My father, Bert Hooper, who has died aged 102, was a self-educated working-class intellectual and a conscientious objector during the second world war.
In that conflict, serving in the Non-Combatant Corps (NCC), he threw incendiary bombs off the roofs of Liverpool factories and pumped smoke on to Cumbria’s beaches at night to deceive German planes. At the same time he took up the opportunity of higher education that would never have been available to him otherwise.
Bert’s father, Albert Hooper, a London cab driver, was fighting in Belgium during the first world war when his son was born in Mitcham, south-west London, to his wife, Ellen (nee Elliott), a chocolate factory worker.
Leaving Western Road secondary school at 13, Bert learned most of what he knew from the books in Mitcham library, and as a teenager became interested in yoga, vegetarianism and HG Wells.
He began his working life as an office boy at a local builders merchants, Hall & Co, in 1931, and was promoted to transport manager there in 1939, based in Romford, east London.
When he was called up that same year, he found that he could not join the Royal Army Medical Corps as he had wished, as bearing arms was a requirement. Instead, he signed up with the NCC, where he was surrounded by those with strong religious and secular philosophical beliefs.
After the war he returned to Hall & Co, where he rose to become a director’s assistant. The company was eventually taken over by Ready Mixed Concrete and in 1980 he retired, just a few months short of his 50th anniversary with the business.
Thereafter he and his wife, Peggy (nee Cain), whom he had married in 1948, enjoyed 20 years of retirement involving family, friends and France until Peggy died in 2003.
Bert had strong beliefs, but he did not inflict them on others. A committed europhile until the end, he stuck to a diet of brown bread, watercress and walnuts, devoured books on history and philosophy, loved Mozart, drank red wine and walked.
After Peggy’s death he concentrated on pursuing his interests in art, music and playing bridge, the last of which he kept up even while in a nursing home for the last three years of his life.
He is survived by me and my brother, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
