Peter Dunsmore Howard was born in Maidenhead, England and educated at Mill Hill School. He attended the University of Oxford and captained the England national rugby union team. He represented Oxford University RFC in The Varsity Match in 1929 and 1930 and made his England debut against Wales in January 1930 while still at Oxford. He played eight times for England, playing in all four matches in the Five Nations Championship in both 1930 and 1931. He captained England against Ireland at Twickenham in 1931, Ireland winning 6-5. In 1939 he won the silver medal in the four-man event at the FIBT World Championships in St. Moritz.
After a flirtation with Mosley’s New Party, from which he was sacked, he joined the Conservative party and became a political correspondent and investigative reporter for the Daily Express. In 1940 he worked with fellow Beaverbrook journalists Michael Foot and Frank Owen to write Guilty Men, a political polemic about appeasement and the politicians behind it.
Meanwhile, Howard decided to investigate the 1930s evangelical work of American religious leader Frank Buchman in England, particularly in Oxford. Howard met members of the movement, and this led him to join what became known as the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement. He decided to write a book about the movement, but was forbidden by the Daily Express editor Leslie Plummer (later Sir Leslie Plummer who was standing in for Lord Beaverbrook while in the War Cabinet). So he resigned. Lord Beaverbrook knew nothing of this until after the war and tried to get him to return to the paper but he declined.
In 1941 he published the book, ‘Innocent Men’, which sold 155,000 copies. During and after World War II, Howard wrote seventeen plays on the themes of cooperation and dialogue in industrial relations, politics or personal life. After Buchman's death in 1961, Howard took his place as the chosen successor to leadership of the worldwide MRA movement. In this work Howard himself travelled extensively. He died of viral pneumonia in Lima, Peru, in February 1965.
