Joseph Dean obituary

My father, Joseph Dean, who has died aged 88, was the youngest son of Basil Dean, the theatre director and producer who went on to found Ealing Studios and the forces' entertainment organisation Ensa, and his wife Esther. Basil was disdainful of family life and took no interest in his children. He was absent at my father's birth but still insisted he be given the middle name Jolyon, after the character in his friend John Galsworthy's newly published Forsyte Saga – a name Galsworthy had made up. Joe's parents divorced when he was four, and in due course, both remarried – Basil twice more, and his mother to the Jewish Hungarian writer Eugene Bagger, under whose influence, the teenage Joe converted to Roman Catholicism.

Joe never recovered from the wretchedness of his childhood and it remained a presence throughout his life. He studied classics at Merton College, Oxford, before cheating the eye-examination (he was short-sighted) so that he could join up. He became an anti-tank gunner with the 51st Highland Division and fought in Alamein, Sicily and Normandy, where he was wounded in a mortar attack a day after he landed. In that instant, he wrote later, he looked down at his bleeding chest and noticed he was wearing his jumper back to front.

Joe wanted to be an architect, but the apparent insecurities of his father's profession meant that he was forced to study law. He specialised in Privy Council work in the former British colonies, which gave him the freedom to travel to Africa and the West Indies, and in 1975 he became a circuit judge. He married my mother, Jenefer Mills, in 1962 and they bought a house on the North Downs, which my father transformed over many years into a beautiful home. They had three children, whom they named Antigone, Tacita and Ptolemy, much to Basil's disapproval.

Joe retired early in order to resume his writing, which began after the war with sketches for the paper Truth and culminated in 1953, when he successfully published a collection of libel cases, Hatred, Ridicule and Contempt. But he became distracted trying to save the market town of Ashford from being over-developed by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, and started the East Ashford Rural Trust to ensure the rail link took the least destructive route, which in the end it did.

In his late seventies, he embarked upon psychotherapy to unblock his writing, but Parkinson's disease prevented him from finishing this process and his autobiography, Prisoner on the Bench, was barely begun. He was a man of great integrity, erudition and much complexity, beloved by those close to him. He is survived by Jenefer, their three children and six grandchildren, and by his older brothers, Winton, the musicologist, and Martin.

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