That was not his real name. And he was my father’s uncle my great uncle but he was always known as Head. That is because Alex Peterson was a founder and head of the International Baccalaureate, the “IB.” I remember him from visits to the house he shared with my grandmother’s sister, his wife Corrie, in St John’s Wood as a teenager.
I stayed there when I went to watch the odd match at Lords, always managing to get lost on my way back to their flat. Or, when in London, visiting the Imperial war museum. On this Remembrance Sunday I shall never forget uncle Alec telling me that the day Hitler invaded Russia, he saw the news on a newspaper stand and said to himself “now we are going to win”.
During the war Head had worked in the propaganda unit of the Special Operations Executive and he admitted that up until that day, 22 June 1941, he had worried that we might lose.
His nephews and nieces, that is to say my father and his brother Charles and sister Lucy, had been evacuated from Kent in 1939 not because of bombs but because of the fear of a German invasion. Given that their father was working in Churchill’s bunker the fear was that were the Germans to land they might suffer a grisly fate on the application of what the Nazis termed Sippehaft. After June 22 1941, dad and his siblings rapidly returned to Kent from Westmoreland where they had been staying with the family of their cook.
Recognising Alec’s work in Education, the blue plaque went up the other day at the Peterson’s former family house in Headington. My Oxford living sister N supplies the photos.
