Peter Jarvis

Dr Peter Jarvis 1932 - 2025

Peter N. Jarvis, aka Pedr, was a founding medical member of the Ffestiniog Railway Medical Service (Gwasanaeth Meddygol Rheilffordd Ffestiniog), and sometime Chairman of the Milton Keynes Group of the FRS.

He was born in Liverpool but his maternal grandparents lived in Colwyn Bay. He spent the first four years of WW2 there to avoid the blitz with his mother and his grandparents while his father was on night time ARP duty in Liverpool. He returned to Liverpool in 1943 to attend Quarry Bank High School. In 1950 he went to Liverpool University to study medicine and it was there that he met Suzette Punter. They became a devoted couple and they married in 1960.

He was an FR volunteer from 1957 and prefered tracklaying as a healthy outdoor activity. He worked for all three railways (FR, WHR(C), WHR(P)). He and his wife Sue (FR volunteer since 1959) were members of the Lilla Group. They have one daughter, Hilary, also a railway volunteer who married Andy Savage.

Whilst still a devout FR man, for nearly twenty years he worked on the new Rheilffordd Eryri or Welsh Highland Railway and raised funds for it.

A writer of fiction as well as a chronicler of fact, his essays appeared in the society magazine, and a collection was published in 1994 under the title Chwedlau Ffestiniog Fables (see Books).

In the winter he visited the Public Records Office at Kew and was itching to get at the FR Archives in Caernarfon.

John Winton in The Little Wonder says "He might well be called the romantic conscience of the railway - for years he has enlivened proceedings at Annual General Meetings. Half-Welsh, calling himself a 'half-breed', his anecdotes of the railway merge, at some indeterminable point, into Welsh legend." He is chronicler of the Welsh dragons that, of course, power the FR's locomotives - see FRM-097.

In their private lives Peter and Sue were also guides at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre where the first electronic computers worked. Peter had been instrumental with two other in saving Bletchley Park and creating the museum of WW2 code breaking and the development of computers. Both were members of national archaeological societies. Sue died in 2019.

See also

• Personalities
• Ffestiniog Railway Medical Service