Dacre Watson has kindly forwarded the following notice from Carol Boulter:

Hugh Boulter (SH 53-58).

“When I was first engaged to Hugh in 1967 he took me to St Bees to show me all the places he had loved as a child and throughout his school years (he was born in School House). I have a vivid memory of a sea-washed pool to swim in carved out by his father, John Boulter, and a biting gale bending the trees! I am a soft southerner! Then when his mother came to live with us in the 1970s the importance of the school and the influence of his father John as Headmaster became even more apparent. John had died the year after he had married us in 1968.

After a gap year at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Hugh went up to Corpus Christi College and read history. In fact, although deeply intellectual and scholarly, he was not a natural historian. But he was a natural geographer and loved travel and meeting people from other cultures all his life. He took the rather opaque comment by the Oxford careers office to heart ‘Mr Boulter, it's a pity we no longer have an Empire, you would have made an excellent colonial officer.’  He did the next best thing and volunteered to teach in Nigeria with CMS at Okongwu Memorial Grammar School in Nnewi. Before many months he was the acting Headmaster. His administrative talent and quiet leadership had started to show.

On returning to Britain he took a postgraduate course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Manchester University, and lived on the 19th floor of the Mobberly Tower. With his parents living in Sawrey, Cumbria, where his father was the priest, he was near to them which delighted them in that pre-internet age of little direct communication. It was at that stage that we met. Our eyes locked across the aisle of St Peters Sawrey at 8.00 o'clock communion and we married in 1968, 52 years ago.

He used his training to teach primary age immigrants from Pakistan who had newly arrived in Huddersfield. His class was recognised everywhere as being bilingual in Huddersfield and Oxford English. He loved teaching but even more loved visiting his pupils’ families, and listening to the stories of their lives.

His next career move was to take up a post as an Education Officer in Slough, with a special responsibility for immigrants. Our two sons were born there. In 1970 and 1971 we ran holiday clubs with hundreds of volunteers to help pupils newly arrived in Britain to improve their English and integrate. It was the time of Enoch Powell's inflammatory racist speeches, and we felt we were pioneers. Slough is now a truly multiracial town and the welcome we received there in 2008 when I was High Sheriff and we returned to visit pleased him so much.

When local government was reorganised in 1975 we moved to Northamptonshire and he took up the post of Education Officer for Primary Schools in the county. There were many small rural schools there and he loved driving round the countryside to support them. It was at this time that he took a diploma in Managing Charities with the OU and did a piece of research on the survival of small schools. He loved living in the countryside again at Wootton. Watching wildlife was a lifelong interest.

Then another reorganisation landed him a job in the Finance Department of the Education Authority in Northampton. The budget ran to millions and the work honed his political skills as the council was Labour controlled and he needed to work with the unions, who were active on behalf of teaching and non-teaching staff. But this job was not so much to his taste; he missed the contact with families from across the world. His old boss from Slough, Charles Smythe, was about to retire from the Worldwide Education Service (WES) and recruited him to be the next CEO based at its London office near Great Portland Street. This was perfect and the next few years he spent travelling to set up and run British-style education, in schools and at home, in most of the countries of the Middle and Far East. In fact he was in the middle of writing the memories of those years when he died. I had inherited a family house in Theale with a good train service to London. The proximity to London reignited our shared love of the city and its culture, especially going to theatre and art galleries.

Then in his 50s he felt restive and decided he needed a final career change and Lord Young of Darlington recruited him to start his project, The Open School. So he left WES. It was a disastrous relationship, and within a short time he was eased out, and suffered a breakdown. I was working for my PhD in science education at Reading University, and they took me into the staff which helped to make ends meet. He valiantly took on charitable work, notably running a large appeal for Leighton Park School, where the boys had been, and volunteering and travelling for Wells for India and Biblelands.

It took a long time to recover, and one day I asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Being an introvert he took three weeks to reply, but then he suddenly realised that he was being called to study interfaith relations. He registered for a PhD at Bristol with Gavin de Costa. The next and final passion had begun for promoting conversation and understanding between faiths. On gaining his PhD, a study of the role of the Holy Spirit in Christianity and Islam as a vehicle for building understanding, he plunged into work in this area within the church and charities. Almost his final words before he died on 28th June of a heart attack at 80 were ‘I am going to have to give up my interfaith work, I don't think I can manage the committees anymore.’

So a life of travel, administration and passion for integration came to a sudden but timely end. It was a life dedicated to understanding how God speaks through his Spirit to unite us. It was a life dedicated to his family, to supporting his mother and myself, to being a teacher, an academic, a public servant and to loving his sons and his grandchildren.”

 

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