My bigamous tutor
SIR: I enjoyed Norman Stone’s review of The Professor and the Parson – about Hugh Trevor-roper’s encounters with Robert Parkin Peters, a ‘small-time crook’ with academic pretensions and bigamous inclinations.
In September 1950, I became a freshman at the College of Wooster in Ohio. At the beginning of my second year, two Englishmen joined the faculty.
The first Englishman, a history lecturer, started asking me out. His disproportionate physical appearance always made me think of ToulouseLautrec. I accepted – once. Then Robert Parkin Peters, as he was known, became ill and I heard that his fellow Englishman had offered to bring him meals and do errands while he recovered. Perhaps the helper could also discourage Peters’s unwelcome attentions to me.
So I rang the other Englishman, Barry Floyd, a good-looking geographer who had been my lecturer, and explained the problem. The conversation ended with ‘Well, why don’t we take a walk and talk about it?’ So we did – to the local ice-cream parlour.
In the spring, Robert Parkin Peters was arrested – for bigamy – and was taken away, leaving enormous debts. His credentials and references, on Oxford University stationery, had been so impeccable they had not been questioned. (And no, he had not attended Oxford.)
As for the other Englishman, the good-looking geographer, I married him. We sailed across the Atlantic and, on arrival in England, we saw several The Oldie newspaper headlines about Robert Parkin (the Peters was gone): ‘The Handsome Curate Gave Such a Nice Sermon’; ‘Parson from Liner Held’; ‘Clergyman Gets 4 Months for Bigamy’.
Of course I can be grateful to the same man for indirectly bringing about a meeting that has given me getting on for seven decades of an extraordinarily happy and interesting life. Jean Floyd, Rye, East Sussex