Obituary in The Scotsman, published 14 January 2009
Born: 9 March, 1937, in Glen Urquhart. Died: 3 January, 2009, in Glen Urquhart, aged 71.
PROFESSOR Peter English was one of the world's leading experts in pig health and welfare, and his work in stockmanship during a distinguished four-decade career at Aberdeen University pioneered reform of the pig industry.
A stalwart of the Scottish pig sector, Prof English led programmes for postgraduate students and worked with colleagues in agricultural research, teaching and practice, setting new standards for more effective and welfare-friendly pig production systems.
English joined the staff of Aberdeen University after graduating in 1961, and moved through university life as lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in agriculture before being appointed professor of animal science and husbandry in 1998.
His early interest in pigs laid the foundations for his pioneering work in establishing MSc and diploma courses in pig and animal production at his alma mater. The attraction of the course led to recruitment of students from around the globe, and through his latter contact with them he became acknowledged in many parts of the world as an expert in pig production, stockmanship and health-and-welfare programmes.
At home, he was looked on as a stalwart of the Scottish pig sector, and for nine years until recently had served on the Farm Animal Welfare Council, advising the government on animal standards.
Peter Roderick English, a native of Glen Urquhart, attended Glen Urquhart School and Inverness Royal Academy with the intention of establishing a career in farming. Offered a post in academia as assistant lecturer, he accepted reluctantly, and then only for six months. It was his natural enthusiasm for people and his enjoyment in working with students that altered his perceptions.
A popular, outgoing man, English was passionate about the Highlands and his native Highland heritage. A lifelong lover of shinty, he had captained the Glen Urquhart, Aberdeen University and Scottish Universities teams, and between 1970 and 1980 was vice-president of the Camanachd Association.
A long-time lover of remote places, he was the author of two books, one on Glen Urquhart and the people, history and sport of the area. The other covered his childhood memories of Arnisdale and Loch Hourn in Knoydart on the west coast of Inverness-shire.
As a nine-year-old, he had gone there for nearly a year to help an uncle on a croft. The proceeds from his Knoydart book helped fund a community centre opened last year looking out from Loch Hourn to Ladhar Bheinn.
In retirement in Glen Urquhart, he and his wife, Anne, reclaimed land from bracken and whin and made a home in the glen above Drumnadrochit.
He is survived by his wife, three children and four grandchildren.
AN APPRECIATION by ANDREW NOBLE published in teh Scotsman January 2009
VISITING Peter and Anne English in their new place of retirement perched above Loch Ness one immediately met with the customary banter, teasing and enormous warmth of hospitality. One was struck by the beauty of the place and how the splendid new house was already organically related to the old farmstead; Peter's lifelong preoccupation was that all virtue was connected to the past.
Also unsurprising was the fact that no concession had been made to age; the planting and landscaping that had taken place seemed the work of not one man but a small army. Even more revealing of Peter's nature than this phenomenal energy was his relationship to his frequently visiting grandchildren. Like his own children, his nieces and nephews and hordes of small visitors, the grandchildren delighted in being outside with him and caught up in his ever- inventive ploys. If they were occasionally ill, this most manly of men was extraordinarily patient and comforting towards them.
This combination of physical and intellectual energy and uncondescending charity towards other people created in Peter a sustained excellence in so many disparate fields. Family man, farmer, innovative researcher in animal husbandry, educator, athlete, social historian and community activist were not only completely, but often simultaneously, fulfilled roles.
He was always a man of ancestral verities, even pieties. As a teenager his initial impulse was to stay rooted on the land. Aberdeen University, because of his outstanding intellectual qualities, had to coerce him into an academic post. The university was rewarded with 42 years of service in research and teaching.
The boy whose sole ambition was to work locally in practical agriculture became, because of his expertise, a constant global traveller, his principal book on animal husbandry so valued that it was translated into 23 languages.
He was awarded The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals/British Society of Animal Science Award for Innovative Developments in Animal Welfare. He also received the prestigious David Black Award in 1984. He spent nine years on the Farm Animal Welfare Council advising the UK government.
It was, however, as a teacher on his hugely successful MSc programme for international students that Peter excelled. It was intellectually stimulating and pragmatically related to their real needs. Peter also took extraordinary pastoral care of them. This extended to the now legendary Highland Games he held for his students at Ardachy. Such extraordinary feats of hospitality and, indeed, so many other aspects of his life, would have been impossible without his wife, Anne. Rightly believing herself "married not to a man but a force of nature", she was his intellectual equal and almost always able to impose a comic sense of proportion on his occasionally excessive tendencies.
His athletic career was equally exemplary. Good at all sports (his father played football for Fulham, his grandfather in the embryonic games of Camanachd) he excelled at shinty. He was captain of the Glenurquhart team, shinty Blue and captain of Aberdeen University and founder member and captain of Aberdeen Camanachd. He initiated and edited from 1971-76 the still successful Shinty Yearbook. He was for ten years vice-president of the Camanachd Association. At the time of his death he was coaching local schoolboys.
Writing a history of Glenurquhart shinty team led him to a much larger work, Arnisdale and Loch Hourn… The Clachans, People, Memories and the Future (2000). Never one to stop at mere words, Peter, along with the local committee, used the profits of the book to seek lottery and other funding. This consummated a lifetime of getting people, often against their better judgment, to co-operate for the general good, with the erection of a marvellous ceilidh house in Arnisdale.
Our thoughts go out to his wife and his children. It may be a consolation that the pain of his loss is so widely shared. From his mother he inherited a sense of a Burnsian dignity regarding his fellow humans. The last words are rightly the Bard's:
Martyn Gorman
Obituary in The Scotsman, published 14 January 2009Born: 9 March, 1937, in Glen Urquhart. Died: 3 January, 2009, in Glen Urquhart, aged 71.
PROFESSOR Peter English was one of the world's leading experts in pig health and welfare, and his work in stockmanship during a distinguished four-decade career at Aberdeen University pioneered reform of the pig industry.
A stalwart of the Scottish pig sector, Prof English led programmes for postgraduate students and worked with colleagues in agricultural research, teaching and practice, setting new standards for more effective and welfare-friendly pig production systems.
English joined the staff of Aberdeen University after graduating in 1961, and moved through university life as lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in agriculture before being appointed professor of animal science and husbandry in 1998.
His early interest in pigs laid the foundations for his pioneering work in establishing MSc and diploma courses in pig and animal production at his alma mater. The attraction of the course led to recruitment of students from around the globe, and through his latter contact with them he became acknowledged in many parts of the world as an expert in pig production, stockmanship and health-and-welfare programmes.
At home, he was looked on as a stalwart of the Scottish pig sector, and for nine years until recently had served on the Farm Animal Welfare Council, advising the government on animal standards.
Peter Roderick English, a native of Glen Urquhart, attended Glen Urquhart School and Inverness Royal Academy with the intention of establishing a career in farming. Offered a post in academia as assistant lecturer, he accepted reluctantly, and then only for six months. It was his natural enthusiasm for people and his enjoyment in working with students that altered his perceptions.
A popular, outgoing man, English was passionate about the Highlands and his native Highland heritage. A lifelong lover of shinty, he had captained the Glen Urquhart, Aberdeen University and Scottish Universities teams, and between 1970 and 1980 was vice-president of the Camanachd Association.
A long-time lover of remote places, he was the author of two books, one on Glen Urquhart and the people, history and sport of the area. The other covered his childhood memories of Arnisdale and Loch Hourn in Knoydart on the west coast of Inverness-shire.
As a nine-year-old, he had gone there for nearly a year to help an uncle on a croft. The proceeds from his Knoydart book helped fund a community centre opened last year looking out from Loch Hourn to Ladhar Bheinn.
In retirement in Glen Urquhart, he and his wife, Anne, reclaimed land from bracken and whin and made a home in the glen above Drumnadrochit.
He is survived by his wife, three children and four grandchildren.
Martyn Gorman
Professor Peter EnglishAN APPRECIATION by ANDREW NOBLE published in teh Scotsman January 2009
VISITING Peter and Anne English in their new place of retirement perched above Loch Ness one immediately met with the customary banter, teasing and enormous warmth of hospitality. One was struck by the beauty of the place and how the splendid new house was already organically related to the old farmstead; Peter's lifelong preoccupation was that all virtue was connected to the past.
Also unsurprising was the fact that no concession had been made to age; the planting and landscaping that had taken place seemed the work of not one man but a small army. Even more revealing of Peter's nature than this phenomenal energy was his relationship to his frequently visiting grandchildren. Like his own children, his nieces and nephews and hordes of small visitors, the grandchildren delighted in being outside with him and caught up in his ever- inventive ploys. If they were occasionally ill, this most manly of men was extraordinarily patient and comforting towards them.
This combination of physical and intellectual energy and uncondescending charity towards other people created in Peter a sustained excellence in so many disparate fields. Family man, farmer, innovative researcher in animal husbandry, educator, athlete, social historian and community activist were not only completely, but often simultaneously, fulfilled roles.
He was always a man of ancestral verities, even pieties. As a teenager his initial impulse was to stay rooted on the land. Aberdeen University, because of his outstanding intellectual qualities, had to coerce him into an academic post. The university was rewarded with 42 years of service in research and teaching.
The boy whose sole ambition was to work locally in practical agriculture became, because of his expertise, a constant global traveller, his principal book on animal husbandry so valued that it was translated into 23 languages.
He was awarded The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals/British Society of Animal Science Award for Innovative Developments in Animal Welfare. He also received the prestigious David Black Award in 1984. He spent nine years on the Farm Animal Welfare Council advising the UK government.
It was, however, as a teacher on his hugely successful MSc programme for international students that Peter excelled. It was intellectually stimulating and pragmatically related to their real needs. Peter also took extraordinary pastoral care of them. This extended to the now legendary Highland Games he held for his students at Ardachy. Such extraordinary feats of hospitality and, indeed, so many other aspects of his life, would have been impossible without his wife, Anne. Rightly believing herself "married not to a man but a force of nature", she was his intellectual equal and almost always able to impose a comic sense of proportion on his occasionally excessive tendencies.
His athletic career was equally exemplary. Good at all sports (his father played football for Fulham, his grandfather in the embryonic games of Camanachd) he excelled at shinty. He was captain of the Glenurquhart team, shinty Blue and captain of Aberdeen University and founder member and captain of Aberdeen Camanachd. He initiated and edited from 1971-76 the still successful Shinty Yearbook. He was for ten years vice-president of the Camanachd Association. At the time of his death he was coaching local schoolboys.
Writing a history of Glenurquhart shinty team led him to a much larger work, Arnisdale and Loch Hourn… The Clachans, People, Memories and the Future (2000). Never one to stop at mere words, Peter, along with the local committee, used the profits of the book to seek lottery and other funding. This consummated a lifetime of getting people, often against their better judgment, to co-operate for the general good, with the erection of a marvellous ceilidh house in Arnisdale.
Our thoughts go out to his wife and his children. It may be a consolation that the pain of his loss is so widely shared. From his mother he inherited a sense of a Burnsian dignity regarding his fellow humans. The last words are rightly the Bard's:
If there's another world he lives in bliss,
If there be none he made the best of this.