E.R. Braithwaite, the Guyana-born educator whose teaching experiences in London’s East End slums were the inspiration for the international best-selling novel “To Sir, With Love,” a movie and a hit song, died last week in Rockville, Md., reported the Associated Press. He was 104.
According to his companion, Ginette Ast, Braithwaite became ill on Dec. 12 and died later that day at the Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center.
The autobiographical “To Sir, With Love” story, published as a book in 1959, showed a stern, black Caribbean man and a rowdy mostly white group of East End teenagers develop a loving respect for one another.
Actor Sidney Poitier played Braithwaite in the 1967 film, Pop music star Lulu, who played one of the students, performed the title song on screen and garnered a #1 hit with the song on record.
Braithwaite’s career as an author — often writing about racism, class and the dissimilarity between first world and colonial cultures — was far from his sole occupation. In the 1960s, he served as newly independent Guyana’s first representative to the United Nations and later as the nation’s ambassador to Venezuela.
Born Edward Ricardo Braithwaite in colonial British Guiana in 1912, he was the son of Oxford graduates. He attended Cambridge University, was a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II and graduated from Cambridge in 1949 with a degree in physics. After facing racial in jobs and housing, he took position as a secondary school teacher in the London’s rough East neighborhood.
Over the years, Braithwaite lived in Guyana, London, Paris, New York and Washington and taught at New York University and Howard University and other schools.
SOURCE: NY Daily News
