To Sir, With Love author ER Braithwaite dead at 104

NEW YORK — E.R. Braithwaite, the Guyanese author, educator and diplomat whose years teaching in the slums of London’s East End inspired the international bestseller “To Sir, With Love” and the popular Sidney Poitier movie of the same name, has died at age 104.

Braithwaite’s companion, Ginette Ast, told The Associated Press that he became ill Monday and died at the Adventist Health-Care Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Maryland.

Schooled in Guyana, the U.S. and Britain, Braithwaite wrote several fiction and nonfiction books, often focusing on racism and class and the contrast between first world and colonial cultures. He was regarded as an early and overlooked chronicler of Britain from a non-white’s perspective, his admirers including the authors Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Phillips.

He also served in the 1960s as the newly independent Guyana’s first representative at the United Nations and later was ambassador to Venezuela.

“To Sir, With Love,” his first and most famous book, was published in 1959. The autobiographical tale about how a West Indian of patrician manner scolded, encouraged and befriended a rowdy, mostly white class of East End teens, who in turn softened him, was an immediate success and a natural for film.

Edward Ricardo Braithwaite was born in what was then British Guiana in 1912, the son of Oxford graduates who grew up in relatively affluent surroundings and by the late 1930s was attending graduate school at Cambridge University.

A pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force during the Second World War, he graduated from Cambridge in 1949 with a physics degree.