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] Born in Stockport, Cheshire, Parker was a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was directed to work in a coal mine.
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.
[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".