10 October 1943 – 16 January 2021 Peter Blackhurst FCIPP
It is withmuch sadness the Chartered Institute learned of the death of this highly respected and loved founder member who played key roles in creating our professional body. The following obituary was compiled by Gordon Cresswell FCIPP fromconversations with Trevor Lakin FCIPPdip, ChrisWilliams FCIPPdip, Peter White FCIPP, and BryanMonkman FCIPP. T he payroll profession was very saddened to learn of Peter’s passing, leaving a void in the early group of payroll pioneers. He had been fighting MDS, a rare house payroll system. He was successful, and it lasted for over fifteen years. I met Peter at the first meeting of what was to become the committee of APSA, the forerunner of today’s Institute.
form of blood cancer and sadly complications set in. As Chris Williams remarked, “Oddly I thought our inaugural group would go on forever”, a comment I understand because, although we’re not invincible, there was something about those early days in the eighties that made us feel we could change the world – we certainly rocked the payroll establishment and Peter was a large part of this. Peter White recalls first meeting Peter in 1968 when both Peter B and his wife Krys worked at Hertfordshire County Council. Says Peter: “We renewed our acquaintanceship in 1980 with the advent of APSA (Association of Payroll Administrators) when I joined a number of payroll and pensions people including Graham Francis, Gordon Cresswell and Peter who I recall as a confident young man, pushing ahead with his career and bringing fresh ideas to the table, forming part of the bedrock of our fledgling organisation.” Peter moved to Cheshire City Council then to Cheshire County Council where he employed Bryan Monkman in 1975 in the pensions department. Bryan remembers, “Peter adopted a quite radical stance to our reorganisation of the department, adopting a team structure, an alien concept to some of the diehards.” His boss, Lawrence Warrell, who died last year, moved Peter back into payroll with the challenge to design and develop a bespoke in- standing out charismatically with his charm and original ideas. Peter was never quiet, and you always knew when he was in the room
We had only broad ideas of what it would become – notions of representation for the payroll voice, a vague idea of a payroll qualification. There were about twenty of us, mostly strangers to each other, with Peter standing out charismatically with his charm and original ideas. Peter was never quiet, and you always knew when he was in the room! We became firm friends as the organisation progressed, often rooming together in London in interests of economy. Bryan recalls that Peter’s boss had allowed him to attend the first APSA meeting with the proviso of not taking on any roles. He returned the next day as APSA secretary! He was proud of his membership being number 2, second only to George Powell, the Liverpudlian who made the first rallying call for there to be a payroll body. The most important initiative we undertook as a body was to produce the first payroll qualification, a warts-and- all product but it worked. I remember Peter coining the phrase that payroll’s objective is “to pay people accurately on time”, something so obvious but it needed to be stated. Another major contribution he made towards the qualification was to measure efficiency through payroll indicators – old-hat now, but back in the 1980s quite radical. Peter was an ideas man. He believed everything we did in payroll could be laid out as a formula which meant, when adopted, that the payroll programs could be made to do so much more than they had in the past. It was during these exciting early days, as we all got to know each other, that I met Peter’s wife Krys, always supportive of his efforts and putting up with Peter going off with the rest of us for workshops and meetings. During the early days Trevor Lakin met Peter and he recalls “I was working at Peterborough Software and was introduced to Peter for the production of an article for our local government customers. We bonded over a splendid lunch (quite liquid!) with discussions on music and bands
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2021 | Issue 68 4
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