Peter Hardwick, who has died aged 84, was an English teacher of outstanding brilliance and inspiration, despite an entire loss of pedagogical training or qualifications. With one brief interruption, he taught at Stonyhurst college, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, for four decades. For a lot of of his pupils, his was a decisive cultural influence, not only on their education but on their lives.
He was born in Birmingham, the son of a chief school headmaster. After national service, he read history at Jesus College, Oxford, where he was a latest and friend of the critic Kenneth Tynan. But his real interest – and gift – was in literature, as he discovered when, in 1955, he became a brief teacher at Stonyhurst.
A Catholic by birth and (despite a temporary period of scepticism early on) by lifelong conviction, Hardwick was a very good admirer of Jesuit thought and education, but his own variety of teaching was in many ways a departure from the tradition: expansive and discursive, taking in philosophy, music, art history, politics; engaged as much in contemporary British, American and Russian literature as within the classics; though always shot through with the very Jesuit-like conviction that an education in literature could and may be an ethical education besides.
In their sophistication and intellectual challenge, his classes – whether on English literature or on general topics – were towards university seminars than conventional sixth-form teaching. Examinations were considered minor irritations. Few who were taught by Hardwick would forget the experience; many continued to determine or correspond with him decades later. a big number went directly to have careers inside the arts and broadcasting, the director Charles Sturridge and the Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Peters among them. He followed my very own adventures on the BBC and Channel 4 with amusement and fierce loyalty.
He married Brigid Bodkin, who would also teach at Stonyhurst, in 1956, they usually had four children together. In 1994, after decades as head of the English department, Hardwick retired. He continued to support culture and education on the school.
Walking had always been a fine love of his, and over the decades he had walked every yard of the hills and valleys around Stonyhurst, the landscape of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom he particularly admired. In retirement, he led walking holidays in Greece in addition to joining friends for walks inside the north of britain and beyond. His later years were also spent taking care of Brigid, who were diagnosed in 1990 with Parkinson’s. He felt immense pride and delight in his children, his 13 grandchildren and, last year, an excellent-granddaughter, who took his place at the traditional family Christmas expedition up Longridge Fell when, for the primary time, he was too ill to head himself.
He is survived by Brigid, their two sons, Christopher and Tom, two daughters, Mary and Lucy, grandchildren and great-granddaughter.
