Death of Peter Farquhar
British novelist, teacher, and murder victim
Peter Farquhar was a retired teacher of English and novelist. After his death on 26 October 2015, his former student and lodger Benjamin L. Field was convicted of murdering him. In 2026, Field's conviction was overturned on appeal, and judges ordered a retrial.
Background
Peter Farquhar
Peter Farquhar was born in Edinburgh on 3 January 1946, the son of a physician. He was educated at Latymer Upper School in London and then Churchill College, Cambridge, where he achieved a first-class degree in English.
Farquhar was an English teacher for 34 years, firstly at Manchester Grammar School (1970–82) then Stowe School (1983–2004). From 2007 he was an occasional lecturer at University of Buckingham. He was described by his friend and former pupil at Manchester, Michael Crick, as having "an acute understanding of the problems of modern adolescent boys. For some, he became almost like a second father."
His first novel, A Wide Wide Sea, a coming-of-age story about three teenagers from Edinburgh who travel to France and Spain on a voyage of self-discovery, was written in 1997 but not published until 2015. It was published only after two Buckingham students, Ben Field and Martyn Smith, discovered the manuscript and persuaded Farquhar to publish it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Death of Peter Farquhar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.