"Years ago when Jenny, our young family and I were visiting Peter in Ibiza, he casually said to me 'I’m having a few people over would you mind cooking?'

'Of course' I replied 'Who’s coming?'

'So and so' said Peter, 'And they’ll bring so and so and I met Bill in the market so they’ll come…' and so it went on and on and on till we reached a count of 27 people

I made some panicky remark.

'Don’t worry Tony, you’ll be fine' and off he went to climb a rickety ladder and put some lights in a tree.

And of course the party was fine. I’m sure many of you have similar stories. Peter was always giving me jobs to do for which I was unqualified and didn’t have any idea how to do. This [Peter's funeral service] is just the biggest of them all.

Peter Claus Espé was born in Berlin in 1932. I imagine him as a happy boy. But around 1936 his father, a chemist who worked for Siemens, was given an ultimatum. Divorce your Jewish wife or lose your job. The Quakers found his mother Ilsa a job as a maid in Kent. As she had employment, she was allowed to move to England. Peter’s father brought him to England to join her. He returned to Berlin. The Nazis moved Siemens to Slovakia during the war; Slovakia became part of the Soviet Union, where Peter’s father made a new life. Peter, as far as I know, only met up with him once in the late Sixties in Germany.

Peter and Ilsa moved to Oxford and at first lived in one room in a house in Clarendon Square owned by a judge who made the property available to refugees. In 1948 Ilsa bought 86 Kingston Road and she and Peter made their home there with Peter’s stepfather Hans, who was Peter’s father’s best friend, a Nuclear Physicist. Hans was completely absorbed in his academic work at Keble College. I once asked him about it, and from his great height he simply replied, 'You couldn’t begin to understand'.

Ilsa was a dynamo, tiny, a dedicated smoker and even at 90 running keep fit classes for ‘the old people’, as she used to call them. Her whole life, with her tireless charitable work, was a big thank you to Oxford. Peter told me that he and Ilsa would gather the unregarded fallen Mulberries from Worcester College lawn to make jam during the war – an image of mother and son which somehow says a lot.

Her eyes fixed on their future in Britain, Ilsa shielded Peter from the darkness of their history, to the extent that only two months before he died, he found an old shoe box in the cellar. In it were censored letters from his grandmother and photographs sent via The Red Cross perhaps from one of the camps.

Peter went to Magdalen College School and Christ Church College, where he studied Chemistry and gained a Half Blue at Hockey. He was sporty and played squash. I remember him playing with my then teenage son. Peter just stood in the middle of the court whacking the ball all over the place and making Alexis run till he was exhausted.

Despite being sporty he didn’t get invited to the best parties, till that is he became the stringer for Tatler the society magazine, after that he and his camera were welcome everywhere.

He did a Master’s degree in Science, a thesis on the sex life of glowworms, oddly appropriate as glowworms bring light to darkness.

He did his National Service in the RAF as a photographer and navigator and being Peter managed to be in one of the few British planes that ditched in the water during the Suez Crisis. It was 24 hours before the crew were rescued.

Having escaped this, Peter returned to Oxford only to catch polio in the Cowley Pool.

He could so easily have died in an iron lung at the JR but he survived. The muscles in his left leg somewhat withered. This however proved only a spur to his extraordinary energy.

He often told the story of how got a job at a school in Oxford and proudly came home to tell Ilsa.
'Where will you live?' she asked.
'Why here in my attic room.'
'Oh no you won’t' said Ilsa and booted him out of the nest.

Though he made wonderful eccentric homes in Richmond, Ibiza and Lyneham, I think he never really recovered from the shock of this and it’s fitting that he spent his last years at 86 Kingston Road, in the Oxford that he loved.

A few months ago, Peter rang me to say that on one of his evening wheelchair walks with Tom, the lodger who was with him all through Lockdown, that they had been to Holywell Churchyard. Peter was so delighted to discover this beautiful quiet spot and amazed, that in all his years in Oxford, he had never been there.

Peter moved to London and got a job teaching at a school in Putney. Then came the LCP, which Tim Stevens will talk about.

I want to move forward in time and you can fill this gap with all your stories and memories of Peter. If you are moved to write these down please send them to us or seek out Charles at the wake, who has agreed to collect and collate them.

In the last decade Peter spent several years building the easy to live in extension to 2 The Row, Lyneham. This he called Poppy Cottage. It was only just finished when, with the aid of a faulty toaster, fire swept through the guts of the building. Peter was unscathed but everything including many of his photographs were smoke-blackened and sodden by the fire hoses. It was a terrible blow.

The house was underinsured. Peter, characteristically, had ticked the economy box in the Insurance document. Though he told Jeff to 'Chuck it all on a skip', Jeff ignored him and saved and sifted everything in the debris meticulously. For two or more years, Jeff fought the builders to squeeze maximum value out of their restoration, checking each tiny detail and making them re-do sloppy work. Lyneham was restored and with it Peter. At this, perhaps the darkest moment of Peter’s life, Jeff’s patient dedication dragged an often-reluctant Peter into the light of day.

Even in the dead of winter when the back wall of his kitchen was a plastic sheet, Peter insisted on staying in Lyneham. He was deaf to the pleas of his friends to stay with them or anywhere else. He would not go. He always did thing his own way and beneath that haphazard exterior there was a will of steel.

Then another terrible blow, Peter rolled his car. He survived the crash but it convinced him that he must sell Lyneham and move to Oxford.

Now at Kingston Road, the boxes of photographs, Jeff had saved, proved gradually a lifeline to Peter and a way back from the heartbreak of leaving Lyneham. In the last few years they were a great source of delight as Peter sorted through them and made contact after fifty plus years with the people in them. Reuniting them with their images.

For Peter loved people, whoever you were he listened, really listened in a way so few people do. He delighted in your hopes and dreams. He sympathised with your troubles and tried to help. Notoriously mean with himself, his tailor was the bargain rail at Asda in High Wycombe, that he dropped in on every week driving down the M40 to Lyneham from the LCP in London. 'Look at this Tony only five pounds – fantastic bargain'.

He hated spending money on himself but would give thousands to people in trouble at the drop of a hat.

He always believed the best of people and when people, occasionally, let him down I never heard him say bad things about them.

His love of art was passionate and completely unaffected.

If someone he knew had an exhibition, Peter would not only activate his extraordinary network of contacts but also have a party and take that party to the Private View. If he liked the work he would buy something. He never bought a work of art as an investment he bought because he wanted to hang it on his crowded walls.

If he didn’t understand something he would ring up one of his friends or Jenny or me and say 'I don’t get it Tony, it doesn’t move me. Can you explain it?'

Till his death he was fantastically well informed. He read The Times from cover to cover every day and his iPad still pings with the four news feeds he subscribed to. Every week during lockdown a fat envelope would arrive in the post, stuffed with press cuttings that he thought would interest me and Jenny, or to pass on to our children Alexis, Cleo and Amy. Tom, working on the AstraZeneca vaccine meant Peter got a debrief over a whisky nearly every night. He was more up-to-date than most of the media.

During Lockdown, amazingly, his social circle actually expanded as the rest of the country’s contracted.

Peter formed strong bonds with all his Oxford lodgers Andy, Charles, Tom and Kaori.

Anne, Jeff, his neighbours Polly and Jeremy, Anumod and Tamara and his host of friends were all making plans for helping him after the operation.

For Peter always survived didn’t he? The Nazis, Suez, Polio, The Fire, rolling his car, not to mention so many other escapes, like falling out of a tree in Ibiza clutching a still buzzing chain saw. But this time he didn’t.

Eighteen months ago he rang me, after a visit to the Doctor, 'Tony' he said, 'The clock is ticking, brace yourself'. I protested that he would probably bury me and we made a bit of a joke of it.

This last year he meticulously put his affairs in order. On my last visit to the hospital, he loaded me with papers, of which he had a total grasp and sent me scurrying off on two days of errands to accountants and the like.

He knew the risks of the operation, the gamble he was taking. He remained a scientist after all. Yes he was frightened, but he was also immensely brave.

Oh Peter how we will all miss you.

‘All that remains of us is love’ and in your case love and hundreds and hundreds of photographs."

Tony Bicât, July 2021, giving the eulogy for Peter's funeral