Alan Allport
I have known and loved Christopher for well over 60 years — since we first met as undergraduates. We shared a house together in Park Town during my first year after graduating.
Christopher stood out among his student contemporaries with his wide and exuberant range of knowledge and interests. Ideas were his playground. He loved to wind a conversation up into the stratosphere, sparking off others around him, drawing them out: conversations that often ended in uproarious, shared laughter. Then, as the laughter subsided, he’d launch the next firework …
His enthusiasm for chemistry started from an early age. Virginia recalls him, around 11 years old, filling his parents’ car boot with heaps of stinky seaweed. He purloined his mother’s best jelly-pan, in which he then boiled the seaweed down for hours and hours, to produce – eventually – a thimbleful of iodine.
Before going to college, Christopher completed his two-years’ National Service – in those days obligatory for every young male – as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. As a practical-minded problem-solver he thoroughly enjoyed the military exercises, as well as the comradeship. In 1956 he was sent to Suez as part of the British and French invasion. There he constructed a tank bridge across the Canal before they were ordered to dismantle it and withdraw.
Always original, during his student days he took up several vacation jobs as assistant lighthouse-keeper on remote Scottish islands: on Islay, on Skye, and on Ailsa Craig.
Christopher’s two passionate interests were music and nuclear physics — the latter, all and only for peaceful purposes. Most of all towards the dream of controlled nuclear fusion: unlimited clean energy and an end to fossil fuels. For his final year as an undergraduate he had switched from chemistry to physics, gaining a First, and going straight on to a D Phil in theoretical plasma physics. Music continued, meanwhile, to occupy almost as much of his time, organising and singing in countless large and small concerts, madrigal groups and occasional operas.
Almost the only field of knowledge in which he could not be enthusiastically engaged was what you might call ‘natural history’ – the private lives of plants and animals. Christopher loved hill walking and walks in the woods. I worked hard to draw his attention also to the smaller beings who share our planet: to help him to distinguish a bug from a beetle, a sparrow from a sparrowhawk. But my tutorials never really ‘took’. If I were to point out an Osprey flying spectacularly overhead, he would glance up – out of politeness – nod, and carry on his previous conversation without missing a beat.
Being Christopher, he completed his doctorate in three years flat. While many of his contemporaries went off to America for a ‘Post-Doc’ year, Christopher – original as ever – opted instead for the Soviet Union. In December 1964, equipped with a huge fur coat, he arrived in Moscow by train. Amazingly, he had obtained all the necessary bureaucratic permits and KGB clearance to work on nuclear physics at the elite Kurchatov Institute. During his time there, with his Russian colleagues he published two major theoretical papers. He must have worked his socks off. Even so, he still found time for extended trips to Novosibirsk in snowy Siberia, dancing with a ballerina, and white nights in Leningrad. And to write lots of letters.
Back in Oxford he won a three-year junior research fellowship (JRF) at Merton College, beginning in October 1965. So began his life-long attachment to Merton, where he later became a ‘supernumerary’
and finally Emeritus fellow. These were some of the happiest years of Christopher’s life. During his year away in Moscow he had been courting Anne Crace by letter, while Anne was a medical student in London. Back home, in April 1966 he invited her to stay at his parents’ house in Edinburgh. The next day he dragged her up Castle Law in the Pentlands, and there proposed to her – on the cold, snowy, windswept summit. Anne accepted – though her teeth were chattering – and on the tenth of December 1966 they were joyfully married in Merton chapel.
Their marriage, lasting 56 years, was the cornerstone of his life. In September the following year they celebrated the birth of their first-born, Natasha. And, to Christopher’s lifelong pride and joy, there followed two other much-loved daughters, Miranda, and then Trio.
In 1968, following his 3-year JRF at Merton, Christopher began working at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, on the theoretical design for a nuclear fusion reactor. Nearly ten years later, Culham was chosen as the host site for the brand-new Joint European Torus (JET) Project, to build just such a reactor. And in January 1979, Christopher transferred to the JET Project, working closely with Hans-Otto Wüster, its brilliant and charismatic Director, until Hans-Otto’s sudden and unexpected death in 1985. Christopher thought the world of him.
This was the most fulfilling period of Christopher’s professional career. By 1983, JET achieved its first plasma. It was an immensely ambitious programme, aimed at opening the way to supplying the world with unlimited, clean energy, eliminating the need for climate-destabilising fossil fuels. Christopher was in on the project from its inception. The initial aim was to achieve scientific ‘breakeven’ – when the energy produced equals the energy put in. Sadly, neither JET nor its American competitor ever got there, though JET came closer than any other machine, a record it held until 2021.
In total Christopher spent 17 years at Culham. But he then moved on, first as a research manager in Offshore Technology, working on the ability of North Sea oil rigs to withstand the worst possible wave impacts, then back to the nuclear industry, in Nuclear Robotics. Robotics led on to his work for AEA technology in Russia. Christopher made a huge commitment to this project, working with Russian colleagues, seeking safe ways to dismantle nuclear-powered submarines. After his retirement in 2002, his frequent trips to Russia continued under the UK/Russian Closed Nuclear Cities Partnership, seeking new, peaceful employment for former nuclear-weapons scientists.
All through his hugely energetic and varied career, Christopher kept up his deep love of music. The madrigal group continued to meet and sing together, never missing their annual champagne picnic on the Cherwell, singing from their punts to the cows on the riverbank. And Christopher organised and took leading roles in ever-more-ambitious opera performances.
Christopher’s longing for a peaceful world led to his deep attachment to Oxford Quaker Meeting, of which he was a faithful member and attender for nearly half a century. In the Sunday morning meetings he often gave spoken ministry, usually about some aspect of world affairs. His commitment to peace and disarmament between the nuclear-armed East and West found vigorous expression also in the international Pugwash movement. Pugwash, founded in 1957, is an international body of nuclear scientists committed to peace, seeking a world free of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, it contributed to the elaboration of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968). Christopher’s role in Pugwash meetings began in 1969 and continued uninterrupted for more than 50 years, until his death. For 20 years, from 2002 he was a member of the executive committee of British Pugwash, and its chairman from 2011 to 2017.
Peter Jenkins, the current Chair of British Pugwash, who knew him well, has written a resounding tribute: “Christopher’s loss will leave a gaping hole at the heart of British Pugwash. His intellectual contribution has been immense. Both as chairman of British Pugwash and as a member of the executive committee he has been the kindest, most considerate, and best humoured of colleagues. For more than a decade he represented us on the Council of International Pugwash and at meetings of the movement’s European groups. In those circles he was highly respected for his knowledge of nuclear matters and for the power of his intellect, and held in deep affection by many. We shall all long remember a man whose friendship we shall miss and whose passing we mourn.”
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 523 • November 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
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