My husband, John Heath, who has died aged 91, was professor of economics at London Business School from 1970 to 1986, running the MBA programme and the Sloan fellowship programme. He also claimed that he had brought some of the first Apple computers to the UK to be used at the school. Later, he organised a meditation group there.
Younger son of Thomas, a bank clerk, and Dorothy (nee Meallin), a gifted violinist who gave up public performance after her marriage, John was born in Esher, Surrey. His mother died when John was a baby, and he and his brother, Peter, were brought up by their father and grandparents. Both boys attended Merchant Taylors’ school in Hertfordshire as boarders.
During the second world war, John joined the Royal Navy at 18 and travelled round the world on warships. He remembered seeing Winston Churchill on HMS King George V, going down into the gunroom with a cigar, which was promptly removed by a fellow officer. After the war ended, John went to St Andrews University, gaining a double first in economics and psychology. A fellow student on the course was the future novelist Fay Weldon.
John was a lecturer in economics at Manchester University from 1956 to 1964. During this period, he also drove across the US with his first wife, Wendy (nee Betts), and young family on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (1961-62), working at the universities of Chicago and Berkeley in California. From 1964 until 1967, he was director of the economic research unit at the Board of Trade, then director of its economic services division until joining the London Business School.
After his retirement in 1987, John focused more on human rights issues and research for the Tibetan government in exile, in Dharamsala, India. He also set up a treatment centre there for Tibetan survivors of torture, and did management consultancy work all over the world. His books included Public Enterprise at the Crossroads (1990), Revitalizing Socialist Enterprise (1993) and Tibet and China in the Twenty-First Century (2005). He served on the board of the airports operator BAA, helping to set up Stansted airport and, while on the board of British Rail, wrote a report condemning privatisation.
John and Wendy divorced in 1995. He and I met when I was performing as a flautist in a concert to raise funds for an Indian hospital in 1997; soon, we discovered we shared an interest in Tibetan Buddhism. We married in 2000 and honeymooned on the Greek island of Crete; in 2006, we settled there, renovating a ruined village house. We continued to travel extensively to the US, India and the Middle East.
John is survived by his children David, Claire and Simon, me and my children, Tristan and Sophie, nine grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
