Joe Mitty - Early Life

Early Life

Joe Mitty was born on 7 May 1919, in Islington, north London. His father, an employee at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, died when he was just 12 years old and he was raised by his mother. He attended a local council church school.

Mitty became a civil service clerk after leaving school. He joined the British Territorial Army in 1938 before enlisting in the 7th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment in March 1939. Mitty was admitted to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for officer training in 1942, following which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army's Hampshire Regiment and was sent to East Asia. On his way to East Asia, Mitty travelled through India where he was personally moved by the extreme poverty which he witnessed in the slums of Calcutta.

In 1942, while still serving in the military, Mitty married Dorothy White. The couple had two sons and a daughter. Dorothy died in 1995. And his daughter Gloria died in 1989.

Mitty left the Army in 1946 and moved to Oxford with his wife. He purchased a quarter acre plot of land at Cumnor for £75, and built a house, which he and his wife would live in for the next 60 years. He initially worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production. However, in 1949 he noticed an employment advertisement in the Oxford Mail newspaper seeking an administrative assistant for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, an organization which would later became known by its current name, Oxfam. Mitty decided to apply for this position.