Peter Holt
Profile
The past came to life in all sorts of amusing and interesting ways when I interviewed Peter Holt for this article, but nothing prepared me for the shock I received when he recounted the life story of his father. Peter Holt senior, born in 1851 into a family of boat-builders on the Bridgewater Canal, had been apprenticed to his father as a carpenter, but aspired to a different life. His mother (Peter’s grandmother) used her Co-Op ‘divi’ to pay for him to study for the ministry at the Unitarian college in Manchester – where, astonishingly, his tutor was the great William Gaskell (husband of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell). I suddenly felt very close to two of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century Unitarian history.
Our Peter was born in the Lancashire colliery and cotton town of Astley in 1918, the son of his father’s second marriage. His step-brother Felix followed their father into the Unitarian ministry, and his step-brother Raymond (‘R.V. Holt’) became Tutor and Librarian at Manchester College Oxford, and author of the important book The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (1938). It was indeed a bookish family: Peter remembers learning to read on his father’s knee at the age of three and, he says, he has been an avid reader ever since.
His father died when Peter was nine years old. Evelyn, his step-sister, got a job as a schoolteacher in Buckinghamshire, and Peter and his mother moved to live with her in the village of Ickford ("three hundred souls, all damned", according to the local rector) – swapping the grimy, go-getting culture of the industrial north for the quiescent rural south. Peter attended the village school until he won a scholarship to Lord Williams’s Grammar School, four miles away in Thame (where, by an odd coincidence, he was in the same class as Bob Eaton). There was no bus from Ickford to Oxford on Sundays, and the family had no car, so Peter, his mother, and step-sister attended services at MCO only once a month, when they could afford the taxi fare. Peter has vivid memories of the Revd. L.P. Jacks, who was at that time both Principal and Minister. As a youth Peter tried other denominations, cycling regularly to attend the Quaker meeting in Amersham, and (in another phase of religiosity) getting confirmed in the Church of England.
In 1937 Peter won a scholarship to read History at University College, Oxford. Armed after graduation with a Diploma of Education, he obtained a post in the Anglo-Egyptian condominium of the Sudan, as a teacher in the only government-run secondary school for Sudanese students, who were almost entirely Muslim. He was happy living in Omdurman, teaching history and learning colloquial and classical Arabic. Subsequently he took charge of the dusty and neglected archives of the former Sudanese administration of the Mahdists, which, until it was overthrown by Anglo-Egyptian forces under Lord Kitchener, had "run like clockwork", according to Peter. His translations of the records formed the basis of his DPhil thesis and subsequent book The Mahdist State in The Sudan (published by OUP: 1957, 1970).
After seven years in Sudan, while on annual leave in the Oxfordshire village of Shipton-under-Wychwood (where his mother was living by then), Peter fell in love with a local farmer’s daughter. They were married in 1952, and Nancy, who had hardly ever travelled beyond her home village, bravely moved to Sudan to set up home with Peter, learning enough kitchen Arabic to run their household and creating a garden from the desert, until, like most of the expatriates, they left the country for good when it gained independence. Peter obtained a lecturing post at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he was to remain for almost 30 years, eventually as Professor of Near and Middle Eastern History. During all this time he and Nancy lived at Great Missenden, and here their two children, Harriet and Andrew, were born. Harriet became an architect and married a GP in Devon; Andrew and his wife live in France with their two children.
When Peter retired from SOAS in 1982, he and Nancy moved to the village of Kirtlington in Oxfordshire, where he still lives. Although Nancy was an Anglican, she was happy to accompany him to Sunday services at our chapel. When she died in January this year, the announcement in the Daily Telegraph recorded that ‘she was kindness personified’. Peter (who says that without her he feels like "a wagon without a wheel") is now, at the age of 88, learning the art of housekeeping. He appreciates the kindness of his neighbours in the village (where, somewhat improbably, the post office is run by a Sudanese), and he takes pleasure in walking in Kirtlington Park and the surrounding countryside.
I enjoyed interviewing Peter for this profile, but in retrospect I realise that our conversation, wide-ranging over many subjects, did not reveal much about his own achievements. I put this down to his natural modesty and reticence. Asked to name his favourite hymn, he chose ‘Lead, kindly light’ – "because it expresses the need that we all feel for help and guidance". Professors are not usually so humble, in my experience – but this one is.
(Professor Holt died in November 2006) Catherine Robinson May 2006