My former teacher Nigel Johnson, who has died aged 86, taught English at schools in Anglesey, Germany and Cheshire over a 30-year career in which he was unusually dedicated to trying to bring out the best in his pupils.
Nigel was born in Scarborough, where his parents, Phyllis (nee Birdsall) and Cecil Johnson, owned a women’s clothes shop. After attending Scarborough high school for boys, he did his national service in the Royal Navy.
He had cheated on the initial navy eye test by listening to other people’s answers as he sat in the queue outside, but was soon rumbled during a second test, and though he was admitted to the service he was never posted to sea, instead running a library at a naval base near Nuneaton. After national service he did a general arts degree at Durham University, where he was an avid rower, and followed up with a diploma in education.
Graduating in 1960, he immediately married Ann Fletcher, a student teacher in Scarborough, and embarked on a career as an English teacher, beginning in Peterborough where he taught at Deacon’s school (now Thomas Deacon academy), before becoming head of English at HMS Conway, a naval boarding school in Anglesey, where he spent his free time sailing a dinghy on the Menai Straits and where he taught, among others, the future rugby coach Clive Woodward and future Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith. By 1967, he and Ann had three daughters.
Although life in Angelsey was idyllic, Nigel soon got itchy feet and applied for a job with the British Forces Education Service. Instead of the dreamed-of Cyprus or Malta, in 1970 the Johnsons were dispatched to Cornwall school in Dortmund. For three years the family made the most of things by Volvo-ing across Germany, France and Spain on long camping trips.
In 1973 Nigel moved to the independent Sandbach school in Cheshire, staying there for 10 years and producing annual school plays of a high standard: a highlight was Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, staged for the school’s 1977 tercentenary celebrations. Nigel took time to see the potential in students that others might have missed: I was one of many young people whose lives he changed for the better.
In 1983 he went to Grange School in Hartford, also in Cheshire, and in 1990 he decided to take early retirement, aged 55.
Nigel then moved to the Cornish coast, where he and Ann settled in Mylor Bridge near Falmouth. Inspired by John Hodgson, a former Sandbach colleague who had already retired to the area, he became a devoted sailor and spent the next 20 years messing about in boats, occasionally crossing the Channel to Brittany.
Nigel and Ann divorced in 2009, and in 2010 he married Gill McNab, whom he had met in the church choir.
Nigel remained active in retirement, volunteering at the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth, and compiling a volume of poems, People and Places, and a memoir, The Time of My Life. He was full of fun and curiosity and always wonderful company.
Nigel is survived by Gill, Ann, his daughters, Sarah, Emma and Rachel, and eight grandchildren, Oliver, James, Joseph, Anna, Sophie, Thomas, Marianne and Christian.
