My father, Robin Cutler, who has died aged 92, was a quirky, eccentric and acutely bright man. He became a primary school teacher in Sussex after initially training to be a Dominican friar.
He came to his profession partly because of a troubled childhood that imbued him with a desire to provide others with the kind of caring, stable start to life that he had not experienced himself.
His father, Ernest, a mechanical engineer, walked out on his mother, Cecilia (nee Colvin), a nurse, who regularly beat her children with a silver-topped stick. She was subsequently judged to be an unfit parent and as a result Robin was sent to a Dominican school, Blackfriars, in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, where the kindly Dominicans filled him with six years’ worth of theological Greek, Latin and rice pudding.
On finishing school he became a novice friar and was singled out as a Dominican mover and shaker of the future. But after some time at Blackfriars Priory in Oxford he decided he was not cut out for a religious life and left abruptly, upsetting his mentors, who had seen him as “one of the blessed”.
In his mid-20s, in 1956, he had to do his delayed national service duties, working as a clerk and joking that he “flew typewriters” in the RAF. There his language skills and love of solitude were identified as good spy material, and he was selected to learn Russian at the remote Joint Services School for Linguists, in Crail, Fife. He never did any actual spying, or at least never spoke about it if he did.
His main ambition had been to start a family and provide for his children the happiness he had been denied. So following demob in 1958 he married my mother, Pauline Howell, a teacher.
Robin had an uncanny knack for understanding children. After teacher training in Exeter in the late 1950s he taught at primary schools in Cardiff, Plymouth and Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, before settling in Sussex, first at Robert May primary school in Furnace Green and then at Ashurst Wood junior school in the village of Ashurst Wood, where he worked for many years until his retirement in the early 90s. He was loved by the children there, not least for his peculiar methods, such as stomping around the class on top of their desks.
Always happiest with his nose in a book and in the company of his five children and his wife, he was interested in philosophy, environmental politics and international jurisprudence. Books and musical instruments littered the family home in the village of Rotherfield, East Sussex, close to Ashdown Forest, and, fuelled by pints of mahogany-dark tea, he mastered the craft of bookbinding and learned to play the recorder. Other interests included cricket, rugby and cooking.
A zealous sun-worshipper, my father was nut brown all year round, and the slightest flicker of sunshine, whatever the month, saw him out in the garden, shirtless.
Pauline died in 2022. Robin is survived by his children, Jane, Nicholas, Rachel, Anna and me, 13 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and his sister, Cherry.
