Richard Leeson obituary

My husband, Richard Leeson, who has died aged 90, was a gifted linguist, teacher and academic leader who became deputy director of Ealing College of Higher Education, in west London.

Dick’s first managerial role was as head of the school of liberal arts at Ealing College of Technology (1971-75). He chaired the Liberal Arts Board of the Council for National Academic Awards, where he was responsible for ensuring both the quality of non-university institutions and their liberal arts programmes. He became known affectionately within the academic community as “Mr Liberal Arts”. He then became acting vice-principal and acting principal (1975-77), and then deputy director, of Ealing College of Higher Education (now called the University of West London), retiring in 1996. As deputy director, he was responsible for ensuring the high quality of all of its programmes, and continued to teach, once a fortnight, a course he created, the Critique of Translation.

Born in Southampton, the only child of Dorothy (nee Billinghurst), a housewife, and Leonard Leeson, a sheet-metal worker, Richard was evacuated to the Hampshire countryside in 1939. Back in Southampton after the second world war, he went to King Edward VI school, then a grammar school founded for the poor. He was one of the first children to undertake a student exchange, first to Germany and then to France.

On completing his A-levels, he did national service in the RAF and was selected for the Joint Services School of Linguists (an elite squad) to study Russian, in his case, at Cambridge University. As this was during the cold war, the government sought people who would be able to interrogate Russians in Russian. He never actually had the opportunity to do so.

Dick then read French and German at Keble College, Oxford. After graduating, he taught languages at Boteler grammar school, Warrington (1956-59), and King Edward’s school, Birmingham (1959-64), and Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry (1964-71).

Finding the available French teaching materials woefully inadequate, he wrote a practical and immediately useful book, Voyage à Paris (1971). His MPhil, which focused on improving language teaching by understanding how language is acquired, resulted in a second book, Fluency and Language Teaching (1975).

On retirement, and for the following 10 years, Dick became an adviser with Citizens Advice in Wimbledon, south London, where he had lived since 1986. He focused on helping clients in crippling debt, training other advisers in debt work as well as undertaking prison visits aimed at reducing reoffending by helping prisoners understand money. He had a phenomenal zest for life, history, travel, bridge, the Guardian crossword and Southampton football club.

Dick had two daughters, Helena and Nicola, with Audrey Jackson, whom he married in 1957. The marriage ended in divorce in 1989. Dick and I met at Ealing College of Higher Education where I was lecturing in law, and we married in 1991.

Helena predeceased him. Dick is survived by me, Nicola and two granddaughters, Rebecca and Rachel.