Air Vice-Marshal John Powell had a powerful influence over the careers of many of the Royal Air Force’s post-econd World War generation of senior officers. His long tenure as senior tutor in the humanities at Royal Air Force College Cranwell ensured that their flying and technical skills were matched by solid grounding in history, strategy and international affairs, and that they were able to argue these matters fluently and cogently. He helped to ensure that the RAF remained the best-equipped of the three services intellectually.

John Frederick Powell was born early in the First World War in Somerset, where his father was Vicar of Limpley Stoke-cum-Freshford. The family came originally from Wales: his parents were Welsh-speaking and he retained a strong attachment to Wales throughout his life. He also inherited a Welsh singing voice which took him to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and later encouraged him to send three of his sons to Canterbury Cathedral choir school.

It also led him later in life to his delivering a spirited table-top rendering of Cwm Rhondda to a bemused audience of Italians at a son’s wedding.

After school at Lancing College, he returned to King’s College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate. There he met Ysolda Moylan, daughter of Sir John Moylan, a Deputy Secretary in the Home Office, to whom he was married for 64 years until her death in 2003. Both remained enthusiastic classicists throughout their lives and friends remember them arguing furiously in the Eighties over the correct Latin rendering of “Beware of bats”.

John Powell joined the RAFVR shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he served mainly in Coastal Command and earned a mention in dispatches. While in Northern Ireland he was shot at one night by the IRA, who narrowly missed him. Years later his eldest son had a similar escape when the IRA mortared 10 Downing Street.

His subsequent RAF career embraced a number of senior staff jobs, culminating in promotion to air vice-marshal and Director of the Royal Air Force’s Education in 1967, a post which he held for an unusually long period of six years. He was a popular and well-liked officer, noted for his dry wit.

John Powell is survived by four sons, all of whom have achieved prominence in various ways. The eldest, now Lord Powell of Bayswater, served in 10 Downing Street as foreign affairs Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher and John Major, while the youngest, Jonathan Powell, was Tony Blair’s chief of staff throughout his time as Prime Minister. The other two sons pursued successful business careers, one as chairman of one of the UK’s leading advertising agencies and subsequently as chairman of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts since 2003, the other running two large engineering companies in the US.

John Powell always preserved a healthy scepticism about his offspring and their activities, allowing in his nineties only that one, by then ensconced in the House of Lords, “showed some promise”, while another, already prominent in Downing Street, was described as “an untidy boy”.

Throughout his long life, Powell displayed the best qualities of the generation which carried Britain through the Second World War and the harsh postwar years, above all a strong sense of duty, public service and patriotism. He was appointed OBE in 1956.

Air Vice-Marshal John Powell, OBE, Director of Educational Services, RAF, 1967-72, was born on June 12, 1915. He died on November 24, 2008, aged 93