Arno Rabinowitz obituary

My father, Arno Rabinowitz, who has died aged 90, was a pioneering educational psychologist and a widely admired mentor, counsellor and confidant. His existence was down to a confluence of luck: his mother, Tilly, was one of three siblings evacuated from eastern Europe in the early 1920s during the pogroms against Jews. These three were “Ochberg Orphans”, fortunate recipients of the philanthropy of another émigré, the industrialist Isaac Ochberg, who enabled Jewish orphans to emigrate to safety in South Africa.

Arno was born in Johannesburg, to Tilly (nee Abrahams) and Danny Rabinowitz, a hotelier. He went to school at Highlands North in Johannesburg and later studied English and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1950s. There he was involved in clandestine anti-apartheid activities and was briefly a legal intern, in which capacity he saw Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in court.

Partly as a consequence of his political activities, he left South Africa for London in 1956, where he promptly fell in love with Gwen Dunkley, a teacher. Together they went for two years to Roubaix, northern France, where Arno taught English and philosophy; on their return they married.

Arno studied psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, and subsequently qualified as an educational psychologist at the London Child Guidance training centre in Hampstead. He worked at the Bethlem and Maudsley hospital school in south London, and became principal of the first special needs nursery school in the UK, Katharine Elliot school in Shrewsbury; he joined the Inner London Educational Authority, rising to become acting principal educational psychologist until the body was shut down by Margaret Thatcher in 1990. He then continued in private practice, lectured at universities in Northern Ireland and Pakistan, and held several advisory roles including at the Institute of Education and Peper Harow school in Surrey.

Although never taking on any formal roles, Arno was politically engaged throughout his life; he was a committed socialist and Labour party member, and latterly as a self-appointed gadfly and irritant to Croydon council (where he lived for almost 60 years). He loved to travel, owned a house in Spain and regularly visited his siblings in South Africa, the US and Canada. He read voraciously, was active online until a few weeks before his death and was known as a witty and subversive raconteur.

He is survived by Gwen, his sons, Gideon and me, six grandchildren, Joel, Anna, Louis, Raoul, Sophie and Laura, and his siblings, Cyril, David and Lila.