Alan Durband

She was particularly ambitious for her son, and even before he was born began making sacrifices and saving money from their modest income for the time when she might have to pay for a grammar school education.

He began undergraduate life at Cambridge in September 1948; his tutor was the noted literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis,[1] who had also been a conscientious objector (in World War I).

"Dusty" Durband later came to considerable public fame as the highly regarded Sixth Form teacher of A level English to Paul McCartney (1958–60) who achieved his pass in that subject.

[5] Durband was also a motivating force behind the creation and renovation of The Everyman Theatre on Hope Street, Liverpool which opened in 1964 and earlier he had attempted with Sam Wanamaker[6] to revive 'The New Shakespeare' as a supper club until its mysterious destructive fire in 1959.

He served for nearly 30 years as vice-chair, chair and vice-president of the Theatre Board raising thousands of pounds by means of innovative seven-year tax-free covenants for the conversion of the building.

To mark this era, Willy Russell unveiled a plaque in memory of Alan Durband at the theatre in 1998 in the company of actor Pete Postlethwaite who acknowledged a great personal debt to his time spent on the stage at The Everyman.

His acute social conscience seemed to lie easily alongside a love of life with all its joys: of good food, wine and clothes, comfortable houses and luxury cars, made possible only by his entrepreneurial bent and an extremely strong work ethic which produced a steady flow of royalty payments from several decades of sales of his study guides in Britain and the United States.

As an entry in the School Magazine (July 1962) announcing his departure, put it: "nestling in his briefcase alongside L5A's exercises were the latest brochures on refrigerators, washing machines, caravanserai, nuclear disarmament, brilliant new textbooks, and resurrections of long defunct amphitheatres".