My father, John White, who has died aged 104, was an English teacher in London. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became the humanist representative on the permanent advisory body for religious education of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and helped to ensure that humanism and non-religious views had a voice in the design of the curricula of the time.
In the 1960s he was concerned about the narrow-mindedness of religious education in schools and was disturbed by the requirement of daily worship introduced by the Education Act 1944. From 1968 he became involved in the British Humanist Association (BHA, now Humanists UK), serving on its Education Committee and later as its Chairman and Secretary. He was also a celebrant at humanist funerals.
As a result of his work for the BHA, John became a member of Ilea’s standing advisory body on religious education and also served on several interfaith committees. His papers, held at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, provide a comprehensive history of humanist education campaigns from the 1960s to the 1990s.
John was born in New Cross, south-east London, the only child of Jack and Edith (née Fox), after his father returned from a four-year tour of duty on the Western Front as a stretcher bearer during World War I. The horrific things his father had witnessed shaped John’s later development as a humanist, pacifist and socialist.
While at Brockley Central School, his involvement with Woodcraft Folk, a co-operative international socialist movement, also sparked his love of traditional song and dance, as well as camping and the outdoors.
Despite his pacifism, John’s opposition to fascism led him to volunteer for the RAF in 1940. He trained in Canada and returned as a navigator, flying dangerous night missions in Lockheed Hudson aircraft along the Mediterranean to supply Valletta during the Siege of Malta.
After his discharge from military service in 1946, he trained as a teacher at Newlands College, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. After a brief spell as a lecturer at Brixton Day College, he moved to Dunraven Secondary School, Streatham, where he remained as Head of the English Department from 1954 until his retirement in 1979. During these 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 he had met in a theatre company in Buckinghamshire. They shared a love of art, poetry and theatre and were enthusiastic members of London’s Tower Theatre, where John produced and presented classic music hall evenings in the 1960s, and later with the Lissenden Players in Highgate.
He performed frequently at Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s Singers’ Club in the 1980s, and was also a popular member of Sharps Folk Club at Cecil Sharp House near Regent’s Park, and the Croydon Folk Club. In fact, he was one of the founders of Sharps in 1988, and continued to perform at their weekly meetings even after his 100th birthday.
Lucie died in 2012. He leaves behind their two children Ann and me, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
