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. Interestingly opera was one of Harriet's favourite passions. 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
1976 1979 1980 1986 1987 1988 1989 1991 1993 1996 1997
 * 28 December 1976: Misunderstood, 'I Can Take You To The Sun (7")' (Fontana) (JP: 'I was very chuffed to see that get in there...the only record the catalogue number of which I know off by heart 'cos of the number of times I've had to write and tell people what it is....I'd like to dedicate that one to my mother, because when the band came over here in 1966, they went and stayed with her for a few months. I don't think she's ever fully recovered from that.')
 * 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." 
 * 27 April 1987: Peel mentions that it's his mother's birthday today.
 * 17 August 1987: (JP: 'Actually, my mother is a bit of a sucker for that sort of thing in that she loves ordering stuff through the mail, and they're always bizarre objects, things which have no genuine practical application at all. I mean, painted clothes brushes that bottle mulberries and tell you the time in Hong Kong simultaneously, and little boxes full of these things scattered all over the house.')
 * 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.
 * 24 November 1991: Start of show: "Thank you very much, Andy. One thing that you won't get on Ceefax is the information that my mother was seven months pregnant with me when that last record was recorded."
 * 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.
 * 11 January 1997: (JP: 'The last time I was in Chester was when my mother told me to buy some cavalry twill trousers. Obviously things have changed a bit since then.')

1999 Others
 * 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.
 * Peeling Back The Years: "Yeah, nothing on radio at all. I used to listen to Housewives Choice in the expectation that you might hear the occasional good record and to the Two-Way Family Favourites or whatever it was, you know, Forces Favourites, again in the hope that you would hear some exciting records on there. But the most that you could hope for really was the odd Frankie Laine track. Because Frankie Laine was my big hero, my first big hero. I mean, I saw him inbetween… You see, the very first gig I went to, my mother took me to see Obernkirchen Children's Choir. The Happy Wanderer."


 * 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."