My father, Martin Corrick, who has died aged 80, was a novelist and teacher: writing and social justice ran through his life, including in the fields of adult education and governor training, and in setting up the Gosport Men’s Shed. He was aware of local deprivation and that, with his own feelings of depression and isolation, led to the setting up of the Shed in 2013, to provide company and activities for men. An Isle of Wight film-maker, David George, made Better Shed Than Dead about it in 2014.
It took hard work and negotiation on Martin’s part in the early years, and it is now a Gosport institution, with 170 members, and has helped to start other men’s sheds. Its yellow T-shirted members appear at every local event.
Martin was born in Radlett, Hertfordshire, the son of Elizabeth Pritchard, a secretary at the De Havilland aircraft company, and Denis Corrick, an aircraft engineer at the same firm, and grew up in Bristol. He attended Clifton college, which he disliked, saying he had been physically abused there. He left school early for an engineering apprenticeship, but dropped out of that.
Eventually, supported by his wife, Hilary (nee Mapstone), whom he had met in 1968 at the Bristol Gliding Club and married in 1971, he studied for his A-levels. With the help of a state scholarship he studied English at Hertford College, Oxford, then trained as a teacher.
He loved sailing, so moved to Southampton to be by the sea, and taught English and drama at Itchen sixth form college. He was concerned about the opportunities and self-esteem of young people, and was keen to engage them in theatre – there were memorable school productions at the Edinburgh fringe and at Fort Nelson, near Portsmouth.
He and Hilary, a social worker, were active in Eastleigh Labour party in the 1980s; Martin wrote wearily for the Guardian in 1988 that the party had slipped “into factionalism, anger, back-stabbing, dogmatism”. They divorced in 1996 and he moved to freelance writing. His work included articles for the Guardian about travelling the country by narrowboat. In 1997, he was accepted to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and wrote his first novel, The Navigation Log, in 2002. The New York Times praised its tenderness and “elegiac vision”. After Berlin followed three years later and By Chance in 2008.
Martin was a school governor and, with Nigel Gann, set up governor training services for Hampshire county council – he felt strongly about supporting and challenging schools. He met his partner, Annie Sayle, a headteacher, through this.
Martin taught writing to adult students, at what was then the New College of Southampton University. Many of his students were older people who had not had much education, and he enjoyed increasing their confidence in writing.
He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015 and was one of the first people to join a clinical trial of lecanemab four years ago; it was important to him to do something that might help others. In his last few weeks of life, he was comforted by dreams of sailing on the Solent.
He is survived by Annie, his daughters, Freya and me, his grandchildren, Molly and Harriet, and his siblings, Ann, Jenny, Tom and Sarah.
