My father, Nigel Lemon, who has died aged 83, was a lay preacher in the United Reformed Church and a senior lecturer in theology at Chester College of Higher Education, which is now part of the University of Chester.
Nigel preached in all the places that he lived, and once he had settled down permanently in Chester he served villages around West Cheshire and into Wales as a local pastor. In 1978 he was ordained, serving as the minister of Lavister and Trevalyn chapels near Wrexham.
At Chester College Nigel was known for his liberal and ecumenical outlook, which led him to introduce Islamic Studies to the curriculum. He also set up an MEd course that focused on religious education.
Nigel was born in Bromley, Kent, to Winifred (nee Cole), who worked at the Co-Operative Wholesale Society’s head office in London, and Harry Lemon, who worked for William Brandt’s Sons & Co, a merchant bank. After attending Beckenham and Penge grammar school for boys he undertook teacher training at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, during which time he met Anne Barton. They were married in 1964 after he started teaching religious education at Colne Valley high school in Huddersfield. It was a time of revolution in school RE teaching, with a new commitment to raising awareness of the wider religious world beyond Christianity, and he thrived in that environment.
After moving on to teach RE in Derbyshire at the John Port school in Etwall and the Herbert Strutt grammar school in Belper, in 1969 he went to Chester College of Higher Education to teach modern church history. In 1981-82 the college granted him a sabbatical year to study at Lancaster University for an MA in religious education, in which he achieved a distinction, and it was on his return that he introduced his MEd course, also beginning to teach part of a module on the history department’s MA in Victorian studies.
Nigel had a gently subversive streak that manifested itself in a number of ways at the college, including his advocacy for colleagues who were under pressure from a sometimes-hostile management and his support for industrial action when required. A hint of his political activism from decades before came to light recently when one of his granddaughters underwent screening as part of the process of becoming a special constable – and Nigel had to declare that he had been arrested on an Aldermaston CND march in the early 1960s.
He took early retirement from Chester College at the age of 59, but continued preaching, including in chapels in the villages of Malpas, Barton and Farndon in Cheshire and then in the Preston and Fylde area after he and Anne moved to Lancashire in 2002.
Outside teaching and preaching, Nigel’s interests were equally divided between church history and transport, as evidenced by the fact that the 14 societies he belonged to at the time of his death were evenly split between both subjects. He had a keen interest in nonconformist and Quaker hymns (he had a rich singing voice), and was fascinated by the narrow gauge railways of Switzerland.
He is survived by Anne, their three children, Katherine, Rachel and me, and three grandchildren, Rebecca, Grace and Ben. A fourth grandchild, Fiona, predeceased him.
