darling”, but he has started saying, “I miss you”, which he never did before. That’s hard.’
Anna says he is also more confused. ‘You just have to go into this world with him. There’s a lot of saying, “Oh yes, Daddy. You are meeting the Queen today. Brilliant.’
How desperately sad Anna’s story is. And how very common.
She was plunged into this world when her father – a retired Canon of Leeds, the man ‘who used to carry me on his shoulders’ – had a stroke about nine years ago.
A brain scan revealed that areas of his brain had simply died. He has vascular dementia (caused by reduced blood flow to the brain, which kills off the tissue) and – as with the other types of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s – there is no cure.
Who would shoulder the bulk of the care her dad was going to need? Anna and her brothers, of course. But while her brothers lived in their native Staffordshire, within an hour of their dad, they have children and full-time jobs.
Anna, whose career had taken her to London in the 1990s, doesn’t have children and works on a freelance basis.
‘The local vicar has been very helpful, but I’ll be critical of the Church of England,’ says Anna. ‘My Dad gave his life to the Church and I don’t see a lot of support coming back from it’
As well as a home in London she owns a small cottage next door to her mother’s in Staffordshire (her parents have been divorced for more than 40 years), which has made commuting to ‘deal with various crises’ easier.
She says that managing the geographical distance is something a lot of people experience. ‘Every time Dad has had a fall, we have a scramble to see who can get there quickest.
‘We’d had cameras installed in the assisted living flat and once I was obsessively checking and saw him on the bathroom floor at 5am. He’d been there all night.
‘He ended up in hospital – in a corridor. When he was discharged, I’ll never forget him needing the loo halfway across a zebra crossing in the car park.
‘He’s incontinent. We had no choice but to get him up out of his wheelchair, middle of the crossing, so he could go.
‘My other half was trying to shield him from everyone seeing, but I was apologising saying, “My Dad has dementia. I’m sorry. I’m sorry”. I did weep for him then, this dignified man. He would have hated being in that situation.’ Despite their divorce, touchingly, Anna’s mum is still a part of this coping ‘package’. ‘They have a very odd relationship, but she’s still the only person who can make Dad laugh,’ says Anna.
And how is Anna herself coping? She starts by telling me that she’s more equipped than most because, alongside her broadcast career, she’s also a hypnotherapist, so has access to a ‘toolkit’ for life stresses.
But the overall impression is that she’s a woman at breaking point. ‘To be honest, I find it catastrophic and endless,’ she says.
‘I have used antidepressants at times – at the moment, I am on a low dose because I found myself getting depressed and anxious.
‘It’s the frustration of dealing with social services, with care homes and with someone who has dementia.
‘I will have phone calls from Dad most days because he needs something. He will shout, “I can’t hear you” because the TV is up at a million. It’s exhausting.’
Anna tells me she no longer drives alone to Staffordshire since one particularly fraught visit, when, on her return, she had to pull over ‘because I thought I was going to lose control’.
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‘My other half now drives me,’ she says. ‘He’s been amazing, but this sort of thing does impact on relationships, on finances, on every part of your life. It’s why we need more help.’
Is there support from the Church? ‘The local vicar has been very helpful, but I’ll be critical of the Church of England,’ says Anna. ‘My Dad gave his life to the Church and I don’t see a lot of support coming back from it.’
None of this is relayed in a woe-is-me way. Anna is very conscious of the fact she is better equipped than most to cope. ‘And yet, if I’m struggling, what about other people?’ she asks.
‘One in three of us will develop dementia. It’s coming for us all. Isn’t it time we were better equipped, as a society?’
It is also a fact that if and when it comes for her, Anna, now 55, won’t have children to shoulder that burden. ‘Which children do,’ she says. ‘I mean, you don’t have children so they can look after you, but there are an awful lot of us who don’t have children. Where are we all going?’
Alas for Anna, she knows where her father is heading. She tells me of the moment when she realised how far down the path they were.
‘I was putting him to bed. I’d changed the sheets – he’d urinated on them – and as I was leaning over him, he said, “Night, night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite”, which is something he used to say when I was little.
‘Afterwards, I went to put his sheets on to wash, and I just stood there and I wept and wept and wept. You are witnessing someone becoming a child again, and it’s awful.
‘It’s a long grief. I’m not afraid to say that I hope my Dad is taken swiftly with a massive stroke or heart attack, so that he doesn’t have to suffer the ignominy of this awful decline.’
Her father, sadly, would doubtless agree.
