Charles Hannam Obituary

Charles Hannam, my late friend, was an influential author and a charismatic teacher. He was born Karl Hirschland into a Jewish banking family in Essen, Germany. However, the rise of the Nazis slowly eroded some of his comfortable assumptions about the world and his place in it. Luckily, he managed to escape to Britain on one of the last Kindertransport trains before the war, but unfortunately, his father, Max Hirschland, died of starvation in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

In Britain, he was sent first to a hostel for Jewish refugee children and later to a school for delinquent boys in Oxfordshire. Fortunately, his elder sister, Margot, managed to rescue him from there and got him accepted into a local grammar school in Midhurst, West Sussex.

Later, Charles gained admission to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but deferred it to fight against Hitler. Instead, he was sent to Burma and later to India to police the transition to independence. While in India, he realized that many British officers and men held hatred and ignorance towards Indian people and their culture, much like the way Jews were treated in Germany.

Charles eventually became a teacher by chance. Although he was a passionate supporter of state education, his first job was in a prep school. He was a European intellectual with an extensive knowledge and love of art, history, and philosophy, with an exceptional ability to recall with great specificity the sights, smells, and sounds that he experienced.

In 1960, he married Pam Gibson, but unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce. The first of their three sons was born with Down’s syndrome, and Charles wrote Parents and Mentally Handicapped Children in 1975, one of the first honest discussions of what it is like to raise a child with Down’s syndrome. His work received a remarkable response from parents relieved that their experience had been recognized.

Charles was also an early author of Young Teachers and Reluctant Learners in 1971, written with Pat Smyth and Norman Stephenson, a book that gave an account of a year-long project at Bristol University School of Education. The book’s results challenged the nature of teacher training, and the university tried to suppress it. Despite this, the book was being discussed nationally within weeks of its release and became a must-read for every radical educationist.

Charles married his third wife, Sue, in 1983, and they moved to an isolated smallholding in Devon, where they grew vegetables and kept chickens. He is survived by Sue and their daughter, Naomi, and by David, Simon, and Toby, sons of his marriage to Pam.