John Delin (1927-2006)

John Delin was a teacher of maths at Battersea Grammar School from 1954 to 1960, when he left the school to take up a new position as Science Correspondent at the Sunday Telegraph on Fleet Street and subsequently, to join the launch team for the paper’s new colour supplement magazine in 1962. When he joined the school he had only just been awarded his BSc honours degree in maths and his MEd, although during his National Service in the late 1940s he had served as a Captain in the Education Corps, tutoring young servicemen in skills such as keeping household accounts and living within their means.

After his daughter provided a copy of the school photograph from 1960, Old Grammarians offered some of their memories of his teaching. He was described as funny and ‘one of the good guys’, with considerable patience at coaching his pupils. He was, according to one Old Grammarian, a teacher who ‘made maths interesting and amusing.’

Simon Black said: “Mr Delin taught me at BGS about 1957. He set us a test to calculate the materials needed to build a shed. That many of us got it wrong didn’t matter. We learned how. I still use the basic principles he taught us to this day. He was a good teacher.”

Graham Rushworth said: “I left BGS in 1957 but he had taken a special interest in me in the years before, probably because of my poor maths. I met him on the street one day in West Dulwich in the early sixties when I was working as a journalist for ITN and we had a chat about old school memories. A very nice man.”

John was a moving force behind the BGS Camera Club/Photographic Society, bringing his own love of images both still and moving to help encourage an interest in photography. Since he was a teenager he had enjoyed developing his own pictures from around South London. He also made and edited his own ciné films.

After leaving BGS John made a considerable name for himself as a journalist and settled in Dulwich with his wife Joan (formerly a teacher of French at Rosa Basset School) and three daughters. He covered major events including the moon landings in 1969 and, later, chemical disasters at Bhopal and Flixborough. He wrote for the New Scientist and various other publications, as well as staying on the Telegraph’s staff list until his retirement in the mid-1980s. His last stories before retirement covered the impact of Chernobyl disaster.

In the early 1960s, he began to combine his journalism with public relations work for Loughborough University of Technology, prior to the award of its charter in 1966. He became Information Officer for the University in 1972 and moved his family up to the Midlands that year, later also adding a post as lecturer in media studies to his portfolio. He commuted to London by train every Friday, arriving at his desk in Fleet Street before some of his colleagues who had driven in from Dulwich. A colleague of the time described him as ‘a good egg’

John devoted his career to the meeting point of science and information, believing that the more people learnt, the richer their lives would be, but he shared numerous other interests with his pupils as much as with his family. When he died in 2006, aged 79, after a long period with Lewy Body Dementia, one of his former BGS pupils wrote to the family to tell them of his memories of Mr Delin’s tuition in the Camera Club. Under his tuition, he said, he had learnt a skill and love in photography which had stayed with him all his life. That accolade would have pleased him greatly. In his eulogy, a former Fleet Street colleague said that he had ‘manifold accomplishments as writer, educator and communicator’. He added: “He was a true polymath…a specialist as a mathematician but also a generalist of both breadth and depth.”