Classically Understated
Peter Needham
By Boris Starling
January 2023
On Holocaust Memorial Day, Boris Starling recalls a much-revered (and feared) school teacher.
The teaching body at Eton contained more than its fair share of characters and eccentrics, and Peter Needham was not the least of them. He had an indeterminate number of absolutely feral dogs, and he’d peer at you from under the splendid dome of his bald forehead as though your very existence was an affront to the twin concepts of order and civilisation. As a 14-year-old Classics pupil, I found him terrifying.
Three years later, editing the school magazine and having to deal with him as one of the two masters who oversaw its production, I realised that behind his gruff exterior was a man of twinkling humour – albeit drier than the Sahara – and great kindness. At one stage my fellow editor Ben and I got in big trouble for something we’d printed, and Peter quietly but forcefully made the point to the powers that be that he too had signed off the offending passage and would therefore share any blame that was to be apportioned. Needless to say, the fuss quietened down pretty quickly after that.
It’s perhaps a failing of schoolchildren the world over that they rarely consider the personal histories of those who teach them. So it wasn’t until Peter died a couple of years ago and I read his obituary that I realised he hadn’t always been Peter Needham. He was originally Peter Niethammer from Teplice, in what was then Czechoslovakia – and in 1939, at the age of four, he was one of the first refugee Jewish children flown from Prague to Croydon airport, as fears grew of a Nazi takeover.
With his displacement came a ferocious work ethic, to go with an equally-formidable youthful intellect. He won a scholarship to St Paul’s School in 1947, and then another to Oriel five years later, to read Classics. His lifelong love of Latin would eventually find fruit in ways which delighted not just his six grandchildren, but many others too: among his published translations in retirement were Ursus Nomine Paddington, Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, and Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum.
Like almost every Central European Jew of his time, he had relatives who perished in the death camps. In getting out while he still could, he was one of the lucky ones: but so too were I and thousands of other boys who had the great good fortune to come across him in our formative years.
