My father, Harry Lewis, who has died aged 93, was a carpentry and joinery teacher who spent many years working abroad, first as a Christian missionary in Malawi and then in government teaching posts there, and in Lesotho and Kenya.
Harry was born in London to Minnie Lewis, a housemaid. He never knew his father, and at the age of two he was put into the Farningham Home for Little Boys in South Darenth, Kent. His time there made him strong and resilient, and it also gave him a great appreciation of life.
He did his schooling at the home, and at 14 became an apprentice carpenter, leading to a City and Guilds certificate. He married Dorothy Gibbs, an occupational therapist, in 1954, and they travelled to Malawi as missionaries for the Scottish Presbyterian church in 1956. Harry taught carpentry and joinery at the mission in Livingstonia, in the north of the country.
In 1966 he ended his missionary work and returned to the UK to train as a teacher at the Moray House School of Education and Sport in Edinburgh. The following year he went back to Malawi to teach carpentry and joinery as a technical master at the government-run Soche Technical College in Blantyre, after which he spent nine years in Lesotho working for the government as a chief training superintendent and then in Kenya for a further four years training craft teachers.
After that the family returned to London and he taught at High Wycombe College in Buckinghamshire before retiring in the early 1990s.
Harry was an inspiration to us all in his outlook on life. A peaceful man who was strong in his views, he was a vegetarian for the last 33 years of his life, a keen cyclist, grew all his own organic vegetables and was a great supporter of Friends of the Earth, the Green party and CND.
He was always an avid Guardian reader, even getting copies sent to him by airmail to Africa. Latterly, reading the paper kept him going through lockdown.
Dorothy died in 2013. He is survived by their four children, Charlie, Robin, Mark and me, and six grandchildren. Another son, Martin, died aged eight in Malawi.
