A MATHS teacher who taught at Herne Bay High for almost 30 years, Bryan Nicholson, has died at the age of 71.

Mr Nicholson will be remembered by his many former pupils, but equally by countless people in all walks of life to whom he extended a helping hand.

During the Second World War Mr Nicholson was a pupil at Simon Langton Boys' Grammar School at Canterbury. In the early 1950s he began a teaching career in London, initially in primary schools.

But a position at Frank Hooker Secondary School, now Canterbury High, took him back to East Kent for several years. He met and married his late wife Shirley and the couple moved to Sussex, where Mr Nicholson held a teaching post at Westgate School in Chichester.

After five years he took a position at the then Herne Bay Secondary School where he became head of the maths department before retirement in 1992. His wife died the following year.

Mr Nicholson was a man of many interests, including fly-fishing, caravanning, bridge and chess. He built model aeroplanes, especially gliders, and became chair of the Canterbury Pilgrims Model Flying Club. He also enjoyed capturing life through the lens, and in the 1980s won the prestigious Kodak Amateur Photographers' Award.

But it was as a man given to helping others, inherent in all the best teachers, that he will perhaps most fondly be remembered.

His daughter, Anne, said she could never accompany him in town without him stopping to share a kind word here, a word of advice there, with all those who had come to know and respect him.

Nurturing the talents of others and helping people out of a fix was a forte of Mr Nicholson's right up to his death in Faversham Cottage Hospital.

He leaves a brother Peter, daughters Anne and Lyn, and seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The funeral takes place tomorrow (Friday, January 7) at 3.30pm in Barham Crematorium. Family flowers only, but donations to the tsunami earthquake are welcome, c/o funeral directors' A. Welch and Sons, 94 Station Road, Herne Bay, CT6 5QB.