John Peel: RIP

[aclivity]

I was a bit apprehensive of anyone who takes such a pseudonym filling Peelies spot (I thought it was going to be on Home Truths at first! The Horror!) but having read something in a newspaper about him recently, his musical taste seems pretty good.

Big shoes to fill, Mr. Da Bank, but good luck to you.

[Mr T.]

Widow to finish Peel's life story
By Hugh Davies
(Filed: 02/12/2004)

John Peel's widow is to complete the autobiography the DJ was writing before his death from a heart attack in Peru, aged 65.

Sheila Ravenscroft, a former schoolteacher, whom Peel affectionately called "The Pig", will finish the book with her children - Alexandra, William, Florence and Thomas.

She has agreed to add about another 70,000 words to the 50,000 completed by her husband. Publication of the book is due next October.

Peel's brothers - Alan, 57, who bears a strong resemblance to the DJ, and Francis, 63 - are expected to help.

Alan Peel, the managing director of Eagle Media, a television documentary company, followed his brother to Shrewsbury public school, and recalled that John had given him useful advice about sex: "Always remember that girls like it too." They also shared a love of Anthony Powell's novel A Dance to the Music of Time.

Peel's widow said yesterday that she had "thought long and hard" about the book, for which her husband signed a £1.6 million deal after a bidding war in April 2003.

She said: "This book was very important to him, and he was very excited about writing it. We decided it would have been a terrible waste to have let all of his work so far go unpublished and feel he would have wished us to complete it."

Larry Findlay, the managing director of Transworld publishers, is working with the family "to publish the book that I know John himself would have wanted".

Peel is said to have completed a large part of the book, but fellow DJ Andy Kershaw said he had been told that much of Peel's work had been lost in a computer accident.

Although distraught, Peel's wife of 30 years managed every aspect of his funeral service at their church in Suffolk where she was a bellringer, from the songs he loved, such as Roy Orbison's Running Scared, to the red roses and red gladioli she wore on their wedding day.

The BBC is still debating about who will replace Peel on his Radio 4 show Home Truths. Jenny Abramsky, the director of BBC Radio, said "great care" would be taken to find the perfect successor.

[Mr T.]

Trio replaces 'unique' John Peel

The BBC has decided that filling the late John Peel's shoes is too much for any one person, and yesterday announced that three DJs specialising in Welsh, black and ambient music would take over his late-night slot on Radio 1.

The new show, One Music, will be dedicated to discovering new music in tribute to Peel, who always championed unknown acts.

The veteran DJ died at 65 from a heart attack three months ago. His three replacements -Huw Stephens, Ras Kwame and Rob Da Bank (Robert Gorham) - will each broadcast one night a week from Tuesdays to Thursdays between 11pm and 1am.

Andy Parfitt, the Radio 1 controller, said Peel was unique and could never be replaced, but he hoped the new triumvirate would keep his legacy alive.

[Mr T.]

In his own words, the teenage rape of John Peel
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 09/10/2005)

John Peel, the disc jockey, wrote shortly before he died about his rape by an older pupil at boarding school.

In his autobiography, serialised from today in The Sunday Telegraph, he speaks of "systematic sexual abuse" at Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, which he attended from the age of 13.


John Peel said he became inured to abuse at school

Peel wrote of the sexual demands made on new boys from "study monitors", who were four or five years older.

The BBC disc jockey, who died a year ago at the age of 65 from a heart attack while holidaying in Peru, wrote: "Another study monitor obliged me to perform an even more unwelcome service during what was supposed to be a period for doing homework. This period, during which we were confined to our studies, was called 'top schools', but for my study monitor it was 'hand jobs'.

"If for some reason my tormentor didn't require a hand job, possibly because he had already compelled another small boy to give him one, he loaned me to one of his two friends and I was obliged to service them instead.

"This man - and although it is tempting to name him, I'm not going to - was, I think, the only genuinely amoral person I've ever met. Towards the end of our time together, he compelled me to agree to meet him in a public toilet in the cemetery on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, where he raped me. Oddly enough, much as I hated the experience, I think I had become so accustomed to systematic sexual abuse that I wasn't especially traumatised by the experience.

"However, it was many years before I could bring myself to tell anyone what had happened to me, and when I did tell Sheila, my wife, one afternoon in the Eighties as we drove through Shrewsbury and past the cemetery toilet block, she found it, I think, more upsetting than I ever did. We have not spoken of it again …

"It's hard to believe it now, I admit, but when I was 13 or 14 I was kinda cute and therefore craved by quite a few older boys. They were not, generally speaking, interested in penetration, but more, as we have seen, in what we have come to know as relief - massage or even, in the absence of the below-stairs staff or hunting dogs they possibly slept with at home, warmth.

"Having experienced few physical expressions of affection at home - something that would have been true, I imagine, of almost every boy in the house - I was rather flattered by these attentions and was aware, too, that the only people to whom I could turn for help were, by and large, the very people who yearned to cuddle me."

The Sunday Telegraph traced Peel's oldest and closest friend, "Sparrow" Harrison, who said that the disc jockey had told him about the rape two years ago over a pint in a pub near Peel's home in Suffolk. "I was rather touched John told me something so personal, but I never spoke about it to anyone else," said Mr Harrison, 66.

He said that he knew the identity of the man who was alleged to have raped Peel shortly after he arrived at the school in 1953. Out of curiosity, Mr Harrison traced the alleged abuser and discovered that he was living in Wales.

Mr Harrison refused to identify the man and said he had not put Peel's allegations to him because the events had happened so long ago. He said: "I had known the man socially because we had lived in the same area and, even before John told me his story, I never liked him - whereas John was such a decent, humble man. Anyway, I am told that life for John's abuser has not gone according to plan."

Mr Harrison, a businessman and farmer, who lives in north Wales, was not a pupil at Shrewsbury, an all-boys school where fees are now more than £7,500 a term. However, he and Peel attended Woodlands prep school in Deganwy, north Wales. In the book, Peel says that Sparrow, as a talented boxer, was "a useful friend at Woodlands" where bullying was "pretty much endemic".

Peel, whose real name was John Ravenscroft, had time to write only half of his memoirs, Margrave of the Marshes, but the work was completed by his wife and their four children within months of his death.

[Mr T.]

John Peel, the tracks of my life
(Filed: 09/10/2005)

In the first exclusive extract from the autobigraphy that he was writing when he died, John Peel describes growing up and life at boarding school

I was born, I have always told people, at the age of four in a woodcutter’s cottage in the Black Forest, but the disappointing truth is that I was born in Heswall Cottage Hospital a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War.



You’d be amazed at the number of people who’ve suggested some sort of link between my birth and the outbreak of war. “So it was your fault,” they’ve chortled, but I’ve never laughed – any more than I have at the people who have greeted me in more recent years with the words, “D’yer ken John Peel?” Several of these are buried in shallow graves on B roads off the A505. The police have confessed themselves baffled.

Naturally I don’t remember much about the war. Father was away, eyeball to eyeball with the Germans in North Africa. Mother was in her bedroom. Sometimes I’d be carried to the air-raid shelter at the top of the garden, out of the French windows from the sitting-room, across the crazy paving and up the former tennis court we called the Big Lawn. Later, I would be joined by Francis Houghton Leslie Ravenscroft; conceived, it was explained to me years later, in London, when Father was half-way home on leave. On the big blue radio in the air-raid shelter we heard, without understanding what it meant, of the war in Europe. Somehow, though, we understood that the words on the radio were linked with the strange powdered foods we ate and with the fact that Father wasn’t there. Father, I decided, probably didn’t exist at all, remaining, for the first six years of my life, a figure as remote and improbable as the characters in The Blue Fairy Book.

One afternoon when we were on holiday in Tre-Arddur Bay, Anglesey, we heard a motorcycle engine at the top of the road and ran to the gateway to watch it pass. To our surprise and, I think, mild alarm, the bike slowed and turned into the driveway. Mother was washing her hair in a sink and I ran in shouting, “Mummy! Mummy! There’s a funny-looking man at the door.” She looked out of the window, burst into tears and said, “That’s your father.” Seconds later I stood with Francis looking up at the man we now thought of as our motorcyclist. So this was what a father looked like.

Years later I found myself standing in the same spot retelling this story for a television crew. As I told it, I could feel something ungovernable rising within me and fancied that I would have some sort of seizure at the completion of my account. In the event, I gave a rather theatrical low moan and slumped to the ground in tears. The television people mercifully edited this collapse from their film. I can only assume that their thoughtfulness was due to a lack of experience in the ways of television.

At the end of the summer of x I went to Shrewsbury School. I was left in what was styled a waiting house. This was across the road from the House for which I was intended, Riggs Hall, and was superintended by one A.J. Hagger.

Hagger’s response to just about everything I got wrong was to beat me. These were fairly informal beatings, during which both of us remained fully clothed throughout. I didn’t much care for being beaten and never developed a taste for it later in life either, but I certainly was used to it. At home, Mother had beaten me regularly from an early age (she hadn’t wanted me to grow up to be a sissy, she explained years later). These beatings were informal in that there was no prescribed number of blows, but formal in that they came about as the result of a rather horrid ritual. If I was considered by Nanny to have transgressed in some way, she would make her way to the bottom of the stairs and shout the words, “Are you there?” If my mother heard her from where she lay on her bed reading romantic fiction, she would fling herself out of the room, along the hall and down the stairs, grabbing 1) a belt and 2) me, on the way. Then I was hauled into the dining-room, bent over the table and beaten until Mother grew weary of it. No questions were asked. It sufficed that Nanny had shouted, “Are you there?” If Mother failed to hear the question, I escaped unpunished. There seemed to me to be something attractively medieval about this form of justice.

Most of the beatings I received from Mr Hagger were for offences which would have been offences in no other place on Earth – except, perhaps, for another public school.

We new boys had a great deal more to do, needless to say, than school work. We also had to cope with “douling”, colour tests and, unless we were fortunate enough to be grossly deformed, with being loved.

Douling, my clever friends told me, derived from the Greek word for a slave, and in your first two years at school you could be compelled to do almost any task by either a House prefect – they were called monitors – or your study monitor. These tasks could range from boiling an egg to giving someone a hand job. Monitors summoned douls by stepping into the corridor and yelling either “Dddooooooouuuuuuulll” or “Doul doul doul doul doul doul.” For one you had to run to the monitor no matter what you were doing, for the other you ran only if you weren’t already engaged in school work or on a task for some other slave-master. When all the available douls were lined up, the monitor would select usually the last to arrive or, if they were so minded, the cutest, to clean shoes, press cadet corps uniforms, run somewhere with a message. These things were just about tolerable.

Intolerable were the demands made by study monitors. A study might consist of three or four citizens, with the senior being the monitor and the junior the doul. A boy called Cox was my study monitor for a year and among the tasks he assigned me on a regular basis was that of boot-polishing his bicycle tyres. When he adjudged them clean and shiny enough, he would take his bike for a short spin in the mud before telling me to start again. Strong though the temptation might have been, telling him to go f––– himself would have resulted in serious punishment. However, I’m currently operating under no such constraints, so: Go f––– yourself, Cox.


Peel after he left Shrewsbury School

Another study monitor obliged me to perform an even more unwelcome service during what was supposed to be a period for homework. This period was called ‘‘top schools’’, but for my study monitor it was ‘‘hand jobs’’. If for some reason my tormentor didn’t require a hand job, possibly because he had already compelled another small boy to give him one, he loaned me to one of his two friends and I was obliged to service them instead.

This man – and although it is tempting to name him, I’m not going to – was, I think, the only genuinely amoral person I’ve ever met. Towards the end of our time together, he compelled me to meet him in a public toilet in the cemetery on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, where he raped me. Oddly enough, much as I hated the experience, I think I had become so accustomed to systematic sexual abuse that I wasn’t especially traumatised by the experience.

It was many years before I could bring myself to tell anyone what had happened to me, and when I did tell Sheila, my wife, one afternoon in the 1980s as we drove through Shrewsbury and past the cemetery toilet block, she found it, more upsetting than I ever did. We have not spoken of it again.

It’s hard to believe it now, I admit, but when I was 13 or 14 I was kinda cute and therefore craved by quite a few older boys. They were not, generally speaking, interested in penetration, but more in what we have come to know as relief massage or even, in the absence of the below-stairs staff or hunting dogs they possibly slept with at home, warmth. Having experienced few physical expressions of affection at home – something that would have been true, I imagine, of almost every boy in the House – I was rather flattered by these attentions and was aware, too, that the only people to whom I could turn for help were, by and large, the very people who yearned to cuddle me.

Although the public-school system was supposed to be awash with what we now know to be paedophiles, I never, despite my tip-tilted nose and prettily turned ankles, attracted the attention of lascivious members of staff. In fact, I never heard of anyone who had, and the only example of what we might style “inappropriate behaviour” occurred when a young, brilliant and odd master was caught in the park on the town side of the Severn with a small boy perched on his chest. I even survived unmolested the sharing of a tent on an ITC camp (ITC = Initial Training Corps) in Wales with a housemaster who was to go on to achieve notoriety at another public school for his near manic enthusiasm for TDSU beatings (TDSU = Trousers Down, Shirt Up). In fact, in sharing with me some small part of his considerable knowledge and understanding, this master made me realise for the first time that there was pleasure to be derived merely from knowing stuff.

My unspeakable loveliness was not, alas, enough to stop me from falling foul of the billions of rules and regulations that hedged about our lives. Most of these referred to bizarre privileges granted to older boys – there were paths that could only be used by school prefects, known as praeposters, and other paths on which you couldn’t whistle, or talk, or have your hands in your pockets, or run until you had been at the school for two, or three, or four years – but we were also supposed to be able to identify, when ordered to do so by a boy in a position of authority, members of staff, their subjects, classrooms, wives, children, addresses and even, where appropriate, their pets. On Sunday evenings, cowering first-years were tested as to their knowledge and understanding of these arcane matters by the Head of House. These tests were known as Colour Tests, and if you failed them, you were beaten.

The beatings were splendidly ritualised. The beatee was obliged to proceed at ten o’clock to the landing on which the Cadet Corps uniforms were kept. The victim would then bend over the cupboard and the Head of House would administer four or six strokes, depending on the gravity of the offence, with a split bamboo to a pyjama’d backside. The split bamboo was chosen, it was said, because if the cane was turned in such a way that the split landed at 90 degrees to the pert bottom awaiting its arrival, it would hurt upon impact, then, having spread and pinched the skin, hurt again upon being withdrawn. After the beating, which you were expected to endure without crying out, you thanked the Head of House for his attentions, returned to your dormitory and the rest of the House could start breathing again, having temporarily ceased breathing lest by doing so they missed any whimpering you might have allowed yourself. Unfortunately, you could not discuss what had just passed with your friends because talking after lights out was forbidden. The punishment for talking after lights out was, as you may have guessed, a beating.

Within the past year I have received several letters from a former Head of House inviting me to contribute funds for a scholarship to be set up in the name of our Housemaster, R.H.J. Brooke. In his first letter he reminded me, lest I had forgotten, that he might have been compelled from time to time to beat me. He expressed what I took to be mild regret that this had been the case, and when I wrote back explaining that I didn’t have the reserves of wealth that he assumed I did, I told him by way of consolation that I bore no grudges, understanding that he was only, after all, obeying orders.

I’m not in touch with anyone who was at Shrewsbury with me. I think the truth is that I was not much liked at Shrewsbury – one former acquaintance whose opinion of me was sought by an enterprising television researcher said, rather memorably, that “John wasn’t the sort of boy you invited home for the weekend.” I’m not entirely certain what the implications of that phrase are, but they cannot be good.

I had some friends, of course. Names such as Edwards, Saltmarsh and Stephens come to mind, but they were, in the main, much cleverer than I, were never in the same form, and presumably went on to university, then took over family businesses before becoming Lords Lieutenant of counties. My principal consolation therefore from the years spent at Shrewsbury was the huge benefit I derived from being in a House – and, for a memorable year, a form – presided over by R.H.J. Brooke.

Brooke was a man I – along, I think, with almost everyone in the House and many other boys in the school – absolutely adored. I think that on some level he recognised that there is a sort of curious success to be derived from what appears to be failure, that if you end up doing something that brings you great happiness, as I have, you have achieved this as much as the result of your perceived “failures” as of your perceived “successes’’.

A boy at a private school in the 1950s had extraordinarily little control over his life. Everything appeared preordained, predestined, and it dawned on me, as I battled through school and on into the Army, that the only available control mechanism lay in failure – failure to pass the exams necessary to take me on to university, failure to pass the exams necessary to take me on to officer training.

Brooke, perhaps growing desperate for something positive to write about me, suggested in my report for the x term of 195x that “Journalism would seem a good career for him, for he has a sort of specious literary gift of the gab which might well stand him in good stead.” At the time, I thought nobody had ever said anything nicer about me – and suspect that Brooke would have known that as he wrote my report.

[Mr T.]

From teenage kicks to home truths
(Filed: 06/10/2005)

The broadcaster John Peel was familiar to millions, but his laidback style concealed a complex family man. Sheila Ravenscroft, his widow, talks to Mick Brown about Peel's loveless childhood, his public school days and their enduring marriage

The living arrangements in the warm and comfortable Suffolk cottage that radio listeners came to know as "Peel Acres" perfectly encompass the two abiding obsessions in John Peel's life: his family, and his music.

John and Sheila at their wedding in 1974

From the kitchen - pine furnishings, an Aga, a framed picture of the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly occupying pride of place - a stable door leads to the room that was Peel's personal sanctuary, the walls lined with thousands upon thousands of records; files, reference books and demo tapes covering every inch of the shelves and floor, all of them untouched since his death 12 months ago.

It was here, says his wife, Sheila, that John was at his happiest, music playing at full volume, a stopwatch in his hand, jotting down timings, the door open to the kitchen where he could see the family talking, laughing and arguing.

One does not have to spend long in Sheila Ravenscroft's company to realise that whatever else John Peel might have achieved in his life, in marriage he was deeply blessed. She is a handsome woman in her fifties, immensely hospitable, forthright, quick to laugh, and, it is immediately apparent, the family's pillar of strength. Their eldest son William, 29, is in Newcastle, where he now lives. Thomas, 25, is in London, working on a television film about his father's favourite records, to be broadcast in November. Florence -"Flossie" - 23, busies herself around the kitchen, preparing lunch. Alexandra - "Danda" - who is 27, has come over from her home in Ipswich with her angelic two-year-old son, Archie. "John so wanted to have grandchildren," says Sheila, "and I was so glad he was able to have Archie before he died."

Radio 1 is turned to a volume higher than you might find in the normal household, broadcasting an interview with Alexandra about "John Peel Day" on October 13, when more than 200 bands - many of whom Peel championed in his role as the station's longest serving disc-jockey - will be playing across the country in celebration of his life and contribution to music, with the proceeds going to two of John's favourite charities, Shelter and Médecin Sans Frontières.

The past 12 months, says Sheila, have been "kind in a way", the shock of John's death somehow softened by celebrating his life - bringing to completion the autobiography that he had begun but was unable to finish, and latterly involving herself in the plans for the various anniversary celebrations that confirm Peel's status as the most surprising of British broadcasting institutions. "I suppose the truth is that it still hasn't really sunk in," she says. "I can talk about John quite easily without getting upset, and it seems the most normal thing to do. It's not until everyone's gone that it suddenly hits you that the whole reason any of this is happening is because he's no longer here. But had John died and nothing happened I'd probably be in a terrible state. So it has been very therapeutic."

Peel had been planning to write his autobiography - which he'd whimsically entitled Margrave of the Marshes - for some years, but he always had a tendency to leave things to the last minute. Sheila and the children bought him a word-processor, but John, she says, hated being taught to do anything, and for a year it gathered dust until he finally resolved to master it himself. By the time of his death he had written around a third of the book, up to the point when he first broke into radio while living in America.

It had not occured to Sheila to complete the book until she read a newspaper item, shortly after his death, saying that the family planned to do precisely that. "It was actually the last thing on my mind . . . It was the children, not me, who said: 'Come on, if we all get together, we can do it.' " What finally decided it for them, she jokes, was William's observation that John's section ends in America with an anecdote about him giving a friend a lift to a brothel. "William said we had to finish it, because they couldn't bear anybody to think that's where John and I met."

Reading Margrave of the Marshes one is strongly reminded of Peel the broadcaster: the laconic, amused tone, the self-deprecating asides, the mixture of erudition and whimsy. But one is also struck by what a deeply complicated man John Peel was - a man whose very name was a fabrication (he was born John Ravenscroft; John Peel was his DJ's nom de guerre); who did everything he could to sweep over the traces of his upper-middle-class upbringing; a public figure of enormous popularity who was forever racked by self-doubt; and a man whose devotion to family life was in diametric opposition to the emotional neglect he had experienced as a child. Peel's father, Robert, was serving in the Second World War as an Army captain when John was born in 1939, later returning to take the helm of the family's cotton-broking business. John followed the family tradition of being sent away to prep school, and then Shrewsbury - an experience that left him with an abiding feeling of rejection, compounded by his parents' divorce when he was 16.


Peel called his wife 'the Pig' because of her snorting laugh

A telling photograph once appeared in the Radio Times of Peel on his father's knee; it was the only photograph in existence, Peel claimed, "of either of my parents actually holding me, or indeed touching me. They weren't big on touch." His father, says Sheila, was "an exceedingly nice man", but incapable of affection; while his mother "was enormous fun, but more like a mad aunt than a mother". In the book, Peel notes simply that she was overweight and drank rather more than was good for her. "Yes, he was quite hard on her," Sheila admits. "There was an element of him being nervous of her. But then she used to say that she was nervous of him. I think she felt that nobody had ever told her what to do with children."

In later life, John would sometimes stay over with her at her house in Notting Hill (improbably, for a while she lived with the actor Sebastian Shaw, who played Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi). On one occasion, John left a pair of socks behind. His mother presented them to him on his next visit, neatly pressed and with a cardboard sleeve bearing the legend "Hand-laundered by Harriet Ravenscroft".

"John never wore the socks again," says Sheila, "just kept them in his drawer with the little label. They're still there."

At Shrewsbury he found the arcane rituals of public school baffling and annoying, and the demands placed on the younger boys by prefects, or monitors as they were called, intolerable. In the book, he describes how one monitor would demand to be masturbated - a sexual harrassment that culminated in a humiliating incident when Peel was actually raped in a public toilet in a cemetery on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.

Sheila says that throughout their marriage he would often talk of his schooldays, but did not mention the rape until three or four years before his death, when the family were sitting in the garden talking and John "suddenly came out with it". She has no idea why he had never mentioned it earlier: "It is rather bizarre. I'm not lessening the importance of it, but I think at public schools at that time there would have been a lot of the kind of treatment that John received, and he regarded it as almost part of school life."

Peel must have retained some residual affection for the school, she says, because he often found an excuse to go back. "It became a family joke. If we were driving anywhere in a 50-mile radius of Shrewsbury he always found a reason to detour. And before you knew where you were you'd be in the grounds of Shrewsbury School. 'That's where the Fives courts are,' he'd say, 'and that's the lawn you couldn't stand on unless you were a prefect.' In more recent years, it would be: 'And that's where I was raped.' It became part of the tour."

After Shrewsbury, Peel did National Service as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being packed off to America by his father, ostensibly to learn the cotton business. It was there that his encyclopaedic knowledge of blues and rock 'n' roll, and what passed, in Texas at least, as a Liverpudlian accent - a distinct asset at the height of Beatlemania - gained him his first job in radio. He returned to Britain in 1966 and found work on the pirate station Radio London, before becoming one of the first disc-jockeys to be recruited to the new BBC Radio 1 - where he was to spend the rest of his life.

He had been there a year when, in 1968, he and Sheila met. He was appearing on a television programme; she was in the audience. At the end of the programme, Peel had a note passed to her: "Will you ring ***** Saturday morning. Peace." (Well, it was the 1960s.) She rang on a dare. "He said: 'I'll pick you up at five. It can't be before then because I have to listen to the football results.' He turned up in his Bedford Dormobile. We'd planned to see the film 2001, but he had to call in at the doctor's first. He came out and said: 'I've been told I've got jaundice and I've got to go straight home.' So that was our first date."

Sheila was just 20 and attending teacher-training college. Peel was 10 years older, and separated from his first wife, Shirley, whom he had married in Texas. Sheila's parents, devout Catholics, were alarmed, but quickly came round to him. John's divorce became absolute in 1973, and they married the following year. Her father, Sheila writes, perhaps thought of it as "not so much losing a daughter as gaining a hippy with a plastic mouse dangling from his trousers".



When she and Peel first met, she says, nobody would have given odds on them being together 30 years later. They were "poles apart" in background, attitude, "everything". For all his attempts to shed his middle-class accent, according to Sheila, John still sounded like "a minor member of the Royal Family". She spoke in such a thick northern accent that "nobody could understand a word I said". And yet they found common ground.

Peel was a man of deep and abiding obsessions, and reading the book one is struck by the statistical improbability of him ever finding a partner who would not only indulge his fanatical devotion to Liverpool FC and his passion for the more extreme numbers from the canons of Captain Beefheart, the Fall and Napalm Death, but actually match them with equal intensity. But Sheila was that woman. This was not simply a matter of humouring him. She would go to Napalm Death gigs even when John was unable to. She even assented to being called "the Pig" - the name Peel gave her because of her snorting laugh. But more than that, she gave him the emotional security that Peel had always lacked as a child.

Contrary to appearances, she says, John suffered from an enormous lack of confidence that afflicted him for most of his life. "If we were going out somewhere socially, he would get terribly nervous, thinking he wouldn't be able to cope. And he'd always push me in the door first; not out of politeness, but because he'd be so wound up. Once he'd overcome that initial fear, he could hold his own wonderfully and tell an exceedingly good yarn. But he always felt people would be thinking: 'Oh Lordy, it's him.' There was always this feeling that he was never quite good enough."

He was also a man who could be easily hurt. Criticism of his programmes, or of his musical taste, would leave him downcast - and mystified. "If he had a record he thought was wonderful and somebody didn't like it, not only would he not understand, he'd be actually quite hurt." A man governed by a streak of sentimentality that could sometimes prove almost debilitating, Peel writes that before meeting Sheila he never cried: "But Lord," she says with a laugh, "did he cry once he'd met me." Almost anything, from Little House on the Prairie to a Liverpool victory, would move him to tears. "We'd laugh about it. He'd be sitting watching some absolutely banal thing on television, and if we had visitors he'd say: 'Pig, come here.' And I always knew why. It was so he could hide behind me because he was crying.

"The children made him very emotional. He'd be very close to tears if they said or did something that touched him. It didn't take much."

The normal abrasions of family life could wound him deeply. Sheila recounts a telling anecdote of John being hurt when, on one occasion, Archie wouldn't go to him, and affronted when two of his children turned down an offer to go out with him to collect some demos. "He couldn't understand that they just didn't want to go. He took it so personally, because if either of his parents had ever said 'Do you want to spend some time with me?' he'd have jumped at the chance, because his parents didn't ask him to do things with them.

"He wanted so much to have the family life he had not had as a child. But I used to say: 'Darling, we're not in a Kellogg's Cornflake ad. Kids can be foul.' "

When the children left home to go to university, John was distraught. He and Sheila drove William to Liverpool. On the journey back, Sheila thought she was going to have to take the wheel. "He sobbed all the way down the M62. He couldn't bear the idea of William not being around. But he was like that every time one of them went off and started somewhere." When Flossie followed her brother, Sheila drove her up on her own. "I left John here, and he'd been crying nearly all day on his own when I got back. I was so worried about him. I said: 'You've got to stop doing this because you'll make yourself ill.' "

The broadcaster John Peel was familiar to millions, but his laidback style concealed a complex family man. Sheila Ravenscroft, his widow, talks to Mick Brown about Peel's loveless childhood, his public school days and their enduring marriage

When Sheila suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1996, John was in the Isle of Man with his friend and fellow DJ Andy Kershaw, watching the TT races. When he was told the news over the phone by their daughter Danda his first response was: "If your mum goes, I go too. I don't want to go on living without her."

From the archives: Peel was happiest surrounded by his record collection "Yes, not the best thing for the poor girl to hear at that point, perhaps," says Sheila with a smile. "But he was in such a state of shock it probably came out without him thinking.

"It took him an awfully long time to get over that. If I was out longer than expected he'd become quite distraught because he was convinced something had happened. He gradually calmed down, but he was in a terrible, terrible state. I felt enormously sorry for him when that happened."

John Walters, Peel's long-time producer and probably his closest friend, would often remark that it was Sheila who kept John's feet on the ground, who provided the constant reassurance that enabled him to flourish in his career, who was far more realistic about things. "I had to be. And it's my nature. But that's what was so good. The two of us matched each other so well because we were so different."

In the book she writes: "One of the reasons we lasted so long and so well was that we spent half the week apart, but never stopped longing for one another."

John was often in London or making personal appearances around the country, and when he was at home he would be deeply immersed in his music. It was Sheila who did the cooking and the gardening; who painted and decorated; who held the home together. "John didn't even know how to bleed a radiator. But I would never have dreamt of complaining because he was busy doing other things. He was very good at unblocking the stream when we flooded; he would go down in his waders with a long stick and unblock the culverts to let the stream flow. He was very proud of that."

But if she gave him so much, one is tempted to ask, what did he give her? Sheila thinks about this. "Alexandra was reading back over the book the other day, and she said: 'Mum, you were so, so lucky to have someone love you as much as Dad did. I don't think anybody could have loved anyone as much as he loved you.' And that's how it felt. He was incredibly loving, and in his own way very supportive, because I lack confidence, too. And John would always push me: 'Come on, you can do it; you know you can.' It wasn't entirely him leaning on me;

I leant on him too, but in a different way. And he was an extremely kind man."

In his early days as a disc-jockey, he would often return from live appearances empty-handed, having given his fee to people he felt needed it more, or waived it altogether out of sympathy for the promoter. "I suppose it was all part of the hippie thing," says Sheila. "You want it and I've got it, so you might as well have it. But unfortunately it never seemed to work the other way round." They were obliged to set up an account for the money to be paid into, and rationed John's "pocket money" - "so we could pay the bills," says Sheila.


John Peel moved into the mainstream with his Radio 4 show, Home Truths

Determined that his children should not feel as oppressed by their upbringing as he had, Peel always emphasised fun and experience over duty. William and Danda were both removed from classes to travel with him to Germany, where he recorded regularly for the British Forces Broadcasting Service. And he told Danda that one of his happiest memories was of watching her walking across a meadow with a group of friends for an evening of getting hammered on cider. "She was, he realised, enjoying her life," Sheila writes, "and that pleased him no end."

The family seldom took holidays, as John's work always took precedence. "Instead of holidays we had music festivals," says Sheila. Peel drove himself so hard, partly because he loved what he did, but also, one senses, because he lived in perpetual fear of having his career terminated. No matter how many awards he received, Sheila writes, it was the polls he didn't win that would always strike hardest. While he relished his role as the evangelist of obscure musical causes, he was acutely conscious of how outside the mainstream of Radio 1 he was. "Until Andy Kershaw arrived [in 1985] John felt very much on his own," says Sheila. Kershaw, who always suspected he had been drafted in as Peel's putative replacement, in fact became his closest ally.

Peel's sense of himself as an outsider could be gauged by his open animosity to some of his Radio 1 colleagues. He made no secret of his antagonism towards Tony Blackburn. "They each thought the other was hideous," admits Sheila.

Noel Edmunds? "John wasn't enormously keen . . . "

His disdain for Simon Bates was such that, on one occasion, Peel, Sheila and Kershaw were moved to take a 250-mile round-trip to High Wycombe simply to boo Bates's appearance as Abunazzar in Aladdin.

Nor did he tend to make friends with the artists whose records he played. He had been an early friend and champion of Marc Bolan, but when Bolan became a star he dropped Peel like a brick. "John felt terribly let down, and after that his defences were up. I think he always thought that people were not going to want to know him.

"Whenever he was stuck in London during the week and feeling a bit miserable I'd say: 'Why don't you phone somebody up, ask them out for a meal or drink? It would cheer you up and they'd be dead chuffed.' And he'd say: 'they wouldn't want to come', or 'they're probably too busy'. I think it was because he couldn't bear the idea of somebody thinking: 'Oh God, I don't want to go out for a drink with him', which was so untrue, because people loved seeing him. But all John really wanted to do was come home."

Home Truths, which launched in 1998 under the unpromising description of "everyday life transformed by humour", breathed new life into Peel's career, transforming him from cult DJ into a national broadcasting institution. John, Sheila says, relished the challenge, but regarded it as a second string to his music broadcasts. "He always said if he had to give up one of them it would be Radio 4, because music was everything to him." It took some time to catch on. Peel was initially reluctant to undertake interviews, fearing it was intrusive. And within Radio 4 it was widely regarded as a "problem programme", until it won four Sony Awards in 1999, when the problem seemed to be solved. Among listeners, it quickly established itself as a sort of parish pump around which people could swap stories of everything from obscure hobbies to a death in the family, and Peel led by example.

John, Sheila writes, had always avoided talking about their marriage, because he thought that to "brag" would be tempting fate. "I don't know why he said that because he knew damn well our marriage was safe." Yet Home Truths became, inexorably, a paean to Peel's own home life, sharing details of his family's foibles, the state of William's bedroom, his own diagnosis with diabetes, the small joys and tribulations of life at Peel Acres.

"I think he felt that if he talked about his own family listeners would be able to relate to things, and it would encourage people. And it did, because people felt they could talk to him. It broke down barriers. And he was relaxed doing it; for John, it was just like sitting around the kitchen table talking to a group of friends, and it would all come out."

Sheila insists that having the family's life made public property "really didn't worry me", but it sometimes caused discomfort to the children, "although they didn't hear the programme because they were usually in bed on a Saturday morning".

The programme also had the effect of boosting Peel's recognition factor enormously. Before Home Truths he would often find himself accosted by bearded polytechnic students and cadaverous, rain-coated Scandanavians bearing demo tapes. Afterwards, it would be middle-aged people stopping him in the supermarket to tell him yet another fascinating story about their great aunt. Sheila realised that things were different when they were attending a local picnic concert and a man sitting nearby leaned across. "He said: 'Would you like a chocolate biscuit, Sheila?' I'd never seen him before in my life. And then he said: 'I won't give you one, John, because I know it would upset your diabetes.' "

In the last years of his life, Sheila says, John was "happier and more contented" than she had ever seen him. Her only concern was over his health. A year before his death, his Radio 1 programme was shifted, yet again, to a later time - 11pm-1am. "He was very tired, and I was worried about him. I said: 'I can't believe you're not going to complain.' But he said he'd be fine. He was just relieved he was still on the radio."

When The Daily Telegraph offered to send John and Sheila to Peru to write a travel feature he welcomed the idea of a break, despite his terror of flying. There were four places in the world he had always wanted to visit. He had been to three of them - Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids. The fourth was Machu Picchu in Peru. Before the trip, Sheila insisted that he undergo a thorough medical. His doctor pronounced him in perfect health.

John never saw Machu Picchu. On the ninth day of the trip - two days before they were due to arrive there - he and Sheila were in Cusco. They fell into conversation with an English couple who had recognised John, and who invited them to dinner the next night.

On the way to the couple's hotel, John and Sheila stopped for a drink.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Peel mentioned his old friend John Walters. Like Peel, Walters was insulin dependent. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 63, John had been devastated.

"Apropos of nothing, he just said: 'Oh, I do miss Walters. I was just thinking, it was so nice when he'd phone me up out of the blue and say: "Hey Fatso, turn the telly on; there's something good on." Nobody does that anymore.' It was quite strange."


Sheila in the garden at 'Peel Acres'

At the hotel, they settled themselves in some comfortable chairs with their new friends. Sheila was examining the drinks menu: "I'd always order for John. And suddenly this guy looked across and said: 'John, are you alright? John!' And he was having a heart attack."

Peel never regained consciousness. An ambulance arrived 20 minutes later, and he was pronounced dead. The next day was Sheila's birthday. Over the following couple of days the children were flown out to Peru. It took about a week to organise everything. "It was so out of the blue, and such a shock," says Sheila. She talks about this with extraordinary composure, but she has deliberately declined to discuss the circumstances of his death in the book. It was a family decision, she says, to end on a positive note. "We weren't even going to refer to John dying at all, but to pretend that he isn't dead would be ludicrous. But we felt strongly that we didn't want to end the book on his death."

The overwhelming public response to his passing left her "absolutely astounded". She had expected newspaper obituaries, and that Radio 1 would do something. ''When the children told me that it had been the lead on the news that night, I was speechless. And the funeral and everything about it. It was absolutely unbelievable."

John, she says, would never have believed it. "I just hope to God that wherever he is that he knew what was going on." His lack of confidence would be banished at a stroke.

"I think he'd be saying: 'If that's how it is I'll go back now and start again.' " She laughs. "And maybe be a bit more cocky."

• 'Margrave of the Marshes' by John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft (Transworld) is available for £16.99, plus £1.25 p & p

[rickles23]

A True Radio 1 veteran

I remember when he started as a disc jockey at the launch of
Radio 1 in 1967.

He will be always remembered.....

[uri]

My strange musical taste and a large amount of my youth spent either listening to him
far too late at night (and going to school half asleep) and going to great gigs is all Peelie's fault and all I can say is we are not worthy.

I met him once (1985). Some friends and I were running a fanzine and wanted to interview him. He kindly met us up at the beeb's Bush house and we escorted him to a local curry house where we interviewed him for an article.

AAAAhhh nostalgia's not what it used to be......


Uri

[Mr T.]

Acts to play in John Peel tribute




John Peel was renowned for championing new bands



New Order, The Fall and the Super Furry Animals are among those playing in memory of the late John Peel at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Wednesday.

The concert comes on the eve of John Peel Day and also features performances from less well-known acts, reflecting the former Radio 1 DJ's own playlists.

Peel's widow Sheila will attend the London concert. Thursday's event marks the DJ's last broadcast a year ago.

John Peel died on October 25 last year while on holiday in Peru.

Countrywide gigs

His widow said:"It will be odd being there without him, but myself and the rest of the family are looking forward to what should be a terrific night."

The concert pays tribute to John Peel's desire to champion new acts, with outfits such as Jawbone and Venetian Snares sharing the billing with the likes of Laura Cantrell and the reggae band Misty In Roots.


Super Furry Animals were among the acts played by Peel.





More than 300 gigs are taking place across the country on Thursday to celebrate John Peel Day and events are also being held in Spain, Germany, Italy, US, Holland, New Zealand and Canada to mark the legendary DJ's life.

Roger Daltrey, Sir Elton John, Robert Plant, David Gilmour and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks are also appearing on a tribute single alongside newer acts.

The single is the brainchild of Peel's son, Tom Ravenscroft.

Peel worked at Radio 1 for nearly 40 years on his own late-night show. He also became presenter of BBC Radio 4's Home Truths in 1998.

His career was marked by discovering and championing new artists from Joy Division to the White Stripes.

Radio One's special broadcast for John Peel Day is on Thursday 1900-0100 Friday and features live broadcasts from around the UK.

[Mr T.]

The 'Keep in Peel' day:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/johnpeelday/2005/