John Heath, my beloved late husband, passed away at the age of 91. He held the position of Professor of Economics at London Business School from 1970 to 1986, where he successfully ran the MBA Programme and the Sloan Fellowship Programme. John was also known to have been responsible for bringing some of the first Apple computers to the UK for use at the school. In addition to his teaching career, he established a meditation group at the institution.

Born in Esher, Surrey, John was the younger son of Dorothy (née Meallin), a gifted violinist, and Thomas, a bank clerk. His mother passed away when he was an infant, and he and his brother Peter were raised by their father and grandparents. John and Peter both attended Merchant Taylors’ in Hertfordshire as boarders.

During WWII, John joined the Royal Navy at the age of 18, where he traveled around the world on warships. He vividly remembered seeing Winston Churchill on HMS King George V and witnessed a fellow officer taking away Churchill’s cigar. After the end of the war, John enrolled at St. Andrews University, where he obtained a double first in Economics and Psychology. It was during his university days when he studied alongside the future novelist, Fay Weldon.

John started his teaching career at Manchester University, where he lectured on Economics from 1956 to 1964. It was during this time when he embarked on a road trip across the US with his first wife, Wendy (née Betts), and their young family as Rockefeller Foundation Fellows (1961-1962), working at the universities of Chicago and Berkeley in California. Between 1964 and 1967, John became the director of the economic research unit at the Board of Trade. He then worked as its economic services division director until joining the London Business School.

After retiring in 1987, John redirected his attention towards human rights and worked on research projects for the Tibetan Government in exile in Dharamsala, India. He established a treatment center for Tibetan survivors of torture there and continued to provide management consultancy work around the world. John’s books included Public Enterprise at the Crossroads (1990), Revitalizing Socialist Enterprise (1993), and Tibet and China in the Twenty-First Century (2005). He served on the board of the airports operator BAA and helped set up Stansted airport. While on the board of British Rail, John wrote a report condemning privatisation.

In 1995, John divorced Wendy and, in 1997, I met him while performing as a flautist at a concert to raise funds for an Indian hospital. We discovered our mutual interest in Tibetan Buddhism and got married in 2000. We went on our honeymoon to the Greek island of Crete, where we later decided to settle in 2006, renovating a ruined village house. We continued traveling extensively to the US, India, and the Middle East.

John is survived by his children David, Claire, and Simon, myself, and my children Tristan and Sophie, as well as nine grandchildren and a great-grandchild.