My father, Bernard Thurlow, who has died aged 83, was a teacher, a school counsellor and the founder of a charity for asylum seekers. He had an unstoppable passion for positive change, rooted in the Catholicism that he was brought up with and loved; for him, this translated into a hands-on commitment to social justice and lifelong socialism. He had the rare ability to get on warmly with everybody he met, even while suffering from dementia.
Bernard worked as a teacher in Manchester (1960-69), including at Our Lady’s Roman Catholic high school in Royton. He was then a school counsellor at Stanfield technical high school in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, and part of a central team of counsellors who worked across schools in Dudley, West Midlands (1970-85). From 1992 to 2003, he helped to find accommodation for ex-offenders within the probation service in north Staffordshire, as well as being a volunteer and a member of the national executive and social justice group for the St Vincent de Paul Society (SVP).
He was born and grew up in Selby, North Yorkshire, the third of the four children of May (nee Chard), a housewife, and Ernest Thurlow, an engine driver who drove the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman. Family life was overseen by a statue of the Sacred Heart in the kitchen corner, which had been transported home in a wheelbarrow by Bernard and his brother, Jude, from a decommissioned church on their mother’s instruction.
After Drax grammar school, near Selby, Bernard went to St Mary’s Teaching College in Twickenham. He completed a counselling diploma at Keele University in 1969 and later a degree at Manchester Polytechnic.
At a folk music club in Manchester, he met Jane Howarth, who was also a teacher; they married in 1968. When Jane died in 2002, Bernard retired to his beloved Yorkshire to be close to his grandchildren. There, he did arguably the most important work of his life, volunteering with destitute refugees and asylum seekers in Leeds from 2004 to 2020. He founded St Monica’s Housing in 2011, a charity for female asylum seekers, and undertook casework supporting individual asylum claimants.
An all-round sports person, Bernard had a particular passion for cycling, beginning in 1991 when he started taking children in residential care mountain biking, culminating in a coast-to-coast ride with them. In 2009 he cycled from London to Paris, overtaking people much younger than him, raising money for the SVP.
Bernard is survived by his children, Debs, Richard and me, his grandchildren, Annwen, Gethin, Euan, Murray and Mollie, and his brother, Jude. His sisters, Rita and Mary, predeceased him.
