Remembering Companion Peter Day

We were immensely saddened by the news of the recent death of Peter Day, BBC broadcaster extraordinaire and most recently, the meticulous volunteer editor of our last two Guild magazines, without whose hard work and enthusiasm neither publication would have appeared. He also made an acute and deeply-felt contribution to one of our lockdown online discussion sessions, focused on Ruskin & Technology, alongside Companions Nick Friend and Patrick Curry, and you can watch that HERE. He will be deeply missed and we send our love and good wishes to his family.

You can read his Daily Telegraph obituary HERE, but his close friend and fellow Companion Peter Miller has kindly written a more personal reminiscence for us here:

I’m very sorry to have to let you know that Peter Day, one of our Companions, died in March from pneumonia and complications. Although a fairly recent Companion, Peter Day was very active in the Guild, preparing new publications and designing and editing two editions of the Guild’s annual magazine, The Companion in 2020/1 and the Companions Review in 2022.

Peter worked for the BBC for most of his career presenting In Business on Radio 4 and, for many years, was the financial expert on the Today programme. He spent the first four years of his working life in Glasgow, writing for the Daily Record but then came south to work in London for the BBC as a financial journalist. 

Peter was born in Norfolk where his father worked for the Midland Bank (now HSBC) in East Dereham. The family moved first to Horncastle, then Gainsborough and finally to York in the late ‘sixties, when his father became manager of the York branch of the bank.  Peter boarded at Lincoln School before gaining a scholarship to Oxford at St Edmund’s Hall. 

His interests were always much broader than financial journalism.  In fact, finance per se held only a limited interest for him.  He was more fascinated by how businesses work, the factors behind a successful organisation and the people in them who make a difference. He was extraordinarily well-informed about his twin passions of art and music. There was not a concert or exhibition in London that he did not know about or had not visited.  He was also a voracious reader continually buying books in his many areas of interest.   He was a person of enthusiasms and this was helped along by supplies of good wine in which he also took a keen interest. 

He leaves a brother, Timothy, and a close family of his wife Romee and four children, Lizzie, Anna, Jon and Ben and eight grandchildren. 

Peter Miller
March 2023