Richard Dirnhofer

Richard Dirnhofer was born on 17 February 1955 in Vienna, to Barbara Kromacek. At eighteen months he was adopted by Viola Dirnhofer, a doctor, and Franz Dirnhofer, a photography lecturer, and the city's stone courtyards became his first home. Every summer the family escaped to East Tyrol, where a farmer's brood of seven children swept him into their orbit; those mountain friendships, struck up barefoot in alpine meadows, he kept alive for the rest of his life. The Austrian peaks would shadow him forever — the silhouette he kept searching for in Wales, in Llangollen, in the rolling glens of Scotland.

He trained first as an electrical engineer, and in 1975, in his early twenties, he encountered the Family Federation in Vienna. The pace was punishing and joyful — full days at work, evenings witnessing on the streets, dinner at ten, prayer walks looping the city's five-kilometre Ringstrasse, sometimes the thirteen-kilometre outer circle, sometimes a pledge made at five in the morning on a mountaintop. Friedrich Pretz, who walked those circles beside him, remembered a young, slim, single-minded man whose heart was visibly being forged.

Later he retrained as a teacher and travelled Europe full-time for the church — Sweden, Belgium, and the fundraising stories he loved to retell. In 1992 he was matched with an English woman, Christine Dandy, and they were blessed in Korea. A year in Austria followed, and then England won out: Birmingham, the grandparents nearby, a job as an electrical engineer, and in 1993 a daughter, Viola, named for her two grandmothers. Five years later came Francis Richard. With baby Francis in tow, the whole family spent seven weeks in the Brazilian interior — a stretch of green the children still describe as the Garden of Eden.

He found his vocation teaching special-needs children, finishing his career across seven years at King Edward VI School in Aston, where he was loved. In the community he was the fixer, the youth-club leader, the man with the harmonica. Sewing machines, cookers, fridges, curtain rails, wallpaper, cars — he repaired them all, often without being asked. Friedrich's sewing machine, sent broken to Austria, arrived in Berlin months later in perfect working order. Almost every Birmingham household could point to something he had quietly mended.

He had a cheeky, childlike grin, a weakness for charades, and a party piece — 'Moon River' on the harmonica, played beside Uncle Tom and Uncle Andrew's guitars. He returned to Austria to find his birth mother and reconcile; he kept up with his half-brother Edwin by telephone; he travelled to Korea on pilgrimage; and he met the door-to-door challenge of 'the 43' by sheer stubbornness.

In his last weeks, weak in a hospital bed, he was still complimenting the nurses on their eyes and phoning friends to ask how they were. Christine, Viola, and Francis carry him onward — a husband and father remembered, as his daughter put it, not as gone but as the legend he was and still is.