Geoffrey Langlands
Commando and headmaster MAJOR GEOFFREY Langlands, who has died at 101, was a wartime commando originally from Hull, who stayed on in the Indian subcontinent after the end of colonial rule and became an influential teacher and headmaster who could count Imran Khan, the current Prime Minister of Pakistan, among his former pupils.
“The dedication and passion with which you taught us has remained with us throughout our lives,” Mr Khan had told him. “Apart from being our teacher, he instilled the love for trekking and our northern areas in me,” he added in a tribute.
Langlands was a year old when he and his twin brother lost their father – who had worked for a British-American company at the port of Hull – to the 1918 flu pandemic. Their mother, a folk dance instructor, moved the family to her parents’ home in Bristol.
She died some nine years later, followed by her father, the boys’ last surviving relative. A family friend allowed Geoffrey to be put through public school at King’s College, Taunton.
His teaching career began in Croydon in 1935, with a specialism in maths and science. But the outbreak of war would be a defining punctuation mark.
He took part with the Army’s No 4 Commando unit in the illfated Allied assault on Germanoccupied Dieppe, in 1942. Two years later, he was selected for officer training and dispatched by sea to the Royal Garhwal Rifles.
He rose to the acting rank of troop sergeant major, but during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, he chose to serve with the new Pakistan Army, and spent six years as an instructor.
At a time when the remaining British troops began to return home, Langlands was invited by Ayub Khan, the dictator who became Pakistan’s second president, to stay on. He offered him a job teaching English and maths in Lahore, where he remained for 25 years.
In 1989, he took charge of one of the first private schools in the Himalayan area of Chitral, which was later renamed Langlands School and College in his honour. He ran it for 25 years, retiring only after suffering a stroke, but taking it back from his successor, the British writer Carey Schofield, with whose policies he disagreed and against whom, in his 90s, he engineered an audacious coup.
Earlier, he had been the victim of a kidnap in the lawless tribal area of North Waziristan. He was said to have returned, several days later, as coolly as if he had been away at a staff conference.
He was reported in later years, to have lived an increasingly eccentric life, adopting a postcolonial diet and appearance and insisting that although loyal to Pakistan, he remained fiercely British.
A bachelor, he was awarded an MBE in 1983 for services to education in Pakistan.