A WELL-RESPECTED university lecturer from York has died six days after his 90th birthday.

Tom Corser, a lecturer at St John’s College for more than 40 years, died at his home in Muncastergate. He started teaching at St John’s in York as a PE lecturer in 1949, and rose to become the head of the faculty of performing arts and music in 1976 until his retirement at 63, six years later, although he carried on teaching at the college for nine more years.

Tom, the youngest of six children, had been fanatical about physical health from his very early days at Chadderton Grammar School, Oldham, in the 1930s. He used his enthusiasm and fitness during the Second World War when he helped set up a Parachute Landing School in India, training soldiers in the foothills of the Himalayas. After the war he chose to train at Leeds Carnegie as a PE specialist. After a teaching job in Chipping Norton he met his future wife of 59 years, Betty, also a teacher, at a course for teaching dancing.

Tom came to York to teach at St John’s on a refresher course for teachers returning from HM Forces.

Over the next 30 years, Tom, with his friend and mentor Stanley Barnes, was closely involved with the growth and development of the human movement area of the curriculum at St John’s.

He wrote a dissertation on dance, and studied for an MSc in neuro-muscular control mechanisms in sport at the nascent Sports College, at Loughborough University. Tom’s son, Andrew, said: “My dad will be fondly remembered by staff and the many, many PE students who came under his care over his 40 years at St John’s, including those who played with him, and appreciated his sporting commitment, in the college basketball team, squash team and hockey team – which he played up to the age of 52 – as a serious, caring and highly respected teacher, mentor and forward thinker.”

After retirement, Tom did not give up learning: he embraced computer technology with gusto, and also took up the trumpet in his 80s. He joined the York Concert Band on the bass trombone, and continued playing with them until only a couple of months before his death. He was also an enthusiastic and accomplished ballroom dancer, well-known in recent years at Huntington Working Men’s Club. Andrew said: “His family and friends will greatly miss this dynamic and considerate man: a real gentle gentleman, who lived his life the way he danced the jive – full of joyous commitment, relationship and energy, right up to the end of the music.”