R.S. Peters Archive
In the Summer of 2021 Liverpool Hope University was gifted Richard Stanley Peters’ personal library by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB). The collection includes correspondence, photographs, handwritten notebooks, unpublished research, audio recordings of Peters’ lectures, and over 1000 books. Joint funding enabled Archives & Special Collections to appoint Archivist, Helen Kavanagh in March 2022, to archive and catalogue the collection. Here, she takes us through her discoveries and some of her personal highlights from the archives.
Baby photos, school-boy letters, exam certificates and reams and reams of notes on every philosophical topic imaginable – these are just a few of the delights I’ve come across in the R.S. Peters archive. The largest, and, in my view, most interesting part of this archive is his correspondence. From 1937 to the end of his career, Peters’ letters, both written and received, chart the development of his concerns, disappointments, religious beliefs, and most notably, ambitions. His desire to succeed is evident in his very earliest letters to his ‘Mummy and Daddy’ (who usually resided in India), written while a student at Clifton College. He tells his parents how he wishes for a scholarship to Oxford, and explains that ‘Eton and Balliol is the standard example of a first class education. I have absolutely no hope of getting an open scholarship there’ before admitting he will try anyway. After several terms of striving for distinctions, he was awarded a Neale Scholarship to Queen’s College, notifying his father of the good news by telegram.
(partial scholarship) to study at Queen’s College, Oxford, 1937
The Second World War thwarted his ambitions, and he accounts for his decision to become a conscientious objector in a fascinating letter, illustrative of both his desire to please his father and his evolving religious conviction. ‘Once in the army I might be ordered… to take up arms in a moment of crisis which would mean refusal followed by court martial. In the Society of Friends [Quaker] Corps I would be working purely for humanitarian purposes not military… don’t feel too ashamed of me because I cannot reconcile Christianity and fighting… I cannot fight and remain a Christian… I find myself so much in sympathy with the religious beliefs of the Society of Friends that I am seriously thinking of becoming a Friend (Quaker) myself.’ This he did, and joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in 1940. He was later moved on to do youth work in Walthamstow, and materials from this period survive in RSP/4.
There is evidence in the early letters, too, of the short shrift he paid to intellectual pretence and unclear thinking – a feature which later characterised his own writing. In 1937, at the age of 17, he complained about a book he had been forced to read in English entitled ‘Hydriotaphia’ by Thomas Browne. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve read it (being a moderately sane man)’ he wrote to his father. ‘Books of course have two main objects. ‘1 To show off. 2. To make money. But this book is one long “show off”… The man has made a long list of all he knows about the classics and strung it together in stuff which sounds like a literal translation of Tacitus.’ An amusing essay from around 1938, sent to his parents, has the title ‘No Great Artist Ever Sees Things as They Really Are’. Peters opens with: ‘This is an absurd statement. It is a rather typical epigram which, on first hearing, has a seductive, specious semblance of being very true and witty, but, on closer analysis, means practically nothing.’ These early writings reveal the fledgling steps of a man who was confident in his own clear-headedness, and never shy of calling out naked emperors in the academic world.
In every account of Peters’ life that I have read, one characteristic is consistently highlighted: his industriousness. Peters, it seemed, loved to work. This would certainly explain his rapid rise through the University ranks, from PhD graduate in 1949 to Professor in the Institute of Education at University College London in 1962. His work ethic is also borne out by the sheer volume of letters that were both sent to and received by him during his most fruitful decade, the 1960s.
It was during this time that he wrote his most influential work, ‘Ethics and Education’ and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. There are 100 letters relating to his 1963 inaugural lecture, ‘Education as Initiation’, alone. He corresponds with many notable contemporaries, including fellow academics Michael Oakeshott, Israel Scheffler (‘My Dear Is’) and Shirley and William Letwin, parents of former MP Sir Oliver Letwin.
In 1975, at the age of 56, Richard Peters suffered a major breakdown on a lecture tour of New Zealand. The quantity and tone of his letters shift after this dramatic event. Colleagues offer to pop round for a cup of tea and a gossip rather than haranguing him for not replying to their messages more promptly, as they previously did. Peters ceases to write about his latest projects and opens up about his medication, his struggles with his newly-diagnosed Bipolar Disorder (‘that ghastly affliction’), and the difficulties in his personal life. After such a full, successful, fruitful career, these letters make for painful reading. His disappointment at no longer being able to work as he once did is evident in photographs taken around this time, in which he appears despondent and vacant; and in the speech he made on the occasion of his retirement in 1982. (The audio of this speech has been digitised, along with several other recordings of Peters’ lectures, as part of this project.) In it, he describes himself as ‘a shadow of his former self – alas’, and thanks the many colleagues who ‘carried [his] work in the department as well as their own.’ He also stressed his ‘good fortune’, telling colleagues that ‘I do not have to tell you how much my work in the department has meant to me. I have always been fortunate in that I found writing and research so enjoyable.’ With at least some satisfaction, he states that in the sixties, ‘I was able, I think, to give of my best’.
An excellent 1992 PhD thesis entitled ‘R.S. Peters: A Man and his Work’ survives among his personal papers. The author, Mavourna Collits, inscribed a bound copy to him with the words: ‘with gratitude for a life that made a difference’. After spending several weeks in the pleasure of Richard Peters’ company, this is certainly my impression of his life as well.
by Helen Kavanagh, Project Archivist
October 2022
The R.S. Peters Archive is housed in Archive & Special Collections (A&SC), The Sheppard-Worlock Library at Hope Park campus, Liverpool. The catalogue is available to download from our Finding Aids webpage.
Access is by appointment only, please email specialcollections@hope.ac.uk.
Realms of Gold 