Samuel Holroyd "Tim" Burton (30 November 1919 – 6 December 2005) was a British school teacher, college lecturer and prolific author of English language textbooks and books about the
west of England. He also produced fiction, assembled anthologies and wrote a biography of William Shakespeare.
He was a lifelong socialist, supporter of the Labour Party, and an anti-nuclear campaigner who set up a branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was chairman of the Exmoor Society and campaigned for the preservation of its open spaces.
Early life and family
Samuel Burton, known as Tim, was born on 30 November 1919 at
Caverswall
Caverswall is a village and parish in Staffordshire, to the south west of Staffordshire Moorlands.
In the middle of the 19th century there were about 1500 inhabitants. In the 1880s an urbanised part of the parish called East Vale was transferred ...
, Staffordshire, England.
His father had various occupations and his mother was a village schoolteacher.
[ He received a scholarship that enabled him to attend ]Longton High School
Longton High School was a school in Longton and later Meir, Staffordshire from 1760 to 2010.
History
The school was founded in 1760 with an endowment from John Bourne and was known as the Longton Free School. By 1763, enough money had been prov ...
and then Queen's College, University of Cambridge. He joined the British Army in 1939 but was discharged in 1941 due to injury. He met his future wife Phyl while he was in a military hospital.[
]
Career
Burton first taught at King Edward VI school in Stafford before becoming head of English at Blundell's School in Devon from 1945 to 1964. He subsequently worked at St Luke's College of Education in Exeter and as a lecturer for the British Council and the Workers' Educational Association.[SH (Tim) Burton.]
John Burton, ''The Guardian'', 14 December 2005. Retrieved 30 July 2019.
When not teaching he produced a large number of English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
textbooks, as well as anthologies, biography, fiction, edited editions of classic works and books on Devon and Cornwall. He compiled anthologies of science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
that he used for teaching purposes and thought effective because so many pupils already read the genre. His first published book was ''The Criticism of Poetry'' (1950) which remained in print for nearly four decades.[
By working evenings, weekends and holidays,][ and only in ]