My father, John White, who has died aged 104, was an English teacher in London. He became a humanist representative on the standing advisory council on religious education for the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea) in the late 1960s and early 70s, helping to ensure that humanism and non-religious views had a voice in the shaping of the syllabuses of the time.
He had become concerned about the narrowness of religious instruction in schools in the 60s and was worried about the requirement for daily worship brought in by the 1944 Education Act. From 1968 onwards he became an activist in the British Humanist Association (BHA, now Humanists UK), and was a member of its education committee, and later its chair and secretary. He was also a celebrant at humanist funerals.
It was John’s BHA work that led him to sit on Ilea’s standing advisory council on religious education, and also drew him into working on a number of interfaith committees. His papers, stored at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, provide a rich history of humanist education campaigns from the 60s through to the 90s.
John was born in New Cross, south-east London, the only child of Jack and Edith (nee Fox), after his father had returned from four years on the western front as a stretcher-bearer during the first world war. The terrible things his father had seen had an impact on John later becoming a humanist, pacifist and socialist.
While he was at Brockley Central school his involvement with the Woodcraft Folk, a co-operative international socialist movement, also fuelled a love of traditional song and dance, as well as camping and the countryside.
Despite his pacifism, John’s opposition to fascism prompted him to volunteer in 1940 for the RAF. He trained in Canada and returned as a navigator, flying on dangerous night missions in Lockheed Hudson planes along the Mediterranean to supply Valletta during the siege of Malta.
After being demobbed in 1946, he did teacher training at Newlands College in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, and after a brief spell teaching at Brixton Day college, he moved to Dunraven secondary school in Streatham, staying there from 1954 until retiring in 1979 as head of English. During those years he also taught evening classes in speech and drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
In 1949 John married Lucie Denham, a nurse whom he had met at a drama group in Buckinghamshire. They shared a love of the arts, poetry and theatre, and were keen members of London’s Tower theatre, with John producing and compering old time music hall evenings there in the 60s, as well as later with the Lissenden Players in Highgate.
He often performed at Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s Singers’ Club in the 80s, and was also a much-loved member of Sharp’s folk club at Cecil Sharp House near Regent’s Park, as well as Croydon folk club. In fact he was a founding organiser of Sharp’s in 1988, and was still performing at their weekly sessions beyond his 100th birthday.
Lucie died in 2012. He is survived by their two children, Ann and me, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
