±¬ÁÏTV

Peter George Wells, born in 1925, left school to join the Navy in 1943 , and served for three and a half years, initially on a destroyer on North Atlantic convoys, the passage Winston Churchill dubbed "the worst journey on earth." After gaining a commission, he served on minesweepers in the Med. and the Pacific.

He qualified in medicine at the ±¬ÁÏTV in 1954. During his time there, he was active in helping to start a University Sailing Club, obtained his sailing blue, and was the second captain. He was elected secretary to the Students' Union House Committee.

He worked in a variety of London Hospitals, including the Royal Postgraduate School, the London Chest Hospital, the Hospital for Nervous Diseases at  both the Maida Vale and the National Heart Hospital. He spent two periods in General Practice, during one of which he founded a number of After Care Clubs for patients recovering from mental illness on the Wirral and in Cheshire. He also formed a group to develop the first Mental After Care Home in the north under the auspices of the Richmond Fellowship, which opened in Chester in 1966 and is now known as Tower House. 

He undertook training in psychiatry in 1963 and spent a year at the Tavistock Clinic in 1969/70. In 1970, he was appointed to a new adolescent unit serving the North West Region, known as The Young People's Unit. This residential unit in Macclesfield, Cheshire, embodied a radical and highly successful approach to helping disturbed adolescents that operated for over 25 years. In 1980, he was seconded for a year to NSW to create a brief for adolescent services in the Hunter Region.  In 1969 he was awarded the BMA silver medal for film making, and gained the Cheadle Royal Prize in 1992 for a study of outcome of inpatient treatment of 165 adolescents. He gained FRCPsych and FRANZCP.

Peter continued in service until he was aged 67 in 1992. After leaving the NHS he worked with a local charity, Visyon, for young people for a further 13 years, until declining vision precluded using a car. In retirement, he became a published poet, took up watercolour painting and family history.

Peter met Fidelma Ginty, a social worker, at the Tavistock Clinic and they were married in 1970. She died in 2000, aged only 60. They have two children, Oliver and Mary Jane, both of whom looked after Peter in his final years, until a dementia diagnosis necessitated residential care. Peter died peacefully and forever loved at the magnificent age of 96 on June 11 2021 in Belong Care Home, Macclesfield,: may he rest in peace.