We have been notified of the death of Peter by his wife Rosalind, who writes...

Peter started at Churcher's in 1956, noting how often the weather changed as his bus from Cowplain crossed Butser. Petersfield and the backdrop of the Downs were attractively different from the suburban ribbon development where he lived.  

In 1958 his father's sudden death led to his widowed mother embarking on teacher training and to Peter becoming a boarder: an only child, close to his father and with no other relatives, he may have found Churcher's something of a haven. He was very happy with his classmates: after  a reunion he said to me how nice they had been and how nice they had remained. And he was fascinated by the senior staff, nearly all, as it happened, on the verge of retirement ,with well-established quirks. It was only recently that he told me that his standard night-time remark: "Time to turn on the darkness" was  a quote from his housemaster. A-levels were history, Latin and French: he was not strong on science, and there were other deficiencies: the music master was driven to kick the instrument one piano lesson; and "Bolton, you've ballsed it up again!" came from the woodwork master when boring from one end of a piece of wood failed to meet the boring begun at the other end. 

He moved on to read History, very happily, at University College London, and started to teach in Oswestry, but both staff and pupils were uncongenial, and after a couple of years he tried a different path, taking a diploma in Art History in Edinburgh. When no job emerged in that field, he took a one-year post in a grammar school in Faversham in Kent and found he enjoyed teaching much more second time round. When I met him in 1972 he had just begun work at Leamington College for Boys; after eight years there he became Head of History at Myton School in Warwick, a mixed comprehensive with ambitions. He stayed there until an enticing offer led him and several colleagues to early retirement in 2001. The last term coincided with an Ofsted visit and he was pleased to be signing off with a complimentary report on his teaching, focused on the ready way he involved all the class in discussion. 

Leaving work meant Peter could spend more time pursuing a range of interests. I'll focus on those that came from his urge to collect: cousins, which meant exploring family history; places - we worked through his Pevsners, visiting all but one of the English counties and most of the Scottish/Welsh/Irish; photographs of drain covers, which would have made for an easy chat with Jeremy Corbyn had they ever met; destroyed buildings, which led to his publishing Lost Architectural Landscapes of  [South] Warwickshire; and all the information he could gather about the very unrecorded village of Wellesbourne near Warwick, where we had settled. The outcome was his book about Wellesbourne between about 1830 and 1930, for which he was very pleased to find that a newspaper headline relating to the appalling sewage system there in the 1920's provided an intriguing title: The Naples of the Midlands. 

He always enjoyed keeping up with Churcher's and following its progress. One last link: when I and our three sons needed advice on the music for his funeral service, I turned to his school contemporary, Raymond Fiander, with his background in organ-playing, who had done the same for Peter when we were married.