Canon Bill Anderson, who has died aged 86, was a Roman Catholic priest, preacher and gifted teacher, spiritual director and verse speaker.

In the 1960s he enriched the lives of many students at Blairs College, Aberdeen, a junior seminary for those studying for the priesthood, where he was a teacher of Latin and literature with a gift for recognising the individuality of each student. It takes a very particular talent to persuade 12-year-old boys in Latin class to wear a towel as a toga and decline a Latin verb in full in an attempt to get it into the week’s top 10 verbs.He was affectionately known to his students, of whom I was one, as Hank, because of his likeness to Hank Marvin of the Shadows.

Bill was born in Glasgow and went to primary school in Lanarkshire. He was educated at George Watson’s college, Edinburgh, and became a Catholic (along with his mother, a GP) when he was a teenager. Bill studied classics at Edinburgh University, then earned a second degree in classics at Cambridge, and gained a baccalaureate in philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he studied for the priesthood.

There was a quietly subversive side to Bill. At Blairs College, any books that students brought from home had to be approved as appropriate. If you brought a book that might not be passed, you could give it to Bill, so he could put his stamp on it and offer to lend it to you.

In the 1970s Bill was a religious affairs correspondent at the BBC in Edinburgh, in the 1980s he was spiritual director at the Scots College in Rome and from 1993 until 2000 he was administrator of Aberdeen RC Cathedral.

Bill’s love of words led to him winning the 1996 Times Preacher of the Year competition (with a sermon on humility), and a gold medal from the Poetry Society for verse speaking. He published his first book, Words and the Word, on how literature can inform preaching, when he was 80. Way beyond retirement age, he was still serving in parishes and teaching Latin at Aberdeen University. He moved to Edinburgh late last year to be in the same care home as his brother John, who survives him.

Many of those who benefited from Bill’s inspired teaching and spiritual guidance, but above all from his profound and compassionate humanity, kept in touch with him throughout his life. As he was no fan of technology these friendships were sustained by visiting or writing to him. In the last two years of his life I sent Bill books he might like and we would discuss them in great detail over the telephone. A great company of former students remain grateful for his profound humanity and its deep impact on their lives.