Peter Parker (British businessman)

Sir Peter Parker KBE LVO (30 August 1924 – 28 April 2002) was a British businessman, best known as chairman of the British Railways Board from 1976 to 1983.

Parker was born in France on 30 August 1924, but spent part of his childhood in Shanghai, where his father worked for an oil company. The family were evacuated from China in 1937, and while his father went to work in Africa, his mother and the rest of the family settled in Bedford, England, where he attended Bedford School. After leaving school, he won a scholarship to study Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, as one of the "Dulwich boys", thirty sixth-formers recruited to boost the ranks of military translators.

In 1943 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army, serving first in India and Burma, and later in the United States and Japan, eventually reaching the rank of Major. In 1947 he left the army, and after a conversation over tea with Lord Murray of Newhaven studied history at Lincoln College, Oxford.

At Oxford, he joined the Dramatic Society, where he was widely regarded as the best undergraduate actor of his day alongside contemporaries Kenneth Tynan, John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson. Parker met Shirley Catlin (the future Shirley Williams ) in the university's Labour Party club and they had a relationship. In her autobiography ("Climbing the Bookshelves") Williams says that "...by the spring of 1949 I was in love with him, and he, a little, with me...". He stood unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for Bedford in the 1951 general election.

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