My friend Ted Booth, who has died aged 87, was one of the academics whose iconoclasm made Hornsey College of Art in London a hotbed of radicalism in the 1970s, when Hornsey was a byword for student protests and radical teaching.
A lecturer in creative writing, he was also a well-regarded poet who between 1998 and 2022 had five volumes of work published: Rough Draft (1998), Fair Copy (2010), Lower Second (2017), The Olive Tree (2020) and Abandoned Poems (2022).
Born in Belvedere, Kent, to Mary, a librarian, and Jack, a metallurgist, he grew up in Greenwich, south-east London, where he went to Colfe’s grammar school and became a supporter of Charlton Athletic.
After graduating with a sociology degree from the LSE and gaining a teaching qualification from the Institute of Education, he began his career in special needs provision in schools. Then he moved into teacher training at the Battersea College of Domestic Science in south London and Shenstone College of Education in Worcestershire.
Ted joined Hornsey College of Art in 1972, and was a lecturer there until retiring in 1998, by which time the college had been absorbed into Middlesex University.
Quietly spoken and cerebral, if not reading Ted would be immersed in a Guardian cryptic crossword, or watching Middlesex from his favourite spot at Lord’s cricket ground, the Allen Stand, just below the bar. But his short, rugged stature hinted at an altogether contrasting passion: mountaineering.
As a member of the LSE mountaineering club he saw several of his friends die in a climbing accident in the Peruvian Andes. Thereafter he mastered and taught mountaineering skills, climbing mostly in the UK and the Alps. By 1997 he had reached the top of all 408 peaks in England and Wales listed by the author George Bridge as measuring 2,000 ft or above. Twelve years later, when Mynydd Craig Goch was added to the list after a re-measurement, Ted climbed that too, at the age of 71.
He also ran 17 marathons, including the first London Marathon in 1981, played Sunday league football and club rugby, and was a stalwart of the London Orienteering Klubb.
In retirement in West Hampstead, north-west London, Ted took on the role of poet-in-residence for the Friends of Fortune Green, a group set up to look after a small local park, and was later writer in residence for the Friends of West Hampstead Library. For several years, to mark National Poetry Day, his poems were handed out by volunteers to the delight and occasional bemusement of passersby.
Two of Ted’s poems appeared in the 1999 anthology Football: Pure Poetry, alongside work by Seamus Heaney, Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell, and another was published in its follow-up second volume (2002).
Ted is survived by his wife and fellow climber Janet (nee Pedder), whom he married in 1974, a son, Matthew, from an earlier marriage, to Denise Moyise, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.
