My husband, David Larder, who has died aged 88, was an educationist, going on from schoolteaching to posts as a college lecturer. After promoting safety education for the Royal for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa), he worked for a student welfare organisation.
Born in Boscombe, Dorset, to Rose Sque, a cleaner, and Walter Larder, a builder’s labourer and farm worker, he was educated at Brockenhurst grammar school in the New Forest and then the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. His youthful acting career was cut short in 1953 by national service with the Devonshire Regiment in Kenya during the uprising of the Land and Freedom Army there. Seeing it as a colonial war, he refused to use the propaganda term Mau Mau and after eight months’ service applied to register – successfully – as a conscientious objector on political grounds.
