My fencing coach Derek Evered, who has died aged 100, began his working life as a lab assistant at 14 and rose to become reader in biochemistry, and deputy to the professor, at Chelsea College of Science and Technology, now part of King’s College London.
His career included visiting posts in Zurich and Cambridge, and he authored more than 125 papers, published in journals including the Lancet and the BMJ, as well as founding the master’s course in biochemistry at Chelsea, and supervising more than 500 dissertations. He specialised in amino acids and inborn errors of metabolism, a group of genetic disorders that includes Hartnup syndrome.
Derek’s great passion beyond biochemistry was fencing. He competed actively from the late 1950s onwards and in 1976, with his friend Derek Freeborn, founded Egham Fencing Club, in Surrey, not far from his home in Ashford. He served as its chief coach and president for nearly 50 years.
Born in Lewisham, south-east London, Derek was the second of three sons of Alfred Evered, a textbook salesman, and Elsie (nee Wickerson). His mother died when Derek was nine and he was raised by aunts. He went to school in Southgate, north London, and after starting work as a hospital lab assistant continued his education at night school.
Called up for military service, Derek failed the medical because he was underweight, had scoliosis and was very short-sighted. He discovered fencing by chance, while watching a session in the basement of Regent Street Polytechnic after rifle practice.
A voracious reader, he would discreetly mark library books to avoid inadvertently re-reading them. He loved Napoleonic-era swashbuckling novels, as well as the scientific papers he studied. Forced to retire from Chelsea College at 59 during Thatcher-era cuts to university funding, he then devoted himself fully to fencing, particularly sabre, and wrote a manual on the discipline.
For 28 years he was a regular contributor to the Sword, British Fencing’s magazine, proofreading with an eagle eye. He created and edited Egham Fencing Club’s quarterly journal, Cut and Thrust, produced with the help of club members.
He remained endlessly patient and unfailingly polite with his fencing pupils, often smiling and saying, “Littly social, littly social,” whenever our attention drifted — a phrase he borrowed from his own coach at the Poly, Bela Imregi, a Hungarian, who would laugh at fencers chatting instead of fencing. Derek kept his passion for the sport to the end, always asking for news of club members.
Derek’s wife, Evelyn (nee Purssey), whom he met on a coach trip to France and married in 1954, died earlier this year. He is survived by their children, Angela, Graham and John (his full-time carer for the past decade) and by three grandchildren, John, Sarah and Jamie. Derek’s constant advice to me in his later years was “Don’t get old.”
