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PETER BANDER VAN DUREN
FCCR
30 July 1930- 21 April 2004
Peter Bander-van Duren (1930-2004) Presenting
former Russian president Mikhail
Gorbachev with a copy of
Orders of Knighthood
and of Merit
Born in
Köln (Cologne), Germany: Hans Peter Bander
Only
child of Johann Bander and Klara Agnes, née Kettschau
von Duren
Johann
Bander ended his career in Deutsche Post (the German Post
Office) as one of the three Chief Cashiers of the system for
the Federal Republic, but at the beginning of World War II,
when his son was about ten, he had refused to ‘volunteer’ to
work in the post office in occupied Belgium, was ‘exiled’ to
Spitzbergen and his wife and son, who heard nothing from him
for six years, believed he had died, until they were
reunited after the end of hostilities. Meanwhile mother and
son were compulsorily evacuated to Poland and PB was sent to
a Nazi academy in Czechoslovakia, where he was the only
child of non-Nazi party parents. He ran away, carrying with
him nothing but a child’s suitcase full of sandwiches he had
saved in preparation, determined to find his mother in
Poland and by amazing luck meeting her by a railway station
south of Leipzig, she having set out to take her son away
from the school, not being aware that he had already run
away from it. Together they journeyed, walking, getting
lifts on carts and by whatever other method possible, often
with little or no food, to a hotel in (I believe) Alexisbad,
owned by an English relation who had before the War, on the
advice of the nearest British consul, married a high local
Nazi official to ensure she retained ownership of her
property. Here they stayed until the Russians took over that
part of Germany, but not before he had witnessed, hidden
behind the bar, the murder of all the local German military
high command who had been planning their surrender to the
advancing Western Allies and were in the hotel together when
they were shot down by the Nazi ‘werewolves’. The image of a
general hanging by an arm that had been caught in the
revolving door haunted him all his life. Fortunately most of
his wartime memories were blocked out of his mind as time
went by.
After World War II and the chaos of its aftermath,
which delayed his education by several years, he attended
the Städ Naturwissenschaftliches Gymnasium, Humboldt-strasse,
Köln (known as Humboldt Gymnasium), graduating in 1952 (when
he was President of the Students’ Council and Speaker of the
Class of ’52 – whose Speaker he had been for five
consecutive years), to the University of Köln, gaining a
degree in psychology and later, his PhD in Criminal
Psychology, his thesis being on interrogation techniques. He
also gained his missio canonica, entitling him
to teach canon law to university level. During his time at
Humboldt, he sang a bass solo in Paul Hindemith’s Wir
bauen eine Stadt (Let's Build a Town) under the
composer’s direction.
Coming to England in 1957, where first he taught
mainly delinquents at Tudor Secondary School in Essex Road,
the Angel, Islington, North London, where, to quote the
Headmaster’s reference, he had ‘as his class the most
difficult one in the final year and he has stimulated and
encouraged them, using an effective discipline, so that they
have worked much better than was expected.’ He moved from
there in 1959 to teach at Edith Cavell County Secondary
School, the first in Britain to have been created from two
separate secondary schools (interview: “coming from coping
with those delinquents, why do you think you can teach
religious education to our pupils?” “The pupils here just
haven’t been caught by the police yet.”) In 1962, the year
that he became a naturalised British citizen, a Ministry of
Education report by H.M.Inspectorate on the School described
him as ‘an unusually gifted master’, and when he left, the
Headmistress praised his ‘boundless energy and enthusiasm’
which ‘permeated all the work of his department’. In 1963 he
set up a School of Languages, based on Amherst School, at
the Hackney & Stoke Newington Junior Commercial & Technical
College, where he had, according to the principal, ‘the
ability to get the best out of the most ungifted and
fundamentally disinterested student, and through his lively
presentation he inspires his students to greater efforts’.
In 1965 he answered an advertisement for the post of
lecturer in religious instruction at Wall Hall College,
Aldenham, Herts, a constituent college of the Cambridge
Institute of Education, where he told the interviewing
committee that he wasn’t interested in the job as advertised
but would be interested if it was changed to one in
Religious Education. He was offered the position of lecturer
in Religious Education, thus becoming head of the first
department of Religious & Moral education in the country and
was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1966. His first book One
For the Road, intended to teach standard of values and
morals to secondary school pupils by using a Ford Anglia
owner’s handbook as a parable, was published in 1966, and
its successor, Two for the Road (illustrated with
cartoons by Russell Brockbank), on human relationships, in
1967. The Education Inspectorate of the then London County
Council had wanted these books made available to schools,
and Colin Smythe Limited was set up to publish them and
other works in the educational field. They were used as
class texts by over 300 secondary schools in the country and
gained considerable critical support from Roman Catholic,
Anglican and Non-Conformist leaders. It was through these
books that he first met Archbishop H.E. Cardinale, then
Apostolic Delegate to Great Britain, who praised them
highly, saying that he felt that ‘they should have their
place in every teenager’s library’.
1968 saw the publication of Looking Forward to
the Seventies, which he edited, and which contained
interviews with and essays by leading figures in British
education including the Chairmen of all the Royal
Commissions set up to consider the subject during that
decade. The following year his Prophecies of St Malachy
was published (with updated editions appearing in 1970,
1974, 1979 and 1995). Resigned his teaching position at
Wall Hall in July 1970 to work full time with Colin Smythe
Ltd (a decision he occasionally regretted, yearning for the
simpler academic life), he editing Dr Konstantin Raudive’s
groundbreaking book in the field of psychic research,
Breakthrough, an Amazing Experiment in Electronic
Communication with the Dead (1971) and writing about
that book’s reception in his own Carry on Talking
(1972, called Voices from the Tapes in the US).
In 1973 he and Leslie Hayward set up Van Duren
Publications, and following his work with Matthew Manning,
the young psychic, metal bender and at the time subject of
much poltergeist activity, and the publication of Manning’s
The Link (Colin Smythe, 1974), and two later
books with W.H.Allen, and his editing and publishing the
monthly Psychic Researcher, in 1976 he added
part of his mother’s maiden name to his, and became Peter
Bander van Duren by deed poll. Colin Smythe Ltd. had
published Archbishop H.E. Cardinale’s The Holy See and
the International Order in 1976, and it was decided that
Van Duren Publishers would take over this area of
publishing, and they started work on a number of volumes
relating to the Catholic Church and the Holy See, its
heraldry and Orders, the first of which was Archbishop Bruno
B. Heim’s Heraldry in the Catholic Church (1978,
revised and updated in 1981), followed by The
Representatives: The Real Nature and Function of Papal
Legates (1980) by Mgr Mario Oliveri (now Bishop of
Albenga-Imperia), and Armorial Bruno B. Heim, pages
from the Archbishop’s Liber Amicorum which
PBvD edited and introduced (1981). Archbishop Cardinale’s
Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See 1983,
(published the day after the author’s death – Archbishop
Cardinale had wanted it published on 25 March to mark the
start of the extraordinary Holy Year), revised that year by
PBvD and further revised by him in 1985). His own The
Cross and the Sword (a supplement to Orders of
Knighthood) and his edition of Cardinal (then
Archbishop) Martin’s Heraldry in the Vatican were
published in 1987. He also edited Polonia
Restituta, by Kazimierz Sabbat (President of the
Republic of Poland (in Exile), Professor Mieczyslaw
Sas-Skowronski (Rector of the Polish University Abroad) and
Krzysztof Barbarski (now Director of the Sikorski Museum,
London) (1989).
Following numerous visits to Rome and discussions
with the Cardinal Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, it
was decided that no further revisions to Archbishop
Cardinale’s book could be made. A new book would have to be
written, and PBvD undertook this onerous task, having
already been appointed in 1983, following Archbishop
Cardinale’s death, the Holy See’s revisore on
Pontifical and Catholic-founded Orders. The result of his
labours, the monumental and magisterial Orders of
Knighthood and Awards of Merit, was published in 1995 by
Colin Smythe Ltd (Van Duren Publishers having been closed
down in 1992 so PBvD could concentrate on writing). Since
then he had been advising various Orders and individuals on
phaleristic and heraldic matters.
In January 2002 he fell down the stairs at his home,
suffering multiple compound fractures to his left tibia and
fibula. He recovered, with a steel rod inserted in his tibia
but later in the year he slipped in the garden and fractured
three vertebrae, indicating the bone weakness that was the
first symptom of the multiple myeloma that was to cause his
death by renal failure, exacerbated by collagenous colitis,
on 21 April 2004.
Honours
and decorations: (not including lower ranks in Orders which
he had on occasion received at an earlier date)
3 April 1982: Knight Commander of the Order of St
Gregory the Great motu proprio (Papal)
15
March 1985: Cross of Merit with Silver Star, Equestrian
Order of the Holy Sepulchre of
Jerusalem (Holy See);
1 April 1986: Knight Commander Pro Merito
Militensi, (Sovereign Military Order of Malta)
20
May 1987 Commander, the Most Venerable Order of St John of
Jerusalem (UK)
1988
Interfaith Medal in Gold, (International Council of
Christians and Jews);
11 November 1988: Knight Commander with Star of the
Order of Polonia Restituta (Poland);
8
December 1988: Knight Commander of the Order of Our Lady of
the Conception of Vila
Viçosa (Portugal, Royal House of Bragança);
8
August 1989: Doctor of Laws honoris causa of
the Polski Uniwersytet na Obczynie
(Polish University Abroad)
24
February 1990: Knight Grand Cross of Grace with gold star,
S.M.Constantinian Order
of St.George (Italy/Two Sicilies);
23
January 1991: created Fidalgo Cavaleiro da Casa Real by the
Duke of Bragança
8
July 1991: Professor Catedrático Convidado, Universidade
Moderna, Lisbon, Portugal
2
May 1992: Honorary Member of the 3rd Carpathian
Rifle Division of the Polish Army
1
June 1993: Sash of the Cross of Merit of the Order of the
Causa Monarquica, Portugal
10
May 1994: Grand Cross of Merit of the Military & Hospitaller
Order of St Lazarus
(Grand Priory of France)
25
May 1994: Knight Grand Cross of Merit of the Military &
Hospitaller Order of St
Lazarus (Grand Priory of America)
10
June 1994: Admiral in the Texas Navy
24
Sept. 1994 Grand Officer, the Order of SS. Maurice & Lazarus
(Royal House of Savoy);
Academician - Academico Correspondente Estrangeiro, Academia
de Letras e Artes, Cascais (Portugal);
Member of Council, Instituto Histórico Dom Luiz I (Portugal)
Colin Smythe |
