Obituary: Bob Kilby

Bob Kilby's obituary from the Guardian, August 2006 by Teresa Price.

My friend Bob Kilby, who has died aged 62 of cancer, wanted above all to make a difference to young people.

On leaving Woking grammar school at 16, he started work in an insurance office. A keen mountaineer, he met his future wife Cindy on a climbing weekend. In 1966 his team nearly scaled the Matterhorn in Switzerland, and that year, too, he went to college in Edinburgh to qualify as a youth leader.After working in that field and as a childcare officer in Coventry, he trained as a teacher.

I first met him in 1980, when he joined the staff at Queensdown special school, Brighton. He was determined that the pupils, despite their special needs, should get the best out of their education, and taught history, science, maths, English, music and drama with great verve.One Christmas, Bob encountered an unusual antipathy towards the nativity play. None the less, everyone was swept up in his enthusiasm, and come the performance, all went well till the final carols, when one of the girls started tearing her crepe-paper angel's costume apart. Other children followed suit to provide a highly unconventional finale, but parents laughed, even the governors smiled, and Bob took the teasing from the rest of us in good part.

For the two years up to his retirement in 2003 he was deputy head of St Anne's, a special school in Lewes, a position he felt justifiably proud of.Bob loved folk music and was a dancer with the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men; latterly he played the drum for the Morris team that Cindy danced for. They lived in Plumpton, a village outside Brighton, where they were keen actors and directors of the local pantomime society.Cindy survives him, as do his son Jamie, daughter Joanna, grandson Kai and granddaughter Olivia.