I met Emrys Peters in Cambridge when I returned there in 1946 and began to read anthropology. At that time Evans-Pritchard came across each week from Oxford where he was about to take up the chair in Social Anthropology previously held by Radcliffe-Brown. His lectures were a breath of fresh air, standing out head and shoulders above anything else on offer in the field. But quite apart from their intellectual qualities, his analyses of the internal and external struggles of the Nuer of the Sudan and the Sanusi of Libya were of deep interest to those of us who had spent much of our adult lives engaged in war or war-related activities. And this was especially true of those who had passed part of that time in North Africa.

Like myself, Peters was among the latter, having served in the desert in the Royal Air Force. His previous interest in human geography, which he had studied at Aberystwyth under Daryll Forde, at this time the very enterprising director of the International African Institute, combined with his wartime experiences gave him a deep interest in the Bedouin, which he shared with the rest of us. Indeed, then and later, that voice with the pronounced Welsh lilt engaged us in the evening hours with many a brilliantly recounted tale not only of Libya and the Near East, but of life in the R.A.F. and, more deeply felt, in the depression of the early thirties in the coalfields.