Peter Scott (1918-1978), British teacher of the Alexander Technique.
Life
Peter Scott went to Stockport Grammar School, Cheshire, where he gained a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. As a child he developed a lifelong passion for music in general and the piano in particular. He studied piano under Edward Isaacs and continued his musical studies with James Ching. In 1936, just before going up to Oxford to read Law, he came across the Alexander Technique in Aldous Huxley’s writings; he then bought and read all of Alexander’s books, and went to an interview with Alexander. However, he could not afford lessons at this point. In 1944, having joined the Roman Catholic Church, he took a job as a Latin master at a Catholic boys’ preparatory school in Sussex, and in 1945 he made regular trips to London for lessons at Ashley Place. In 1946 his former piano teacher Ching opened a piano school in Hampstead and invited him to join it as a teacher of adult pupils in the mornings and evenings. This made it possible for him to join the Alexander Technique teachers' training course. He qualified in December 1949, and joined Patrick Macdonald in teaching at Ashley Place from 1956 until 1967, at which point he moved to Ealing and began teaching from home. In 1972 Scott took over Patrick Macdonald’s teachers’ training course which he ran until his unexpected death from cancer of the pancreas in December 1978.[1]
Descriptions
Description of Peter Scott’s teaching and a collection of some quotations by Peter Scott appear in
- ‘Mr Scott’ by William Morton,[2]
- ‘A tale of two trainings’ by Mark Webster,[3] and
- ‘Scott’s teaching aphorisms’ by Clive Borst.[4]
Video
A silent video shows Peter Scott teaching in the 1970s:
- ‘Peter Scott’s Alexander Training School in the 70s’, is on www.youtube.com.[5]
Peter Scott *18th August 1918 – † December 1978.
