Biography from Christ's College, Cambridge, Archives:

Arthur Leslie Peck was born in 1902. He became a Fellow of Christ’s in 1926, a post he would hold for almost fifty years, and also served the College at one time or another as Vice-Master and Librarian. Academically he is best remembered for his work on Aristotle, but had a great many passions and interests besides this classical research. He died in 1974, and the current Reading Room at Christ’s is named after him. A photo of Peck was donated to the College in 2019 by his friend Professor Geoffrey Martin.
Born in 1902 in Cambridge, Peck attended the Perse School, where he was a pupil of W. H. D. Rouse, the classicist and Christ’s Fellow. Indeed, it may have been Rouse who steered the young Peck towards Christ’s College. Peck became a Fellow of Christ’s at the age of 24, and was known as a strict and accurate tutor.
Peck’s particular academic interests were Greek philosophy, along with classical Greek medical and biological texts—he translated Aristotle’s Generation of Animals for the Loeb Classics series, for example. Apart from his research and his teaching duties he was an enthusiastic member of the College; as well as serving as College Librarian, he was Vice-Master from 1957 to 1961, Keeper of the College plate, and Garden Steward. Indeed, during Peck’s memorial service in the college Chapel, a speaker described “his loving care for the College Garden, and the seasonal notes which he sent round to inform us of any special flowers or shrubs in blossom”.
Peck was also a poet, although his efforts generally took the form of either light-hearted or religious verses that would be sent round to his friends and colleagues at Christmas. His intelligence and his eccentricity with language were also evident in his frequent invention of words and phrases; as Joseph Needham wrote, “[these] spread so steadily through the Morris men, and Christ’s men, and a wide circle of other friends as well, that if anyone spoke of segastigation, for example, you recognised it as an outer ripple of the linguistic disturbance caused continually by Arthur at the still centre”. Peck was a co-founder of the Cambridge Morris Men after the First World War, and “endeared himself to generation after generation of younger dancers” through his unforgettable personality.
When he died, unmarried, in 1974, some Morris men took to the First Court lawn to pay their own tribute. He died a rich man, but left the bulk of his money to the church of St Mary the Less, where he had served as a sub-deacon. His Anglo-Catholic faith was very important to him. Peck also left all of his books printed before 1700 to the College Library; these number around forty volumes. The Library also holds a good deal of his papers, poetry and personal effects in its Fellows’ Papers Collection.