FORMER students and staff are expected to join hundreds of mourners as they pay respects to Miles Amherst, who died at the weekend.
The 82-year-old was best known for being the founder of the Abbey School in Tewkesbury, which was open between 1973 and 2006.
But he was also heavily involved in various aspects of community life in the town.
His son Michael Amherst, said everyone who knew his father was invited to remember his life at the funeral in Tewkesbury Abbey, at 3.30pm next Friday.
Mr Amherst loved music and was thrilled that, after the Abbey School closed, its choir was taken on by Dean Close School.
Michael recalled how he and his father attended the choir's first evensong in the Abbey after the closure of the school and he mistook his father's feeling of nostalgia for one of sadness.
He said: "He was in floods of tears and I thought maybe it had been a bad idea to take him there.
"But he said to me that, having thought his life's work was over, he realised it wasn't when he saw the choir's director Ben Nicholas with the boys.
"It reminded him of the evensong that had first been sung back in the 1970s.
"He took enormous comfort from the choir's successful transfer to Dean Close."
Mr Amherst died on May 11 after a short illness.
He had moved to the Ashchurch View care home from his long-term home in Church Street, where he liked being close to the school, abbey and Bell Hotel.
He resurrected Tewkesbury Town Band in the early 1970s and served two terms as a churchwarden at the abbey.
In the 1980s, he was chairman of the town's rotary club.
He is survived by Michael, his daughter Elizabeth and her three children and by his ex-wife Jane, with whom he remained close after their separation.
