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Peter Blaker was the only child of Guy Blaker and Dawn Watson. When his father volunteered for the Royal Artillery, Peter spent his early childhood with his mother and nanny lodging with his maternal grandparents at Ruperts Guard in Northfield End.
He went to St Joan’s School and then as a boarder to Boxgrove in Guildford. He said that he never left Boxgrove emotionally and 70 years later was still organising lunch parties in London for his contemporaries.
Peter was awarded an exhibition to Lancing, where he studied A-levels in Latin, Greek and Ancient History. National service followed in 1956 and he was commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment in which his mother’s uncle had won the Victoria Cross. He said it was the making of him.
His father then sent him up to Jesus College Cambridge to follow in his footsteps to read law before becoming the fourth generation in the family firm in Henley (now Mercers).
While at Cambridge Peter continued soldiering as a Territorial Army subaltern in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and in his final term wrote to his father to say he couldn’t go through with being a solicitor and that he was going back into the army.
Peter married Hiltegund Bastian in January 1969, and their daughter Alexandra was born in 1970, followed by sons Dominic in 1971 and Nicholas in 1975.
Upon retirement in 1998, Peter bought a green VW long wheelbase van and turned it into his and his wife’s mobile country cottage and during the next decade they went all over Europe, sleeping in lay-bys or on the edge of woods.
His hope was that, on his death, he would be remembered most for the fact that whenever he found someone in distress he would go out of his way to comfort them.