My father, Robin Cutler, who has died aged 92, was a unusual, eccentric and acutely shiny man. He grew to become a major college trainer in Sussex after initially coaching to be a Dominican friar.
He got here to his career partly due to a troubled childhood that imbued him with a need to supply others with the sort of caring, secure begin to life that he had not skilled himself.
His father, Ernest, a mechanical engineer, walked out on his mom, Cecilia (nee Colvin), a nurse, who frequently beat her youngsters with a silver-topped stick. She was subsequently judged to be an unfit dad or mum and because of this Robin was despatched to a Dominican college, Blackfriars, in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, the place the kindly Dominicans stuffed him with six years’ price of theological Greek, Latin and rice pudding.
On ending college he grew to become a novice friar and was singled out as a Dominican mover and shaker of the longer term. However after a while at Blackfriars Priory in Oxford he determined he was not lower out for a spiritual life and left abruptly, upsetting his mentors, who had seen him as “one of many blessed”.
In his mid-20s, in 1956, he needed to do his delayed nationwide service duties, working as a clerk and joking that he “flew typewriters” within the RAF. There his language expertise and love of solitude had been recognized pretty much as good spy materials, and he was chosen to be taught Russian on the distant Joint Providers College for Linguists, in Crail, Fife. He by no means did any precise spying, or at the least by no means spoke about it if he did.
His foremost ambition had been to begin a household and supply for his youngsters the happiness he had been denied. So following demob in 1958 he married my mom, Pauline Howell, a trainer.
Robin had an uncanny knack for understanding youngsters. After trainer coaching in Exeter within the late Nineteen Fifties he taught at major colleges in Cardiff, Plymouth and Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, earlier than settling in Sussex, first at Robert Could major college in Furnace Inexperienced after which at Ashurst Wooden junior college within the village of Ashurst Wooden, the place he labored for a few years till his retirement within the early 90s. He was beloved by the kids there, not least for his peculiar strategies, akin to stomping across the class on prime of their desks.
All the time happiest along with his nostril in a guide and within the firm of his 5 youngsters and his spouse, he was considering philosophy, environmental politics and worldwide jurisprudence. Books and musical devices littered the household house within the village of Rotherfield, East Sussex, near Ashdown Forest, and, fuelled by pints of mahogany-dark tea, he mastered the craft of bookbinding and discovered to play the recorder. Different pursuits included cricket, rugby and cooking.
A zealous sun-worshipper, my father was nut brown all yr spherical, and the slightest flicker of sunshine, regardless of the month, noticed him out within the backyard, shirtless.
Pauline died in 2022. Robin is survived by his youngsters, Jane, Nicholas, Rachel, Anna and me, 13 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and his sister, Cherry.
