Harriet Ravenscroft

Harriet Ravenscroft (born Joan) (c. 1910's - 1992) was Peel's mother, who she described him as his 'least favourite son'. After divorcing her husband Robert Ravenscroft (Peel's father), she later had a brief relationship with Sebastian Shaw, the Star Wars actor in the 80's, where she had an arrangement to see him on a four day rotating basis, while he was going out with a classical music and opera agent named Joan Ingpen.

Margrave Of The Marshes
In his autobiography, Margrave Of The Marshes, Peel wrote intensively about his relationship with his mother, where she would regularly beat him and embarrass him in front of guests. Peel described his mother as spending much of her money on clothes and describing some of the outfits she wore as a 'source of acute embarrassment' when she visited him and his brother Francis at Shrewsbury School.

Peel's mother took him to his first ever concert featuring the Obernkirchen Children's Choir in 1954 and would accommodate many musicians, who Peel invited, including the Misunderstood to her home in Notting Hill, London. He would also spend some time spending the night at his mother's home when he was working late night for his BBC Radio One shows.

Shows Mentioned
1979 1980 1986 1988 1989 1993 1996 1997 1999 Others
 * 29 May 1979: Peel says his mother has seen the Raincoats on TV on Sunday night and didn't like them.
 * 04 June 1979: (JP: "The other day, or the other night more accurately, when I was staying in my mother's house and having a look around amongst the things there which my brothers hadn't taken, to see if there was anything left worth having, I picked up a newspaper called 'Screw', assuming this to be an ironic criticism/celebration of carpentry, and it wasn't anything of the sort. So this is for my mother, if she's listening.")
 * It Makes Me Laugh: (JP: 'Several years ago, my mother, something of a hoarder, presented me in a small private ceremony with all of my school reports. I must confess that they made unpleasant and deeply disturbing reading. But I won't bore you with details. The only one which concerns us here is the first of them, written when I was four years old. I should explain that my real name is John Ravenscroft, rather than John Peel, but this didn't prevent the headmistress, a Miss Jones, from observing:)
 * Radio Radio: "Early in 1967 – I was married at the time to an American girl, and it was a fairly catastrophic marriage, so I decided to get out of the area to the extent of coming back to Britain. And went to live with my mother in Notting Hill." 
 * 10 February 1988: Peel stayed at his mother's place last night with his nephew Sasha, who left holiday brochures featuring train journeys from London to China, which Peel admitted that he would love to do on his 50th birthday next year. He goes on to explain that the journey would take him from London via Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Tblisi, Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Alma-Ata, through the Gobi Desert and end up at Xian, where the Terracotta Army are based. Peel reveals the journey would cost him £4330.
 * 07 February 1989: Peel mentions telephoning his brother Alan, whether he's got a room to stay in, after his mother told him that there is no room to stay tonight, because she's got someone staying overnight in her apartment.
 * 15 May 1993: Peel describes yesterday as grim. He had the unpleasant task, along with his brother, of going through his mother’s things at her house in London to decide what to keep. She had died the previous year and they were having to sell her property. He did find a press cutting, that his mother had kept, of an article written by him when he was working in Dallas, about the Beatles. John reads some of it out.
 * 31 August 1996 (BFBS): Peel reveals that his mother was born Joan, but (for reasons best known to herself) changed her name to Harriet in the 1950s.
 * 10 April 1997 (BFBS): Muddy Waters: 'Long Distance Call (LP-Rolling Stone)' (Chess) (JP: 'Possibly the first blues LP I bought: certainly, I bought it when I was in the army meself and took it back home when I was on leave one weekend and played it to my mum. My mother, a woman of extraordinary judgement and taste, thought it was one of the best things she'd ever heard, and she was quite right.')
 * 08 June 1999: Peel on flutes: "The flute is an instrument which I really dislike, to be honest with you. My mother was perhaps frightened by a flute when she was carrying me or something, but I’ve never cared for it on a record, and it’s one of the many, many instruments that I can’t play." Peel appears to be forgetting his support for the early career of Jethro Tull.
 * Interview: On Liverpool FC, Heysel, Hillsborough: "I mean, people in Liverpool didn’t think of me as being a Liverpool person at all, but I thought of myself as being a Liverpool person because that’s where I like to be and that’s where I worked and that’s where my father worked, and my mother and father both came from there, and so on. So I thought of myself as a Liverpudlian."