Peter grew up in Bury, Lancashire, attending the Alderman Smith County Infants School and Bury Grammar School. He lived at home while at the Manchester medical school, the first member of his family to go to university.

At the time, Manchester had many distinguished physicians including Sir Robert Platt and on qualification in 1962 Peter planned to follow a career in general medicine. After house jobs at Manchester Royal Infirmary he worked as senior house officer to John Leonard (who was to remain a lifelong friend) at the busy Withington Hospital, south Manchester.

To complement his clinical experience Peter then became an assistant lecturer in morbid anatomy back at MRI. Carrying out a hundred autopsies led to a revised view of current diagnostic abilities and a critical approach to received truths which would inform his later career choices.

Clinical life resumed in Sheffield with his appointment as registrar to Professor Charles Stuart Harris and the achievement of the London MRCP. A Sheffield general practitioner, J Rodgers Cox, was at the time undergoing retraining in geriatric medicine and was keen to share his newly acquired clinical skills with Peter as they worked together in a research project. Such a rewarding glimpse of geriatric medicine was enough to encourage Peter to direct his career to one that still offered a general medical approach, albeit in a particular age group.

The new specialty of geriatrics was emerging in a small number of pioneer centres (for example Glasgow, UCH, Central Middlesex, Sunderland, Hastings). Lionel Cosin had been invited to create an active unit at Cowley Road Hospital, Oxford and it was here that Peter was appointed as senior registrar in 1967, an appointment shared between Cowley Road and the Radcliffe Infirmary.

While enjoying the clinical medicine of old age in Oxford, Peter also began to appreciate that older people needed advocacy in the medical world backed up by services which were fast, accurate and directly responsive to their special problems. Service effectiveness needed to encompass the needs of family doctors, families and the community at large. For the remainder of his career Peter’s efforts would be directed to creating operational success in his own and other geriatric services.

In 1969 he became a consultant in Hull, attracted by the high proportion of the 473 geriatric beds which were located in general hospitals. He was soon joined by John Knox and Sudhir Datta. Direct admission of frailer older people to geriatric consultant care was agreed with the general physicians. Over the next ten years the unit became a byword for optimism and effectiveness in service provision for older people, attracting national and international interest. The transformation in Hull’s services was described in a BMJ paper published in 1977.

In 1983 Peter accepted an invitation to be Director of the NHS Health (formerly Hospital) Advisory Service, covering services for older people and people with mental illness throughout England and Wales. HAS provided expert multidisciplinary reports on individual local services; some visits were imposed on troubled locations, many others were by invitation where new ideas and directions were being sought. During Peter’s time as Director reports were published for the first time and annual summaries of HAS findings were produced. The peer reviews of the present-day Care Quality Commission embody many of the principles established by HAS.

At the conclusion of his HAS directorship in 1987 Peter joined the Yorkshire Regional Health Authority. Working to Regional Medical Officer Bob Haward he set out to provide regional leadership for the so-called priority services – those for disability, mental illness, older people and those with learning difficulty. Closer links were established with local authority social services, good practice was defined, methods of service evaluation emerged and a team of regional officers knowledgeable and committed to quality priority care was identified. He retired from full time NHS work in 1992 after a coronary occlusion.

Peter was a Council member and then Secretary of the British Geriatrics Society from 1980 – 1982. In 1994 he was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Society. He was a member of the Royal College’s Geriatrics Committee and contributed to a 1992 College Working Group on long term care.

For the Department of Health he chaired a number of working groups and was consultant adviser (geriatric medicine) to the Chief Medical Officer 1981 – 1983. He was an associate of NHS training centres in Harrogate, Leeds and Birmingham. In 1987 he contributed to Sir Roy Griffiths’ review of community care. In 1989 he was appointed Member of the Faculty of Community Medicine.

He was invited to speak about geriatric medicine in South Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and Finland.

Peter was a specialist adviser on community and long-term care to the House of Commons health select committee 1992 - 1993 and 1995 – 1996.

Throughout his professional life Peter was supported willingly by his wife Kathleen. They had known each other from their schooldays. Retirement opened a new phase in their marriage. They travelled widely particularly to the USA. They contributed together to their much-loved sport of tennis, running their local Beverley tennis club as it became the outstanding open-air club in Yorkshire. Both were able to play until their seventies.

The greatest gift conferred by retirement was for Peter to become more closely and lovingly involved with the progress of their three children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Our thoughts are with Peter's family and friends at this sad time.