Introducing an occasional series of profiles with extracts from my interviews down the years with well-known people in the Falmouth-Penryn area.
Few figures have made a greater and longer-lasting contribution to Falmouth life than Peter. A Falmouth Grammar School teacher of some 30 years’ standing, he went on in retirement to become a local historian with few if any equals in any era.
That status was earned not least through his collection of countless old photographs, with all captions painstakingly researched and written, and as the author of a series of meticulously compiled local history books.
One of these – it could justifiably be hailed as his crowning glory – was Falmouth In Old Photographs, a creation which he proudly regarded as “the nearest thing possible to a comprehensive history of Falmouth in pictures.”
His lifelong love affair with the town began at the age of 12, when he saw a photo of Falmouth on the calendar in his father’s office at Tilbury Docks.
“It was authentic enough, but I doubted that such a beautiful place actually existed,” he told me.
The doubts disappeared, though, when his father, employed by Green and Silley Weir, was transferred to Falmouth Docks.
“It took me just 24 hours to discover that I never wanted to live anywhere else. Then my fascination with the town and its history just never stopped growing.”
Falmouth In Old Photographs featured more than 200 old photographs. The port and its shipping took up a major part of the book, which realised a 30-year ambition for the former Falmouth auxiliary coastguard.
“Like so many historians,” he reflected, “I repeatedly put off writing it because I was always afraid of something else happening – after I had written it – which I would want to put into the book.
“Then I joined Cornwall Association of Local Historians and a university lecturer told us: ‘So many people collect a mass of material and then die before putting it into print and so all their invaluable research disappears with them.’
“He told me that if I planned to write a book I should go home and start doing so that very night – and I did!”
Two years later, in 1990, the book was published. Around the same time, he retired as hall manager for the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society after seven years in the post, but carried on as its honorary librarian.
