Researching Peter Evans

The son of prominent Western Australian businessman and politician Max Evans, Evans had a late start to his swimming career, making his debut at the Australian Championships in his hometown of Perth, aged 17. Despite placing second in the 100 m breaststroke, he was not selected for Australia, and instead travelled to the United Kingdom to train under David Haller. During this period, he quickly improved his times and rose from outside the top 200 into the top 25 in the world rankings. Evans returned to Australia in 1980 and qualified for the Olympics in both the 100 m and 200 m breaststroke. A sprinter, he won the 100 m in an Australian record time and showed a preference for shorter events, which required less training mileage. Evans gained a reputation for often doing fewer training laps than his coach asked of him. Having rebuffed Australian government pressure to boycott the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Evans won bronze in the 100 m breaststroke. His career peak came in the 4 × 100 m medley relay, when he outsplit his opponents in the breaststroke leg of the relay, bringing Australia into contention for its eventual win, which remains the only time that the United States has not won the event at Olympic level.

After the Olympics, Evans moved to the United States to study business and compete for the University of Arizona. He was less successful in the short-course format used at college level, which placed more reliance on efficient turns. Evans returned to Australia for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, winning silver in the 100 m breaststroke and gold in the medley relay. He competed in his second Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, winning bronze in both the 100 m breaststroke and the medley relay. Evans retired after missing selection for the 1986 Commonwealth Games and attempted to follow his father into politics. He unsuccessfully stood as the candidate for the Liberal Party of Australia in the electoral district of Perth at the 1986 state election, before pursuing a career in business.

Evans started the Cat's Whisker coffee bar with Spanish dancing but this soon gave way to skiffle and rock 'n roll; because of lack of dancing space, the bar invented hand-jiving .

Later, Evans teamed up with two other young creatives: David Hicks and architect Patrick Garnett of Garnett, Cloughley and Blakemore. According to Malcolm Newell in his book Mood and Atmosphere in Restaurants they set the decorative style that epitomised London in the Swinging Sixties, giving the affluent vibrant places to dine and dance. The times saw an explosion in fashions – male and female: Twiggy, Biba, Mary Quant, Teddy Boys, Cecil Gee, John Stephen, Carnaby Street. Evans was voted 'Beau Brummell' Best Dressed Man in 1965 by the Clothing Manufacturers' Federation; Hicks even designed red-heeled evening slippers for men!

In 1967 Evans started the exclusive, members-only, Raffles night-club in the King's Road, Chelsea. Hicks's design lasted through to 2007 when new owners gave it a 'complete makeover' . The club was popular throughout the Sixties with the royals of the day. Princess Margaret, Princess Anne and Prince Charles were all visitors. The younger royals have followed: Prince William when romancing Kate Middleton and Prince Harry when pursuing Chelsy Davy.

Inter alia, Hicks designed sets for Richard Lester's 1968 movie Petulia, starring Julie Christie. Garnett's Chelsea Drugstore was immortalised in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.

Evans and his second wife, Gail, now write e-books showing how to cure without pills a number of maladies that doctors find difficult, such as insomnia; this cure won an award as did their book on breaking cigarette addiction; other books supply remedies for obesity, depression, hay fever and snoring. Their most ambitious book addresses adding a significant number of extra years to life, and how to save more valuable years by sleeping less but more effectively and efficiently by 'power sleeping'. "An internet book written for the two extremes in today's cut-throat economic conditions: Those desperately seeking work and those heavily pressured souls who actually run growing companies."

Other interests included astrology, politics, and new ways of selling things: "Today's advertising is stuck in the past, repetitive and boring. We have to sell but there's an urgent need to interest consumers, not hack them off so they chew up the sofa," he told Wikipedia.

Evans had a reputation for being eccentric and for sounding like "a bitter and grumpy man who was living in the past and had more interest in the British Empire of old than the country he had lived in for most of his life."

He repeatedly broke traditional broadcasting guidelines by such acts as allowing periods of several seconds of silence to be broadcast.

Coming from a Welsh background and having the common name for that background of Evans, he frequently referred to himself in the traditional Welsh form of "Evans the Wireless", whereby a person's occupation was used as part of their identifier.

The breakfast show was introduced by a fast-paced and witty instrumental tune called "Gentleman Jim", which was composed and conducted by Bert Kaempfert & his Orchestra, released in 1963. At the closing of the breakfast show Evans would again play "Gentleman Jim" as the show's theme, but usually he made a few satirical comments enticing the radio audience to tune in again tomorrow.

Evans was born in West Hartlepool and received his early education at the local Grammar school. He studied with Arthur Hutchings and A.E.F. Dickinson at Durham University from 1947 to 1951 and gained a first-class BA in 1950. He taught music at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury (1951–52) before gaining his Fellowship Diploma from the Royal College of Organists in 1952. He was then appointed a lecturer at Durham University in 1953. He graduated with a BMus from Durham in that year and took the MA with a dissertation on 17th-century chamber music manuscripts in Durham Cathedral Library. He was awarded the DMus by the university in 1958. From 1961 to 1990 he was professor of music at the University of Southampton, where two of his many achievements were the creation of a music honours degree course from inauspicious beginnings, and the addition of a fine, purpose-built performance venue, the Turner Sims Concert Hall to the University's campus (1974), in collaboration with the Southampton Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.

After his early studies of viol music, in particular that of John Jenkins, Evans worked mainly on the 20th century, writing articles on Jonathan Harvey, Alan Rawsthorne (for the 1980 edition of The New Grove) and especially on the music of Benjamin Britten. According to Grove, he brought to that subject "an acute analytical mind coupled with an approach in which musical values are firmly assigned first place".

A plaque erected in his memory in the Turner Sims, funded entirely by former students, reads: "Founder of the Department of Music ~ A brilliant musician and outstanding teacher who inspired countless students ~ His vision and drive gave rise to the Turner Sims Concert Hall ~ Remembered with gratitude and affection".

Evans died of severe double pneumonia on 1 January 2018, after a three-year battle with dementia.