A FORMER Kendal teacher and prominent landscape photographer died just before his 90th birthday.

Tributes from across South Lakeland have poured in for Ted Bowness, from Old Hutton, who passed away peacefully in hospital after a few weeks of illness.

Born in Chapel Stile, Great Langdale, in 1928, he grew up there in an era before mains electricity, when Westmorland dialect was widely spoken and when children like him were free to roam the fells and meadows.

His education began at Langdale School, then Kelsick Grammar in Ambleside, where in later life he became active in its Old Scholars’ Association. He recalled a time in the 1940s when the school was closed for two weeks in winter because the heating fuel had run out, so Ted and his friends decided to walk over the hill to Rydal Water each day and skate on the thick, dark green ice there.

He also made the most of the natural food to be gathered in the valley, sometimes catching trout in the tarns and rivers. .

Ted studied geography at Manchester University, trained in teaching and gained his first job in Birkenhead.

Moving progressively closer to his beloved family and Lake District, he was a member of the founding staff of a new school at Ashton in Preston, along with Chris who he married in 1963.

Arriving at the then Longlands School in Kendal in 1971, Ted ran the part known as St George’s, beside the County Hotel, as an annexe where he successfully taught the first mixed secondary classes in Kendal, seen as controversial at the time.

For years he devoted many hours of his own time to coaching table-tennis, to a high enough standard that one of his Longlands teams became English Schools Champions.

With the upheaval of Kendal’s secondary education in 1980, Ted moved across town to become a year tutor at the newly-created Kirkbie Kendal School.

Early retirement in 1984 meant Ted could concentrate fully on the photography he’d enjoyed all his life, having sold his first shot in 1949 to Motor Cycle Weekly for 29 shillings and sixpence, and paid for his honeymoon with money earned from landscape pictures.

During the 1970s he had written and photographed a Lake District guide book that eventually sold more than 100,000 copies.

In retirement he was proud to take landscape shots for prominent clients like the AA and the Ordnance Survey, and in 2007 one of his pictures was chosen for a historical exhibition at Tate Britain in London.

He also wrote many articles, mainly about favourite routes when exploring in the Lakes or the Hebrides.

From time to time he wrote for the Gazette, usually on historical or nostalgic topics about life in the Lake District in decades past.

A memorial gathering was held on February 7. The celebration of his life included some Kendal Oral History Group recordings of Ted telling anecdotes from his life story.