My father, Edgar Young, who has died aged 93, was part of an extraordinary postwar intake at Bognor Regis emergency teacher training college in West Sussex. Created to address the severe teacher shortage following Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act, the college, led by the innovative Roy Macklin, was more concerned with the character and experience of applicants than in formal qualifications.
During the second world war, Edgar had worked in a protected occupation as a shipwright in Portsmouth dockyard, but saw a vocation in primary school teaching and shared Macklin’s view of education as a guide for living rather than narrowly vocational or academic.
The college provided an intensive 50-week course for mature students, mainly former servicemen and women. Possessing practical skills and often widely travelled, they brought to the classroom a wealth of knowledge denied to colleagues whose life had been spent wholly in the education system. Subsequently heads and school inspectors regarded teachers from this course as particularly talented and effective educators.
Son of John and Lilian (known as “Cissie”), Edgar was born in Portsmouth into a family of skilled dockyard workers. He attended the Northern grammar school until the war disrupted his further education. During his first teaching practice in Portsmouth in 1950 he encountered children who had never seen the sea (despite no part of Portsea Island being more than a mile from the water) and others with no shoes.
For many years Edgar taught at Horndean primary school in Hampshire, working into the evenings to prepare individual learning cards for each child in the class and taking every opportunity to extend lessons out into the village and surrounding countryside. Very much an integral part of village life, Edgar and his wife, Iris (nee Lott), whom he married in 1950, were keen members of the local Merchistoun Hall community association. In his own time, he studied for a diploma in education.
Edgar’s then unfashionable opposition to the 11-plus (along with his union membership) slowed his career development. In 1970 he was eventually appointed deputy head at Wildground junior school in Hythe, adjacent to the New Forest, where, on retirement in 1984, Edgar led guided walks.
In 2001, he and Iris moved to a sheltered housing complex in Southsea, where Joyce, his older sister and a former headteacher, was also a resident. He devotedly cared for both of them until their deaths.
A lifetime teetotaller and non-smoker, 70 years after leaving the dockyard Edgar was diagnosed with mesothelioma (asbestosis), a scourge of former employees. He was attempting the Guardian quick crossword only hours before his death.
Edgar is survived by two sons, Kevin and me, three grandchildren, Ann, Martin and Sam, and a great-granddaughter, Freyja.
