Peter Moloney
Teacher, humorist, broadcaster and former monk who was a hit on the after-dinner speaking circuit
PETER MOLONEY, who has died aged 89, was a former Trappist monk, an African missionary, and a polymath with a wryly humorous streak which he harnessed to become one of Britain’s most popular after-dinner speakers.
In his heyday in the 1960s, he enjoyed a brief television career starring in shows including Moloney On … and Only Moloney, and he appeared with Joan Bakewell on the religious quiz What’s It All About? (BBC Two, 1975).
One of his specialisms was linguistics, and as a Liverpudlian wordsmith he enjoyed claiming a particular affinity with Saxo-celtic Oral Uniate Spoken English (SCOUSE). To his astonishment, an American linguistics professor misinterpreted Moloney’s witticism and visited him after hearing he was the definitive expert.
Acclaiming Moloney the fatherfigure of after-dinner speaking, the Telegraph noted that he could make a 40-minute sermon seem like a comedy routine, promising laughter but with a message: “meringue, but with a nutritious inside”.
With his ascetic cast of features, Moloney managed to combine a seriousness of purpose with a frivolity of approach. It was a winning formula, and he worked hard at it, saying it took him a week to write a minute of speech. “The important thing,” he explained, “is that you have to be psychologically secure about your material.”
Facing an expansive and expectant after-dinner audience, Moloney would have already identified a strong opening, and was fond of recalling some well-worn advice: “If you don’t strike oil in the first three minutes, stop boring.” Knowing of his Liverpool background, people expected him to demonstrate a talent to amuse.
One of his curtain-raisers was about a Liverpool sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs – “Shut Up, Ewes”.
Indeed, Moloney’s material was shot through with references to his home city, where, as he noted with a twinkle, “shoplifting is so rife that some confessional boxes have a sign reading ‘Eight items or less’.” But for all the froth, Moloney could always startle, not least when he turned to observations about Merseyside’s long postwar industrial decline, which he believed had led to “the misery of involuntary poverty and the loneliness of unshakeable wealth”.
“What happened to Liverpool was simple,” he concluded. “The wealth creators just shoved off.” Despite his uncompromising message he invariably succeeded in sending his well-heeled listeners home feeling not berated for their prosperity, but elated at the prospect of sharing it with others.
One of seven children of a Catholic GP and a nurse, Peter Desmond Moloney was born in Liverpool on November 29 1931. At his surgery in Everton Brow, Dr Moloney shared with his son a love of wordplay, entertaining Peter with talk of “hysterical rectomies” and recalling asking an elderly female patient if she was suffering from “stress evacuation”, to be told: “No, burruv gorra touch of the trots.”
Removed from a local prep school allegedly for biting a nun, Peter boarded with his four brothers at Mount St Mary’s at Spinkhill, Derbyshire, a Jesuit school where the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had once taught and where the young Moloney became the under-16 boxing champion. He won a state scholarship to Oxford, but declined it, preferring to remain in Liverpool.
At Liverpool University he was an outstanding linguist, debater, athlete and talented actor, winning admiring reviews for his Gloucester in King Lear. He also held degrees from London and Lancaster universities, as well as the London College of Music and the College of Preceptors, the country’s oldest teaching association.
Calling himself a “novice papist”, in 1953 Moloney shaved his head and became a Trappist monk, spending two years in the silent order at the Cistercian monastery at Nunraw, east of Edinburgh, rising daily for prayer at 2 am.
Advised by the Lord Abbot that his vocation lay elsewhere, he undertook National Service in the Parachute Regiment, staying on as a second lieutenant for active service in Cyprus, Egypt and Jordan.
In the 1960s, working with his young wife as missionaries with the Kiltegan Fathers in Nigeria, Moloney built a secondary school in the village of Ikom and became its principal.
Back in Liverpool, as a young teacher at St Malachy’s School in the Dingle, Moloney recalled a school inspector asking about his class. When one child piped up: “We’re the divvies,” the puzzled inspector turned to Moloney for enlightenment.
Burying his tongue firmly in his cheek, the erudite Moloney unblinkingly explained that “divvy” was derived from divuye, “a term used in the Russian Orthodox Church meaning a searcher who has not quite yet got to his pilgrim’s destination”.
For 20 years he was a lecturer at Liverpool Polytechnic, now Liverpool John Moores University, teaching communication studies, public oratory and English.
With a mixture of what he called “great pleasure and indescribable terror” he started taking engagements as an after-dinner speaker, usually black-tie affairs. Ranging all over the country, he soon became identified as an authentic Scouser who, far from conforming to the popular stereotype, could season an essentially serious presentation with cheeky humour.
“When people hear that you come from Liverpool,” he observed, “they want you to be funny.” He ascribed his success as a communicator to having taught at all levels, from primary to post-doctorate students, and believed the best teachers were – like him – shy extroverts.
Peter Moloney, who was named Benedictine After Dinner Speaker of the Year in 1990, received an honorary fellowship from Liverpool John Moores University in 1999. He was also a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.
He released an album called A Load of Moloney (1967) and wrote two books on Scouse humour, A Plea for Mersey or the Gentle Art of Insinuendo and Football Mad (both 1966).
Peter Moloney married, in 1962, Noelene Mullen, a radiographer, with whom he had four daughters, all of whom were contemporaries at Oxford University. His eldest, Catherine Moloney, qualified as a barrister before becoming a successful crime novelist.
His wife and daughters survive him.