Life Stories
John Lee
John Lee (1958 BA Modern Languages) died on 2 June 2026 aged 86.
John Lee died peacefully at home in Sutton Coldfield, a week short of his eighty-seventh birthday, with his family around him and his favourite music playing.
Born in Manchester on 10 June 1939, he won an Exhibition to Keble and came up in 1958 to read Modern Languages, after a year in France working in a YMCA café and as a sales assistant at Prisunic; France remained a second home to him for the rest of his life. After Oxford he taught French and German at Manchester Central Grammar School, and in 1965 went with his young family to Nairobi under a British Government scheme to teach at a girls’ high school. Those five years began a lifelong attachment to East Africa.
On his return he retrained as an accountant and built a second career in finance, first in industry in Calais, Staffordshire and the Paris suburbs, then in Birmingham, and for two years as a lecturer at West Bromwich Technical College. From 1983 he was back in Nairobi for nearly a decade, training accountants in Kenya’s Ministry of Finance. Consultancy followed in Uganda, Zanzibar, Macedonia, Albania and finally Pakistan, where he led an institutional reform project for Sindh’s irrigation authority until his retirement in 2003.
He married Yvonne Hoyle, a fellow teacher, in 1962, and they were married for sixty-three years. Having agreed when they married that they would live in France at some point while their children were still young, they used their skills as language teachers to bring the children up bilingual in French. In retirement in Sutton Coldfield he played doubles tennis until two weeks before his final illness, kept up his languages and his curiosity through the Birmingham Anglo-French Society and the U3A’s French, German and philosophy groups, would still slip happily into German in his last weeks, and filled the house with music, Brahms above all. He encouraged his children in everything they wanted to do, and taught them to speak up when something was badly wrong. He supported the College quietly every year.
He is survived by Yvonne, by his children Patrick, Rachel and Susan, by five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, and by his sister Margaret.
Kindly provided by his son, Patrick Lee