Tony Parker (25 June 1923 – 3 October 1996) was an oral historian whose work was dedicated to giving a voice to British and American society's most marginalised figures, from single mothers to lighthouse keepers to criminals, including murderers.^[1]

Biography

Born in Stockport, Cheshire, Parker was a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was directed to work in a coal mine. He moved to London and worked as a publisher's representative at Odhams Press. He campaigned against capital punishment and became very interested in prisons and their occupants, eventually focussing on the experiences of prisoners after release. Tony Parker died in Westleton, Suffolk, having just completed his study of his American counterpart Studs Terkel.

Work

His books comprise lengthy interviews with his various subjects. He does not include his questions. He attempts to record his subjects "without comment or judgement".^[2] He began by specialising in studies of convicted criminals in Britain. His later books took a wider range of subjects: a poor housing estate, a small town in America, post-Communist Russia and the lives of lighthouse-keepers. Anthony Storr described him in 1970 as "Britain's most expert interviewer, mouthpiece of the inarticulate and counsel for the defence of those whom society has shunned and abandoned".^[3] As Colin Ward wrote in The Independent, Parker's "own triumphs were the result of his gentleness and modesty, which led the most taciturn or suspicious of people to open up with confidences they would not dream of revealing to more self-assertive questioners".^[4] The anonymous obituarist in The Daily Telegraph stressed that "his real gift was for creating sympathetic silences into which murderers, thugs, child molesters, rapists and baby-batterers could pour their confidences without inhibition".^[5]

He also wrote plays for television and episodes of Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch, Within These Walls and Crown Court.