My former teacher John Hindley, who has died aged 94, taught classics at schools in Surrey and Cornwall for most of his career, engendering the lifelong affection of many pupils.
He was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, to Eric Hindley, a clergyman, and his wife, Frances (nee Parker). His father had mental health problems after service as an army chaplain during the first world war, so for the most part John was brought up by his mother and grandmother. He was a boarder at Winchester college from the age of 13.
During the second world war, aged 18, he responded to a call for people to study oriental languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (now Soas University of London) on a scheme initiated when the War Office realised there was a shortage of linguists with knowledge of Chinese, Japanese and Turkish.
He was assigned to study Turkish and thus became one of the “Dulwich Boys” who lived at Dulwich college, south London, while commuting to their studies. He was also taught some Arabic and was then assigned to Army Field Intelligence in Palestine, where his duties included patrolling the Canal Zone on a motorbike.
After the war, John read classics at Oxford and eventually completed his degree at Birkbeck College, London (now Birkbeck, University of London). He married Daphne Salisbury in 1955 and took up his first teaching post in Battersea, south London, in 1957. In 1959 he was appointed classics master at St George’s college in Weybridge, Surrey, where in the late 1960s he taught me Latin and Greek. He was a naturally gifted teacher, always fully engaged with his subject and his pupils, and had a keen sense of when to chide and when to encourage. He inspired me and many others to go on to fulfil our potential.
In 1974 John and his family moved to Cornwall, where he taught at the sixth-form college in St Austell for 12 years before retiring in 1986. He retained a lifelong interest in philosophy and the classics, and continued to read enthusiastically at Perran Bay care home in Perranporth, where he spent the last year of his life.
He was a gentle, kind and humble person, had a warm sense of humour and, even in his last days, chuckled with a knowing glint in his eye. He is survived by Daphne, their seven children, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
