Susan Parkinson - Telegraph By contrast, she felt that dyslexics, often blessed with visual and creative prowess, had specific talents to offer the arts, science and business, despite their characteristic problems with reading, writing, learning by rote and organisational skills. Indeed, in a brief history of the ADT, she recalled that, while teaching at a school for dyslexic boys, she found that their imaginative powers were outstanding when compared to the work produced in the art colleges where she had previously worked. Her parents returned to England in 1930, settling in a farmhouse in Kent. From her father, Susan inherited a lifelong passion for sport and for a flutter on the horses, as well as a love of birds and music. She became an accomplished amateur flautist. After Maltman's Green School she went to art colleges in Maidstone and Canterbury, then to the Royal College of Art, where she flourished under the tuition of Frank Dobson and won the Life Drawing Prize in 1948. A year later she married Richard Parkinson and moved to her sister's husband's home in Kent. There, with Parkinson, she set up Richard Parkinson Pottery, building a brick kiln in the oast house. For the next decade they produced an array of elegant figures in fine porcelain, some directly representative but mainly witty caricatures of animals and people. Years later the Victoria and Albert Museum put three of her pieces on display in its ceramics cabinets. After Susan Parkinson's marriage ended in 1962, she suffered prolonged bouts of depression, and it was during this period that she began to take an interest in dyslexia. Malcolm Ritchie, then the pioneering headmaster of Brickwall School in Sussex, employed her to teach art, and she worked there from 1963 to 1985, when she took a degree in Research Methods and Statistics. What she had learnt, as well as taught, at Brickwall led to the creation of the ADT in 1992. Key to the work of changing attitudes to dyslexics were the art exhibitions that she arranged, notably at the Mall Galleries in 1994, when 191 works by 73 dyslexic painters, sculptors, designers and architects were put on display. She also organised seminars and teaching experiments and spent hours listening to suffering dyslexics and their parents through the ADT's helpline. Her modest elegance and intelligence did not come free from minor eccentricity. She lived simply in a cloud of tobacco smoke, rarely eating. Her bodyguards were for many years a succession of fine French Bulldogs to whom human ankles were irresistible. She had no children but loved to inspire the young, for some of whom in her later years she delighted in composing engaging horoscopes. Susan Parkinson, born January 8 1925, died October 15 2012