Early Life and Career
Dexter was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and was educated at Stamford School, where his brother, John Dexter, had been before him. After completing his National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals he read classics at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1953 and receiving an honorary Masters Degree in 1958.
In 1954, he started his teaching career in the East Midlands, becoming assistant classics master at Wyggeston School, Leicester. A post at Loughborough Grammar School followed, before he took up the position of senior classics teacher at Corby Grammar School, Northamptonshire, in 1959.
In 1966, he was forced by the onset of deafness to retire from teaching, and took up the post of Senior Assistant Secretary at the University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations (UODLE) in Oxford – a job he held until his retirement in 1988.
Dexter featured prominently in the BBC programme "How to Solve a Cryptic Crossword" as part of the Time Shift series broadcast in November 2008 in which he recounted some of the crossword clues solved by Morse.
Read more about this topic: Colin Dexter
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)