My father, Allen Edwards, who has died aged 92, was a passionate Christian campaigner and teacher who spent his life trying to bring people together. He made his mark in areas as disparate as social housing in Coventry and mathematics education in Papua New Guinea.
Born in Ealing, west London, he was the son of Esther (nee Fletcher), who came from a socialist family, and Vincent, a businessman. After attending Berkhamsted school in Hertfordshire, Allen declared himself a conscientious objector at the outbreak of the second world war and at the age of 19 was sent to run boys’ clubs in Battersea, south-west London. There he discovered the Congregational Church and Mary (nee Lyle-Smythe), a primary school teacher and Anglican who became his lifelong partner in practical Christianity and mother of his four children.
After the war, a first-class degree in mathematics from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was followed by Pocklington school in York, where he was head of mathematics from (1948-52), and then a move to teach at Adisadel College in the Gold Coast (then a British colony, now Ghana), where an allergic reaction to the malaria drug Mepacrine forced an early return to England. In 1953 he became head of mathematics at King Henry VIII school in Coventry and remained there until 1972, when he switched to become deputy head at the newly formed Sidney Stringer school in the same city.
In Coventry Allen also set himself to organising local churches to work together to address social ills, including through a Bread for the World exhibition in 1962, designed as a counterpoint to the consecration of Coventry cathedral that year. His awareness of the appalling housing conditions of new arrivals from the Indian subcontinent led directly to the formation of the Coventry Churches Housing Association.
When all his children were settled, he and Mary spent eight years from 1977 in Papua New Guinea, where Allen set up a programme teaching basic numeracy skills and the use of calculators.
Mary died in 2009. Allen is survived by four children, Julia, myself, John and Nicholas, by ten grandchildren and by ten great-grandchildren.
