Cyril Wright

For almost 30 years Cyril Wright served in senior roles at St Gregory’s Grammar School and All Saints High School in Bradley, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

As head of teaching resources at All Saints, he was a great innovator, using advances in video and audio technology to make lessons more interactive and informative.

At the start of Cyril’s career, “teaching resources” were little more than books and blackboards. Cyril believed that the use of video could revolutionise teaching methods.

In the 1970s, he presented and directed a video programme, 1066: Why Hastings? which analysed why William the Conqueror and King Harold fought the Battle of Hastings on October 14 1066.

Cyril used his knowledge of landscape to explain why Harold decided to draw up his forces on Senlac Ridge, in modern East Sussex, in an ill-fated attempt to thwart William’s invasion. The programme was still being used as a school teaching resource 20 years later.

Long before environmental issues were in vogue, Cyril was concerned about man’s impact on the planet and invited speakers to talk to students about topics which today would be classed as part of the “green” agenda. His passion for liberal issues gained him the affectionate nickname “Civil Wrights”.

A former colleague described him as a “quiet, kind, principled, giant of a man”.

In 1997, in recognition of his role in the school’s development, he was invited back to deliver a speech at the official opening of All Saints’ new library and learning resources centre.

He taught history, politics, geography, general studies and economics at All Saints, which was created in 1973 from the merger of St Gregory’s and the neighbouring St Augustine’s schools.

Outside work, he was a passionate supporter of the hospice movement. In 1981, appeals were launched in Huddersfield and Dewsbury to raise money for hospices in the Kirklees district of West Yorkshire.

Cyril was an enthusiastic and active member of the hospice appeal fund in the Bradley area, and along with many others, helped to raise funds which led to the opening of the Kirkwood Hospice in Huddersfield in 1987.

His humanitarian concerns extended overseas. He was a long-standing supporter of the charity, Reaching the Unreached, which was founded in 1978 to help relieve poverty in India. The charity raises funds to sink around 70 new fresh water wells a year in remote parts of India.

Cyril was a keen supporter of the charity’s work to help children in India gain places on vocational courses in order to lift communities out of poverty.

Born in Manchester in March 1928, Cyril moved with his family to Huddersfield when he was a child. After teacher training in Sheffield, he was sent to do his National Service in Northern Ireland, where he helped some of his fellow servicemen to grasp the three Rs. He obtained an economics degree from the University of London and taught at schools in Milnsbridge and Newsome in Huddersfield, before joining St Gregory’s in 1960, shortly after it opened on a site in Bradley Bar, Huddersfield.

He retired in 1989 and moved with his wife Margaret to Addingham, near Ilkley, in 1993, where he was a member of the local Probus Club and added to his collection of rare antique maps.

Courteous to the end, one of his last acts was to praise the kindness of the staff at Airedale General Hospital in Steeton, West Yorkshire, who nursed him during his final illness.

Many of his former colleagues attended his funeral at the Church of Our Lady & English Martyrs in Addingham.

He leaves a wife, Margaret, and children Frances, Elizabeth, Catherine and Gregory.