Britain’s greatest sporting all-rounder of the post-war era

Bruce Millar (OD 1970)  

Tuesday April 23 2024, 12.01am, The Times  

Peter Wilson’s generation was the last that was able to excel at the highest levels across multiple sports, although he made his name primarily with his skills on the hockey field.  

PJ, as Peter James Wilson was always known, would juggle a hockey ball on a stick to boost his hand-eye coordination as he supervised Bun –Break in the playground; alternatively, he would grip the middle of the stick and propel it rapidly one way then the other, to strengthen his forearm.  

By profession he was a schoolmaster who taught for 55 years and one term at the Dragon Prep School in north Oxford, but he was also a star of the Great Britain’s men’s hockey team. He competed at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, and won 122 caps for GB and Wales –— his country by descent, although he was born in Weston-super-Mare and lived all his life in England.  

In 1974 he became the first British player to be selected to play for Europe in an intercontinental showdown against Asia, and pioneered the “Garryowen”, a high flick, in hockey. He also played international squash for Wales, first– class cricket for Oxford University, and tennis to county level, despite only taking up the sport in his twenties.  

The Sunday Times identified Wilson as the country’s greatest all-round sportsman in 1974  

As if all those sports were not enough, he was also a fine footballer and golfer, and his crowning accolade was to be identified by The Sunday Times as “Britain’s greatest sporting all-rounder of the post-war era”; he kept the cutting among his papers. His was the last generation able to excel at the highest levels across multiple sports: the professionalism, specialisation and media attention ushered in through the 1960s and ‘70s made such an achievement increasingly unlikely, and it is no coincidence that the list of individuals who have both played first– class cricket and participated in the Olympic Games ground to a halt around 1970.  

Peter James Wilson was born in Weston-super-Mare in 1942, one of five children of James, an estate agent, and Dorothy, a model. He attended Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate, Kent.  

With his super-fit 6ft 1in frame, film star smile, and a bronze complexion burnished during his daily lunch hour training runs along the River Cherwell and through the university parks, he also cut a decidedly glamorous figure.  

One female Old Dragon (OD) recalls waiting alongside a pair of mothers outside the school gates at pick-up time when Wilson sauntered past wearing the skimpy tennis shorts of the era: “The first mother’s jaw dropped and she just gazed at this vision of beauty, speechless. The second was soon staring at him too.” Another girl pupil remembers that “PJ and Adonis were pretty well synonymous.”  

To boys –— the vast majority of pupils at the time –— he was simply “by far the coolest teacher” and “the king of languid”, an inspirational figure to hundreds of sports-mad Dragons over the years, including most notably Tim Henman. One summer, Wilson’s Olympian pal David Hemery, the gold medallist in the 400m hurdles in Mexico, dropped in to demonstrate the hurdle technique. In the annual Masters v Boys hockey match, Wilson would play with an old walking stick as a handicap, invariably dribbling his way past the entire boys’ XI before laying on an easy goal for one of his less gifted colleagues.  

On PJ’s retirement from the Dragon in 2021 at the age of 79, his former housemate as a junior teacher, Sir David Lewis –— later Lord Mayor of London –— told the story of David’s recruitment by the school’s Headmaster, Keith Ingram, who was known to generations of Dragons and their families as Inky. In the spring of 1966, after playing as a guest for an OD team at a hockey festival, Wilson was told that his interview for a job on the school staff was to take place in 30 minutes. Given that he had not applied for a job, this came as a complete surprise.  

“Inky poured him a large gin with a splash of tonic. Following a boozy dinner in the common room, he was offered a job to teach science on the basis that he could have as much time off as needed for the Olympic squad.”  

It was an inspired appointment. Wilson found his natural habitat at the Dragon, where he shared with Ingram the rare ability never to display anger at even the worst– behaved pre-adolescent boys; lesser colleagues would, on occasion, explode. As his daughter Susie recalls, Wilson loved the informal atmosphere of the Dragon, with staff known by their nicknames and uniforms invariably scruffy: he believed that children had every right to be naughty.  

A graduate in Geology from St Edmund Hall — (he dodged a job as a geologist in a gold mine in Uganda on the advice of his father), — Wilson taught everything from sciences to Latin, but is mostly remembered for his coaching of both tennis and hockey. One OD who played both sports for the school remembers him as “extremely laid– back and always ready with a good quip”. “He seemed indifferent about whether we won or lost,” despite his own drive as a sportsman –— a mark of the true Corinthian.  

It is a tribute to Wilson’s innate modesty and integrity that he left exactly the same impression on 12-year-old boys as he left on Lewis, who knew him when both were young men, and again when both were ripe in years. There was no condescension to pupils, showboating to contemporaries or kowtowing to superiors.  

Occasionally, the realities of the outside world would intrude on the charmed life of prep school and the sports field –— and Wilson was fully alive to it. His report for the school magazine on the Mexico Games, which took place a couple of months after the Soviet Union had crushed the “Prague Spring”, concluded with a memorable image: “One more vivid recollection for the record — of a Russian athlete hand in hand with his Czech girlfriend. If only the politicians and other misguided gentlemen of the world could have seen and perhaps lived in the utopia that we, at the Olympic Village, had known for six all too short weeks, then the world would, for sure, become a better place.”  

Four years later, at the Munich Olympics of 1972, Wilson gave several members of the Dragon School party individual tours of the Olympic village by the simple expedient of lending them a Team GB tracksuit top and walking through security. They were never challenged. On the day the party was due to leave, Black September gained access to the Olympic village and killed 11 members of the Israeli team.  

He met his wife Celia Tennant while she was a secretary at Oxfam in Oxford and he was working at the Dragon School. They had two daughters: Catharine, who before having children worked as a lawyer; and Suzie, who worked at Cazenove in investor relations before also leaving to have children. All survive him.  

In retirement Wilson worked out daily in the gym at their home in Noke, five miles north of Oxford. Two years ago at a reunion dinner, ODs who had not set eyes on him for half a century were struck once again by the athletic, almost golden figure, barely touched by time. One OD announced proudly that he still played tennis on a regular basis. Wilson shot him a smile and said: “I hope you’re not just patting the ball over the net.”  

Peter Wilson, schoolmaster and sportsman, was born on August 9, 1942.
He died of a heart attack on March 22, 2024, aged 81  

Permission given to share by the author, Bruce Millar (OD 1970)

Click here to watch A service of Thanksgiving for the life of Peter James Wilson