Whenever my aunt Hilary Peters had any money – including a large sum given to her by her wealthy father, the literary agent AD Peters – she would give it away at the earliest opportunity. Long before the green movement became fashionable, her interest in religions (though she retained independence from all of them) merged with ecology and a deep love of animals, and in the early 1970s she set about healing some of the barren, post-industrial acres of London’s docklands.
Hilary, who has died aged 83, encouraged young urbanites to connect with nature - such “connectedness” was intrinsic and vital to her - by starting one of the first city farms in Britain at Surrey Docks. She grew plants in the dock’s masonry and made home-made goat’s cheese for city workers’ lunches. Under her care, goats gambolled and hens scratched in an environment far from rural. Her book Docklandscape (1978) gives a good account of her trials and successes.
The daughter of AD (Augustus Dudley) Peters and his second wife, Margaret, Hilary was born in London, with two much older half-siblings. She attended Francis Holland school, then studied theology at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Thereafter she embraced poverty.
After her work at the city farm, she lived happily in a narrow boat (with the playwright NF Simpson) for more than a decade and cruised the country’s canal systems, becoming an expert on these waterways. It may have been during this time that she conceived the idea of herself as a “pilgrim without destination”, subsequently transferring herself and the inevitable couple of dogs to a renovated ambulance and touring the country for 10 years.
During this time she came to know almost all its landscapes and byways intimately, and gained a compendious knowledge of its churches and large country houses. For some years she edited the journal Follies and gained the reputation for ignoring “Private” signs and gaining entry to any folly that caught her attention. This acquaintanceship with landed gentry contrasted happily with her work for many years as a prison visitor.
When foot-and-mouth struck in 2001 she joined farmers resisting what she regarded as the needless destruction of herds that had taken generations to establish. Thereafter, with scarcely a penny to her name, and by the good fortune that seemed innate in her, she became custodian of a beautiful gatehouse on the Badminton estate where she spent the rest of her life. Hilary had thought her mother “melodramatic”, and along with her father’s early departure from the marriage, this seems to have put her off the idea of family altogether. But she made up for it by enduring friendships.
Many of those she had met on her travels came to stay at the gatehouse over the years, including a good few people in difficulties seeking a refuge. Hilary’s continual concern was to lay bare, as she saw it, the illusions of the self-constructed ego and to find her way through to the “other world” of a oneness we all, in her view, try to separate ourselves from. She was, I think, the least judgmental person I have ever met. A self-professed hermit, she nevertheless ended her days with an enormous circle of loving and devoted friends from every social class and all walks of life.
Hilary is survived by her older sister, the literary biographer Catherine Peters.
