George Lyward

Background

Lyward grew up in the Clapham Junction area of south London. His father was an opera singer but left home while Lyward was very young, and his mother worked as a primary school teacher.

Education

Robinson had attended after a suicide attempt when aged 16, and said that Lyward saved his life.

Career

He was awarded an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1970. He featured in the British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 series Great Lives in May 2012, nominated by singer Tom Robinson. He had three sisters.

After leaving school he taught in two prep schools and at Kingston Grammar School and then returned to Emanuel as a master, before winning in 1917 a choral scholarship to study at Street John"s College, Cambridge where he took a history degree.

In 1918 he obtained the post of house-tutor at The Perse School in Cambridge in order to supplement his modest choral scholarship funds. In 1920 he started studying for ordination at Bishop"s College, Cheshunt, but abandoned this two weeks before his planned ordination.

He taught again at Emanuel, then in 1923 moved to Trinity College, Glenalmond to work with the sixth form students, developing his ideas about teaching this age group. In 1928 a broken engagement led to a breakdown and treatment by Hugh Crichton-Miller, who later asked Lyward to help with some of his own boy patients.

This work led directly to Lyward"s work at Lyward married Sarah (Sadie) whom he met in 1931, and she accompanied him to Finchden, but she died an early death at 54 from cancer in 1967.

Is a grade II* listed building, described as "A large C16 timber-framed house with modern additions at the north west education", and having been used in the 19th century as a Benedictine priory. Lyward opened a therapeutic community in a farm building at Guildables, Edenbridge, Kent in 1930, and by 1935 he moved it to larger premises at With the exception of WW2 years, when was requisitioned by the army, he continued to work there until his death in 1973. During the war, Finchden continued at Marrington Hall, Chirbury, Shropshire.

Former students at include Tom Robinson, Alexis Korner, Robert John Godfrey and Matthew Collings.

Robinson, writing in 2005, refers to as "long closed", and the Friends Reunited entry says that it closed in 1974, within a year of Lyward"s death.

Achievements

• He won a scholarship to Emanuel School in Battersea, and there became a prefect, Head of House, and a sergeant in the Officers" Training Corps, and played rugby in the first XV despite a history of childhood polio which had left him with a weak legal