The Professor and the Parson, page 5
In the spring of 1945 Peters (still known as Parkins) had commenced his career as a schoolmaster at Lord Weymouth’s Grammar School in Warminster, Wiltshire, where he also served as chaplain and took the part of Bottom in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.* At the end of the first term he eloped with the deputy headmaster’s sister-in-law.
As an inhibited priest Peters was of course forbidden from exercising his ministerial functions, but he seemed unable to resist the urge to do so, even though this risked further episcopal discipline. On Saturday 8 September 1945 a notice in The Times reveals that ‘the Rev. R. Parkins’ would be taking evensong the following day in the chapel of the parish church of St Alban the Martyr, Baldwin Gardens, Holborn. Four months later, on Saturday 12 January 1946, another notice in The Times advertised that ‘the Rev. R. Parkins of All Saints [sic], Almondbury, Huddersfield’ would be taking the 6.30 p.m. service on Sunday, in St Paul’s Cathedral itself. For an inhibited priest to officiate in such a prominent place seems reckless indeed – though at least Parkins seems to have taken the precaution not to mention his more recent stint as assistant curate of nearby St Mary’s, Somers Town.
While Trevor-Roper had been conferring with Hurstfield, Cuthbert Simpson had received a reply from a friend and former colleague, the Reverend Eugene Rathbone Fairweather of Trinity College, Toronto. ‘It looks as if you might well have our old pal on your hands,’ wrote Fairweather, who, like Simpson himself, had come across Peters as a colleague at Trinity College eleven years earlier, in 1948. ‘The name here was “Robert Parkin Peters”, and the name under which he had been ordained in England was “Robert Parkins” … Hence the difficulty of finding him in Crockford.’
Crockford’s Clerical Directory is a Who’s Who for the Anglican clergy. As ‘Parkins, Robert’, Peters had been listed in the 1947 and 1948 issues of Crockford; by the 1949–50 issue he had mutated into ‘Peters, Robert Parkin’.* By assuming another name, similar to but different from the one he had gone under before, he had presumably hoped to make a new start. ‘Peters, Robert Parkin’ was listed in one more issue of Crockford (1951–2); but by the next (1953–4) he had disappeared, and would not be listed there again.
To assist in Peters’s identification Fairweather added a description of the man he remembered:
He was slightly stooped and did not walk easily, because of some old back ailment. It was said that he was more of a cripple than he appeared, and that, for example, he could not reach his shoelaces to tie them. He had a cheerful, round face and a confident manner, an accent that was convincing enough, and a fund of Oxford gossip.
A student who had known Peters in Toronto described him as ‘a little man* with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. His discourse was bombastic and delivered in a loud voice that discouraged interruption.
By this time Trevor-Roper was becoming familiar with Peters’s modus operandi. His methods were recognisable, even if his motives remained obscure. It was obvious that, though unscrupulous, he was not merely venal; he seemed to crave status rather than riches. Some of his actions were hard to explain in rational terms. He put energy and effort into deceptions that might more profitably have been spent on honest endeavour. He must have realised that few of these deceptions were sustainable; sooner or later he would be found out. But he was a fantasist whose reality was defined by his own imagination. His lies carried so much conviction because he believed them himself. As Trevor-Roper came to appreciate, fantasists are not always rational. Rather than adapting to the world as it is, they attempt to adjust the world to become as they would want it to be.
Within weeks of Peters’s hasty departure from Oxford, Trevor-Roper had learned enough of his story to write a three-page summary. It was a complex tale, with more twists and turns than any whodunnit, made more complex still with each new detail. He compiled a curriculum vitae for Peters, which he would repeatedly revise as fresh information arrived in the months and years to follow, as he tracked his quarry from place to place and from country to country. This could then be compared with Peters’s own curricula vitae, no two of which were the same, as these trickled into Trevor-Roper’s hands from sources around the world.
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* He was said to have been arrested at gunpoint for failing to pay his hotel bill (almost a capital offence in Switzerland).
* ‘The Rev. Robert Parkins M.A. (Oxon.) has arrived from Europe to be the new Principal of the Divinity School, when it reopens in July,’ reported the Ceylon Churchman in its May 1947 issue. ‘Fr. Parkins was at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is described as “a most able teacher, a real scholar, and an expert in his line, Theology” … We welcome him and Mrs Parkins, and feel that they will be a valuable asset to our Diocesan life.’
* A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo (1934) was a life of the eccentric author, artist, photographer and fraud Frederick Rolfe, who used the pseudonym Baron Corvo. Subtitled ‘An Experiment in Biography’, the book told the story of the author’s investigation of his subject, presenting aspects of Rolfe’s life and character as they were revealed to him. Trevor-Roper would liken his own ‘quest for Backhouse’ to the quest for Corvo.
* Anglican clergy are generally licensed to preach and administer sacraments by the bishop of the diocese(s) in question. However, if a bishop suspends this licence, the deacon or priest may no longer exercise their respective ministerial functions lawfully in that diocese.
* The Reverend Cyril Boom Bagshaw, a flamboyant character, an actor manqué. A schoolboy who was taught by Parkins in the mid-1940s later recalled him as ‘a man of small stature, [with] piercing blue eyes behind heavy dark-rimmed spectacles, booming voice and colossal nerve.’
* See Gavin Mortimer, Through the Wren Door – the History of Warminster School (2019).
* There was another ‘Peters, R. P.’ in Crockford, one Richard Paul Peters, an apparently blameless character of approximately the same age. He had been ordained in 1939 and was vicar of St Mary’s, Easebourne, in the diocese of Chichester, from 1944. In adopting the alias ‘Robert Parkin Peters’, Robert Parkins may have hoped to exploit any potential confusion between the two, since Anglican priests are often referred to by their initials.
* Peters admitted to being five feet four inches tall.
FOUR
In which the parson pledges to do better
A further search in the Magdalen archives turned up earlier traces of ‘Robert Parkins’. In 1946 the High Master of St Paul’s School had written a letter of enquiry to Boase’s predecessor, Sir Henry Tizard. Somebody called Robert Parkins had applied for a post as a master at St Paul’s, claiming to have a first-class degree in modern history from Magdalen: could Sir Henry confirm this claim? In support of his application Parkins had enclosed three glowing testimonials (albeit on unheaded paper): one from the vicar of St Stephen’s, Carlisle (‘he is beyond doubt a young man of outstanding ability’), another from the Director of Music at Gresham’s School in Norfolk, and a third from Gresham’s headmaster. This last was an especially skilful piece of headmasterese. ‘He has thrown himself wholeheartedly into all aspects of the school’s life,’ it read. ‘He is a most able teacher, a real scholar, and expert in his lines, English and theology. His influence on the boys has been of the best, and he has never satisfied himself, when talking to them, with empty religious sentiments, but has been at great pains to instruct them with no little depth.’ As well as being ‘an amusing and interesting companion’, this paragon was ‘quite tireless in all kinds of outside work. He has given up all his spare time to help the clergy of the district, and on some Sundays he has taken six or seven services a day without remuneration in order to help the local parishes where the Vicar has been ill or short-handed.’ An unusual further commendation was that Parkins had taken an interest in the diocese of Gambia.*
Tizard knew that no Robert Parkins had been at Magdalen. As soon as he received the enquiry from the High Master of St Paul’s, he had written by registered post to the then headmaster of Gresham’s, M. J. Olivier (a cousin of the actor Laurence Olivier): ‘Can you very kindly tell me whether Mr Parkins represented himself as a member of Magdalen College when he obtained a temporary post at Gresham’s School in 1945?’
Olivier’s reply had described Parkins’s case as ‘tragic’. He had applied for a post as assistant master teaching history and divinity at Gresham’s in April 1945 – a time when, wrote Olivier, ‘I was absolutely desperate for men’. He had offered Parkins the post, commencing in the autumn term, ‘as I would have done to almost anybody who had not got a criminal record or proven insanity’. As Parkins’s application had said nothing about a degree, Olivier had assumed that he was ‘not a Varsity man’. After he had been at Gresham’s a while, however, Parkins had bashfully revealed that he had an MA from Oxford – not from Magdalen, but from Keble. Then another master had arrived at the school who himself had been at Keble, and a brief conversation between the two had been enough to make it obvious that Parkins had never been a student there. Soon after Parkins had left, for reasons Olivier did not specify.
He had provided Parkins with a testimonial, though not, it seems, the one submitted to St Paul’s. His own had been more cautiously phrased; indeed, since Parkins’s departure, Olivier had told Tizard, he had been ‘more and more overwhelmed by requests from other headmasters for an amplification of my testimonial’. The tragedy was that Parkins had proved to be ‘a very good and efficient master’:
He has this mania for giving himself a degree, and there are no limits to which he will not go to try to convince people that he has one. It used to be a third in theology at Keble. It is now a first in history at Magdalen. I expect it will soon be a Fellowship at All Souls.
M. J. Olivier’s successor as Gresham’s headmaster, Logie Bruce Lockhart,* would be more forthcoming about the reasons for Parkins’s sudden departure. In a telephone conversation, he told Trevor-Roper that Parkins had disappeared from Gresham’s after a colleague, Major Kerridge, who ran the school OTC, had complained of his ‘unwanted and improper advances’ towards his daughter. There was also a rumour that he had driven boys around the locality in a baby Austin to collect money, supposedly for local charities, which he had pocketed for himself.
From Gresham’s Parkins had headed north, to take up a post as Rector of St Columba’s Episcopal Church, Grantown-on-Spey, in the Scottish Highlands – though how he was able to do this without a bishop’s licence is unknown. A little later a story reached Gresham’s that Parkins had extorted a very large sum of money, rumoured to be in the region of £2,000,* from a pair of old ladies at a fishing hotel in the Highlands.
In August 1946, at St Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Fort William, Parkins married Miss Margaret Gladdish, a twenty-two-year-old nurse from London, whom he may have met in 1944, while serving as a volunteer fire-watcher at University College Hospital. She had not accompanied him on his travels since, but perhaps they had kept in touch by correspondence. Now the lovers were together at last, united in a sacred bond. But it quickly became known that there was an impediment: Parkins was still legally bound to an earlier wife, formerly Miss Hilda Brunton, a schoolmistress from Warrington, whom he had married three years earlier, in 1943. Parkins was arrested, charged with bigamy† and released on bail. It was then that, forfeiting his bail of £20, he had fled abroad on a whirlwind tour that (as Trevor-Roper had told Joel Hurstfield) had taken him around the world, via Switzerland (where he had served as chaplain in the Anglican church of Lausanne), France, Malta, Egypt, India, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, and possibly other places, too, never staying anywhere longer than a few months. He applied for admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York, but was refused an entry visa by the US authorities. While a temporary teacher (for one term only) at St Peters’s College, a school in South Australia, he had contrived to receive an MA (ad eundem) from the University of Adelaide, where he was lecturing in the Department of Adult Education. This was, of course, on the basis of his claim to be an MA Oxon. An ad eundem degree is a courtesy or honorary title granted by one college or university to an alumnus of another.
He appears to have been in a hurry to leave Australia, implying in letters to the Provost of Trinity College (part of the University of Toronto) that he would accept any kind of post even if the stipend were low, and even suggesting that he would be willing to travel to Canada without a firm offer of employment. Asked how he could be in a position to leave his teaching post in Australia in mid-term, he provided an unconvincing excuse. But on the strength of his claim to have a first in theology from Magdalen, and the usual impressive testimonial, he was taken on to the staff of Trinity as a lay theologian. Once there, Parkins rapidly made himself unpopular by his haughty manner towards students and other inferiors (‘Sir, I do not think that I know you’), which gave widespread offence, even in an era when Englishmen felt able to be routinely condescending towards Canadians. Gavin White, then an arts student in his final year of study, assumed that all Englishmen were like Parkins; later, relieved to discover otherwise, he would conclude that much of Parkins/Peters’s success in convincing people of his bona fides depended on his rudeness. ‘He was not pleasant in personal relationships,’ White would write:
He would work himself into a position of authority and then use that position to put people down. And nothing he ever wrote suggested that he had academic ability. He was a good study in the theatrical sense. He could mimic and use other people’s ideas, but had none himself. He was just a talking parrot.
When a student in one of his classes had boldly remarked that the wording of his lectures seemed very similar to the text of a book by the theologian E. L. Mascall, Peters had brazenly turned the accusation on its head: ‘It was vewy naughty of Ewic to use my lectures in his book without acknowledgement.’
By now he was calling himself Robert Parkin Peters and had contrived to be re-ordained under his new name – not, as he had told Trevor-Roper, in Washington State, by the Bishop of Olympia, but in Canada, by the Bishop of Toronto. This, so far as Peters was concerned, wiped the slate clean. But such was the complexity and the scope of the web he had woven that he remained vulnerable to anyone who might have known him in a previous life. On the staff at Trinity was a man who had been a resident in the same Toc H hostel during the war; whenever he came into the senior common room, Peters lowered his (usually booming) voice, and left as soon as he could find an excuse for doing so. Then, still in his first term, he was introduced to the formidable wife of Archdeacon Fotheringham, a Scottish Episcopalian in the divinity faculty. She insisted that she had seen him somewhere in Scotland, notwithstanding his denial that he had ever set foot in that country, with its implication that nobody with any sense would do so. Her persistence prompted the Provost of Trinity to enquire into Peters’s credentials. ‘I have reason to suspect that Mr Peters is misrepresenting his qualifications,’ the Provost wrote to the President of Magdalen, ‘and I shall be glad of any information you can give me.’ The Provost had also approached Lambeth Palace, to learn that the Archbishop of Canterbury had castigated Peters as ‘this criminous clerk’.* This reply, together with the response from Magdalen, and from the university Registrar, who stated firmly that nobody of that name had taken a degree from Oxford since at least the eighteenth century, persuaded the Provost to dispense with Peters’s services after only one term.
Peters fled Toronto at the end of the year, leaving behind a mass of debts. The student newspaper of the University of Toronto printed a limerick to mark his departure:
There once was a tutor at Trinity
Who no longer is teaching Divinity
For to talk about Gawd
Without M.A. Oxfawd
Is the most egregious assinity.
Peters’s subsequent peregrinations across North America over the following five years were summarised in the reply sent to Cuthbert Simpson by his friend at Trinity College, the Reverend Eugene Fairweather:
After leaving us he served in Pittsburgh† … and then appeared more or less in succession in Hamilton, Vancouver and Victoria (first under the aegis of some ‘Old Catholic’ sect and then as a star student in the Provincial Normal School*), in Montreal (as a schoolmaster and featured preacher at the Church of the Advent, Westmount), in Detroit and Ann Arbor … and at the College of Wooster …
Having run up significant debts in Pittsburgh, Peters had made his way back across the border again, to Hamilton, Ontario, and fell in with the Old Catholics there, who appointed him their archimandrite, or chief representative – ‘Exarch of the West’ – in British Columbia. (An archimandrite is an honorific rank, only one level lower than a bishop, requiring celibacy.) Now styling himself ‘Monsignor Peters’, he was photographed in front of a large house for the Vancouver News Herald. The accompanying story announced that ‘Mgr. Peters’ had come to the Greater Vancouver area to establish an interdenominational college, to be known as ‘The College of St Francis’, described as ‘a training school for young people who want to do Christian and social work at home or overseas’. The monsignor had launched an appeal to raise $10,000, requested that donations should be sent to him personally, and helpfully provided an address in Vancouver. A few days later the Roman Catholic archdiocese in Vancouver issued a statement dissociating itself from this venture. On 8 September 1950 the Vancouver News Herald printed a further story under the heading ‘Warning Issued Against Fund Raiser’. Peters complained, but it was too late: ‘The College of St Francis’ was stillborn. Peters was then reported to be seeking work as a teacher in Cloverdale, British Columbia. While in the locality he kindly offered to validate some old documents for the university library in Vancouver, which were later found across the border in Seattle, on sale in an antiquarian bookshop.
