When I first met my wife, Ethel Turner, who has died aged 83, she invited me to her 21st birthday party at Crewe Training College. She then promptly forgot about me until a friend said: "Didn't you ask that chap?" That chap, a fitter in the locomotive works, was within five minutes of buzzing off, but Ethel crossed the room just in time.
She was the first child of Henry Lyth, a marine engineer who worked for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (now Company), and Ethel Lyth, who kept a grocery store in Heswall, in Wirral. Although she was born in Liverpool, Ethel and her younger brother, Henry, were raised in Heswall and Thurstaston, where they attended Dawpool school.
Ethel became a teacher and her first post was in Brampton (now in the district of Carlisle). We married in August 1952 and honeymooned in the Pyrenees. Ethel, a geography specialist, wanted to go to the Dolomites but had married a geography dunce who booked for Andorra. Our overnight train from Paris had slatted wooden seats and a tipsy matelot, who clearly fancied his chances with my new bride. She slumbered happily away, but I kept one eye open just in case.
During the next 30 years we worked up and down England and Wales and, in 1982, Ethel was appointed head of special needs at Intake high school (now Leeds West Academy) in West Yorkshire. It was the job she liked best. One of her pupils often came in through her classroom window so as to avoid passing the deputy head's office in drag. Ethel's students knew she cared about them and, while keeping good discipline, she never had any serious trouble. On the day she left Intake, her tutor group played out a sketch of how she would deal with a latecomer, using her jumper, her spectacles, her register and her gestures: she liked that.
For several years after 1989 we worked with VSO in China teaching English in three separate teacher-training colleges. One of these, in Nanyang, Henan province, welcomed us as the first, and only, westerners since 1954, when the Catholic seminary had closed.
Ethel is survived by a daughter, three sons, 10 grandchildren, one great-granddaughter and "that chap", all of whom are left immeasurably the poorer.