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Kenneth Charles Stubbs was born in Beckenham, Kent, on 18 November 1923, and died in Norwich on 3 November 2008. Following a service in the church of Saint George, Tombland, he was buried, as he had wished, in the Norwich City (Earlham Road) Cemetery, on the side next to Gipsy Lane.
After attending the Beckenham Technical College and Art College, Ken was apprenticed in 1940 as an engraver and lettering artist to the London firm of Charles Skipper and East Ltd, a career that was terminated when he arrived one morning to find the premises had been destroyed by enemy action. Army service followed in France and Belgium, including training for the second wave of glider groups for the Arnhem landings, and he was in Palestine for two years after the war. On demobilization, he responded to the Ministry of Education's Emergency Scheme for the Training of Teachers and qualified as a general primary school teacher. He bought a house in East Grinstead, teaching in a primary school in Gravesend, and it was in Gravesend that he regularly went to a folk song club and dances run by Fred and Reg Hall. He moved to Lingfield to teach at the primary school there, and in 1966, after attending a course at Manchester University, began teaching at the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy, again in Lingfield, where staff remember still how much his pupils looked forward to his arts and crafts lessons. He also took a particular interest in remedial reading.
Ken's involvement in folk music and collecting came through his membership of the Communist Party, after he had been introduced to communism by his...