Conning the dons

In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians of his generation but also a former intelligence officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud. He himself wrote a mischievous series of anonymous articles for The Spectator, purporting to emanate from the 17th-century pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his funniest books was an exposé of the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Roper proved to have been a forger and liar on a heroic scale.

But perhaps the supreme irony of Trevor-Roper’s life was that, on behalf of the Sunday Times, he authenticated the ‘Hitler Diaries’ forged by Konrad Kujau: fascinated as he was by hoaxes, he fell for the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century. It was a humiliation which delighted his enemies, and it will always haunt his memory.

On a more modest scale was his interest in a very minor fraudster who came his way in 1958. This was one Robert Michael Parkins, or Robert Parkin Peters, who claimed he was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford and the president of his old college, Magdalen. Peters was a habitual fantasist who, through a long life, repeated three types of deception. He claimed academic degrees and distinctions for himself; he illegally practised as a clergyman — eventually even professing to be a bishop of something called the Old Polish Catholic Church while having not one word of Polish; and he was a serial bigamist, clocking up at least seven marriages.

Young women seemed to have found this paunchy, balding fake parson quite irresistible. The last wife, who stayed with him for more than 30 years, helped him run a spurious sounding college, called variously the Cambridge Religious Studies Centre and Monkfield, which was, astonishingly, accredited by various reputable academic institutions such as the University of Hull and which, even more astonishingly, attracted (presumably fee-paying) students.