Rev. John Lowerson (1941-2009)
John Lowerson, Emeritus Reader in History and for many years a mainstay of the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE), died very suddenly on 21 June.
A loyal Yorkshireman, born in Doncaster and a graduate of the University of Leeds, John came to Sussex in 1970.
His post involved both adult education and intramural teaching and in both capacities he was a dedicated and very supportive teacher and an apparently effortlessly accomplished and entertaining lecturer who could - and did - talk about almost anything, almost anywhere.
It was one of the ironies of his career that he developed a scholarly reputation as an historian of leisure despite having very little of it himself, apart from some fishing. He published Time to Spare in Victorian England with his Sussex colleague John Myerscough in 1977, followed by Trends in Leisure 1919-1939, with Alun Howkins, in 1979 and his major study Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870-1914 in 1993.
But this was only one strand of his activities. He also made a name for himself as a local historian, editing Southern History for a time, editing historical studies of Crawley and Seaford and publishing A Short History of Sussex in 1980.
Brought up a Methodist, which may partly explain his enduring love of music, he had become an Anglican and eventually trained as a non-stipendiary priest. In addition to his 'day-job' as a lecturer, and some parish responsibilities, he became part of the University chaplaincy team, a 'worker priest' within the academy.
He 'retired' in 2003 but he continued to lecture widely, completed his substantial book on Amateur Operatics: A social and cultural history (2005) and seemed for a time to have taken up permanent residence in the British Library while he worked assiduously on his biography of the communist composer Alan Bush.
Norman Vance, Professor of English