My husband, Karl Chidsey, who has died aged 83, was a popular teacher at Brighton Polytechnic (now University) on various subjects related to psychology and business within the business school.
He was a lecturer there from 1969 until taking early retirement in 1991, after which we moved to Valencia in Venezuela, where he worked as an unpaid adviser to the catholic priest Padre Rivolta, founder of Hogares Crea, a local organisation set up to help with the rehabilitation of drug addicts. Karl also established his own clinical psychology service, running it at our home until 2011, by which time he had dealt with 4,000 cases.
Karl was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex to Patricia (nee Le Beau), a care assistant in an old people’s home, and her husband, William, a fitter for the Hunslet Engine Company. Karl’s early days were spent in south Wales in the village of Senghenydd, where his paternal grandfather was a miner. He passed the 11-plus at the age of nine, after which he was awarded a scholarship to start early at Cockburn high school in Leeds, when a family move took them to the city.
After national service in Aden in the early 1950s, Karl gained a degree in psychology at the University of Liverpool in 1963, followed by a master’s in ergonomics at Loughborough University in 1966. He then worked at the Furniture Industry Research Association, designing ergonomic chairs, before moving to Lewes in Sussex to lecture at Brighton Polytechnic.
Karl’s first marriage, to Catherine Platt in 1960, ended in divorce in 1980. He and I met at the University of East Anglia, where he was teaching an Open University course and I was writing my PhD thesis. We married in 1981.
He is survived by me, two daughters, Karen and Jenny, from his first marriage, two of his three siblings, Bob and Philip, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
