File:Kay Woollard - Group of Dwarves.jpg

Summary

Illustration of a group of Dwarves by Kay Woollard, made for Peter Bolton in 1995.

Denis Bridoux: Peter Bolton was a good friend and a member of our local Tolkien group, Amon Sûl Smial, in Halifax since about 1984. He used to come to meetings from Sheffield, then Hull and then Salford. He joined the TS when I became Mallorn Editor in 1986.

Of Danish extraction, he belonged to a rare uninterrupted line of people who held to the ancient Norse faith and it gave him a unique perspective.

We used to play boardgames together sometimes with other smial members, Kingmaker, Samurai, Civilization. The latter would often last a whole weekend, including bank holidays!

He especially related to Dwarves, hence the large number of drawings of them by Kay Woollard that he had on his walls. Their respective birthdays in early July were quite close.

I organised to see The Hobbit (film 1) Premiere together with him in Salford, where he lived. Although he was quite disgusted with the liberties taken at the story, he actually enjoyed it. He was quite an opinionated so and so. ;-)

He never recovered from an attack he had suffered in a Manchester street at night years ago, where he was severely wounded in the head and could never work again. It affected him physically, of course, but also mentally. He could occasionally be quite dour, but he became really grim after that. As another consequence of what had happened to him, he related to the world differently afterwards and held some radical opinions, but we loved him all the same.

I believe that his attack caused him Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, hence his agoraphobia. He took to drinking quite heavily. I remember him downing a bottle of wine which he had brought to a smial meeting all by himself, which he would never have done before. In his later days, as his kidneys had been affected, he had stopped drinking and kept to tea.

His pride and joy were his dogs, which he brought with him to our meetings, when he could. As he developed agoraphobia, it became quite difficult for him to travel by public transport, especially with a large dog. When I had a car available, I would sometimes drive him back.

Although naturally grim, he brightened up whenever talking about Tolkien. He wrote several poems (about Dwarves of course) and a story, but I don’t have copies of them.

He died in 2017, in unknown circumstances. After his death, his collection of Dwarf paintings disappeared and I have no knowledge of their whereabouts. I asked his inheritor, his brother, if we could buy them off him, but never received a reply.

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