My friend David Jackson, who has died aged 82, was an English teacher who later set up a charity working with abusive men. He was also a writer on educational matters.
Born in Paignton, Devon, he was the son of Phyllis (nee Cole) and Donald Jackson, a firefighter. His family had been evacuated there to escape the London blitz. They stayed in the area until his mother died of heart disease when David was 12. He was then separated from his sisters, Shirley, Anne and Susan, and sent to board at King Edward VI grammar school for boys in Totnes, which he found a brutalising experience.
In later life, the siblings reunited, sharing their mutual love of art, dance and creative writing. Susan died in 1970 as a result of a traffic accident.
In 1959 David went to the University of Leicester to study English, followed by a postgraduate certificate of education, and rapidly built a reputation as an innovative teacher of English within the comprehensive system. He taught at Settle high school in North Yorkshire, one of the earliest mixed-ability comprehensives (c1963-67), then was head of English at both Whitworth high school in Lancashire (c1967-72) and, after further study at Bretton Hall College (then part of the University of Leeds), at Toot Hill comprehensive school in Bingham, Nottinghamshire (1974-84).
David had three children with his first wife, Dorothy. A decade later, after the marriage had ended in divorce and he had moved to Nottinghamshire, he met Brenda Mould, whom he married in 1987.
They shared a commitment to progressive education and did much pioneering work, especially at Toot Hill. It was there that David began publishing his theoretical work on English teaching, including Continuity in Secondary English (1982) and Varieties of Writing, with John Brown (1984).
In the mid-1980s, after collapsing outside his classroom due to a heart problem, David gave up teaching and co-founded Nottingham Agenda, an anti-violence programme . He went on to publish Unmasking Masculinity: A Critical Autobiography (1990), and set up a men’s writing group and, later, an ageing men’s group and a men’s memory work group. All produced writing, and his own last monograph was Exploring Ageing Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives (2016).
David loved walking by the sea, and his latest passion was for butterflies. A letter he wrote to a friend in 1997 reveals his multidimensional character: “What I like so much about what we have is the mixture of the personal/political, emotional/theoretical, serious/fun.”
Proud of his working-class origins and always involved in leftwing politics, in his later years David joined a pensioners’ action group and the Green party. From his earliest days, he loved and wrote poetry, and one of his poems, Newspaper Obituaries, was written after reading the Guardian’s Other Lives section.
David is survived by Bren, his children, Peter, Mel and Kate, his sisters Shirley and Anne, and seven grandchildren.
