My former English teacher Willie Jones, who has died aged 94, was an inspirational guide to thousands of students in the UK and, later, Japan. He combined a passion for texts with a warmth and patience that made the analysis of writing an adventure.
He could have become a students’ guru but shrank from leadership; his talent was a gentle helping hand. He wrote voluminously but suffered agonies over clarity and precision. His eyes welled when reciting Shakespeare.
Born in Hereford, Willie was the eldest of the three children of Alice (nee Morris), who dreamed of teaching but was apprenticed to a dressmaker at 14, and Bill Jones, a butcher. Bill had left school at 11; Willie’s parents and some perceptive teachers at Hereford high school for boys helped him to gain a place to study English at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
Before university, two years’ national service, including a commission as a second lieutenant, widened his world. He corresponded with army friends and pupils for the rest of his life. In 1956 he taught on placement at Shrewsbury school in Shropshire, returning in 1959 after a spell at St Bees school in Cumbria and becoming head of English before setting off across the world to teach at Hokkaido University in Sapporo in 1979.
Willie was loved at Shrewsbury, where he galvanised drama classes, was an outstanding pastoral teacher and a long-distance runner, but Japanese culture brought out his best. It led to the flowering of a fascination with craftsmanship, dating back to his father’s skill, which was the opposite of “butchery” in the pejorative sense.
Writing was his craft, and he applied it to studies of the relationship between English and Japanese, and essays on the craftsmen and craftswomen of Hokkaido. These became a book, while he continued to teach as an emeritus professor, the first foreigner to hold the title, until a few months before his death. Watching a Zoom class last year on As You Like It instantly brought back 1960s Shrewsbury for me.
Willie was looked after in his last years by a devoted family in Sapporo after the state system was unwilling to maintain support for a foreign citizen. Masa and Ai Ikeda and their children, Hina and Sora, became his second family as well as carers and took his ashes be scattered on Coles Tump in Herefordshire, where he had played as a boy. He had called the area “that in-between border-land which is not quite one thing, not quite the other, from which I have always needed to take my own liminal bearings”.
He is survived by his brother, Robert, sister, Rosemary, and nieces, Gwen and Emma.
