Our friend Jo Carritt, who has died suddenly aged 65, exhibited a quiet heroism and remarkable good humour throughout his life despite suffering from a disabling progressive condition. We had known him since our time together at Keele University in the late 1960s. It was a feature of Jo's life that he maintained contact with friends from right back to primary school and throughout his life.
Jo was born and brought up in west London, the son of a Daily Worker journalist and a consultant paediatrician. His parents, Bill Carritt and Dr Joan McMichael, were active and well-respected members of the Communist party but, although he was always left-leaning and was a rep for the National Union of Teachers, Jo found plenty of reasons not to join the CP – or any other party, come to that.
After Keele, Jo took an MA in war studies at King's College London, a peculiar choice of subject, some of us thought, for a man so committed to radical social causes. Yet he prided himself on recognising humanity's less admirable tendencies and took a keen delight in identifying the role of strategy in everyday life as much as in war.
Jo suffered from a hereditary progressive wasting disease of the muscles – Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease – which was ultimately to confine him to a wheelchair. Even when he was in his mid-20s, his motor skills were impaired, so it took some courage for him to leave the comforts of home and undertake two years' teaching in the Zambian bush. He made a considerable success of this and derived fulfilment that remained with him. It also armed him for the subsequent challenges of teaching in London special schools, where the rapport he established with pupils marked him out.
Despite holding strong views on many subjects, Jo liked nothing better than the to and fro of conversation with friends. Friends were central to his life and so too were his dogs, in the days when he was still able to tramp the hills. This was denied him in his last few years and, though he felt the loss sorely, he did not complain. He was quite remarkable in the fortitude with which he bore the creeping erosion of his body. "Stoic" is not the sort of word he readily embraced but it is fitting for the bravery and dignity Jo showed in such adversity.
To the end he maintained his interest in the world, reading the Guardian every day. His one grouse was that the obituaries were so media-dominated. He would have expected us to try to redress the balance.
Jo is survived by his partner of nearly 20 years, Ingrid, his sister, Gill, and half-brothers, Ian and Hugh.