Master of deception

Was he a priest or an academic -- or just a very clever and manipulative liar?

The Professor and the Parson

A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking

Adam Sisman Profile Books 2019 Hb, 240pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781788162111

This is the story of a notorious charlatan – and the famed historian who kept watch.

Our parson is Robert Parkin Peters: academic imposter, defrocked Anglican priest, irrepressible fraud. Our professor is the eminent Hugh TrevorRoper, who crossed paths with the bogus Peters at Oxford in 1958. Though their meeting was brief, and Peters lied directly to TrevorRoper’s face, the former’s outrageous claims fascinated the latter for decades. The file he kept on Peters’s misdeeds forms the basis of Adam Sisman’s crisp biography of a sullied subject.

Sisman discovered Peters when writing a biography of TrevorRoper, and became so intrigued he chose to chronicle Peters’ disgraceful life himself. TrevorRoper had also considered writing an account of Peters, but was dissuaded by the potential for lawsuit. (Peters got combative when his fake credentials met legitimate challenge, growing outraged and volcanic when pressed.) But Peters died in 2005, aged 87, leaving Sisman to take up TrevorRoper’s longobserved subject.

We can perhaps grant Peters sympathy, considering he was born disabled and spent his first nine years in a steel frame. But is this true? It’s doubtful, as it was a hardluck tale spun by Peters himself in a 1959 Sunday Pictorial tellall. Baring his stained soul, Peters admitted to fabricating his past, to being married four times, and to being defrocked, but vowed those days were over. Over 40 years of deception would follow this public repentance: a cascade of marriages (probably eight in all), deportations and shortlyheld academic and church positions. An audacious pretender, he even appeared as “Dr Robert Peters, Minister of Religion” on Mastermind in 1983.

The boldness of it all was what grabbed TrevorRoper. Peters used fake credentials and pious posturing to gain positions of authority, in the Church and in academia. At times he comes over as an underdog eccentric who scammed pompous academics and exposed the vulnerabilities of rarefied institutions.

This might be partly true, but it wasn’t harmless fun. Peters was certainly a predator who deceived many, first and foremost the countless women he manipulated. Sisman chalks it up to narcissistic personality disorder, summarising his subject as a man for whom “the act of worship was also one of selfworship”.

Peters presented himself as a man of letters, as a man of the cloth, but the letters were forged and the cloth was wool pulled over unsuspecting eyes. It’s certainly worth taking a cue from TrevorRoper and keeping tabs on frauds like Peters that come into our own lives.

Mike Pursley

★★★★