Life Stories
Peter Rutter
Peter Rutter (1951 BA Modern History) died on 10 May 2023 aged 91.
Peter Rutter was born into a poor family in Chester in 1931. His Liverpudlian father had left the family home at 13 to go to sea – informing his own parents from the ship when in the mid-Atlantic and not seeing them again for 2 years – but, after a successful naval career, had fallen on hard times. Peter, the youngest of two brothers, however, gained a scholarship to the prestigious King School in Chester, worked hard and was offered a place at Keble reading History.
Dad loved Keble and loved Oxford. He always had something of the academic about him and fondly remembered gaining funding for a short sabbatical studying Renaissance Italy in Florence. He never lost a love of travelling and visited many more countries over subsequent years, often with a strong historical bent.
On graduating, Peter took a job as a salesman with Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight on the Wirral but he was not good at selling cleaning products and soon left to take up a post as teacher of History at Sir John Deane’s Grammar School in Northwich, Cheshire. Here, he met and fell in love with his Welsh wife, Enid Milsom, at a screening of Those Magnificent Men in the Flying Machines and they married in the depths of one of the coldest winters on record in December 1962, honeymooning at Woodstock and re-visiting Oxford. Peter went back to university in 1968 to qualify as a teacher of Religious Studies and become head of department at the grammar school, remaining there as it changed into Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College and retiring in 1998.
He is remembered fondly by his former pupils, many of whom took to social media following his death to pay tribute to a teacher they remember as kind and patient and “unfailingly positive, passionate, and magnanimous; an engaging man and a top-notch teacher”.
In his later years, Peter moved to Scotland to be close to his grandchildren and conducted genealogical research into his ancestral home of northern Shetland. He never forgot Keble, would talk about it fondly and continued to attend dinners while he was able, although, in a complete disregard for how admissions procedures had changed over the last 60 years, he did offer to ring the college and put in “a good word” when one of his grandchildren expressed an interest in studying at Oxford. He is survived by Enid, now living in Inverness, his two sons Mark and John and grandchildren Finlay, Angus, Islay and Catriona.
Kindly provided by his son Mark Rutter.