My friend Brian Oosthuysen, who has died aged 87, was a religious studies teacher and house master at Archway school in Stroud, Gloucestershire, for almost 20 years, and at various other schools before that. He hailed from South Africa, but came to the UK in the early 1960s to study divinity, staying for the rest of his life.
Born in Port Elizabeth, he was the son of William, a cleaning supervisor on South African Railways, and Emily (nee Nowell), a shoe factory worker. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 11, and he and his sister, Patty, were largely brought up by their paternal grandmother, Margaret. He attended Grey high school in Port Elizabeth until the family moved for two years to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he went to Milton high school.
