Peter Iddon: A cricketer, a teacher and an inspiration

As I recall, Peter had been to Merchant’s prep school and knew how the place worked. Such knowledge is valuable and I’m sure I never possessed it. How does one make sense of a joint which lies around five miles from Goodison Park and Anfield yet in which boys were beaten for playing football at lunchtime? Rugby, of course, was a secular religion, which was tough on those of us who had never played it, and the introductory coaching we received was so sympathetic that it fostered a dislike of the game in me that it took a few winters of watching the Five Nations to remove.

Maybe I should make it clear in the strongest terms here that Merchant Taylors’ soon became a very different school from the somewhat spartan place in which I struggled to settle and others may have very different recollections of that era in any case. It is now a forward-looking, high-quality institution which many of my friends – and some Lancashire cricketers – attended. One of my firmest friends taught there. And no one should think that Merchants in the late 1960s was very different from many other public schools of that time; eventually they changed or they went bust.

Peter, of course, seemed perfectly at home. He had already received plenty of rugby and cricket coaching and was one of the best sportsmen in his year. But along with these relatively normal skills, there came – and we saw it then – a maturity and a capacity for leadership that put him far beyond his contemporaries. Think Ralph in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. And so, of course, he later became head-boy.