Timothy Julian Churchill Christie (BH, 1952)

The following is an abridged version of the eulogy given at Tim Christie’s funeral by his nephew, Tom Price, on 18 February 2025, followed by a note from Angus Dodd (H, 1985).

Tim was born in Cheltenham in March 1934 to a military family – his father Brigadier W.D.M. Christie (NH, 1909) was in the Royal Engineers. In 1936 his father was posted to Quetta to rebuild the city after the devastating earthquake. Tim, with his mother and sisters, followed him soon thereafter. Then the war came and so Tim spent the war years and his early childhood in various parts of India including in the summer capital Simla. I recall Tim saying he particularly remembered and enjoyed playing with the local boys in Simla and spending the walk home from school each day overturning every stone he came across looking for scorpions despite being told not to. It was at the young age of 4 or 5 that he learnt to ride a horse, ‘Baluchi’, and competed in various gymkhanas with not inconsiderable success.

The family returned to England at the end of the war and Tim went to Cheltenham College in 1947. He was in Boyne House and played rugby and cricket and began a lifelong passion for mountaineering and the outdoors. In 1953 he did his National Service in 53 Squadron Royal Engineers and was posted to Korea just as that war was coming to an end. He much loved recounting how the recently agreed ceasefire held despite he and some colleagues nearly causing an international incident when they placed explosives on the roof of their Commanding Officer’s corrugated-iron WC for a prank. He and his friends detonated this whilst the CO was inside. They were not far from the front line and the North Koreans thought the South was breaking the ceasefire. This was as nothing compared to the mood of the dishevelled CO who staggered from the toilet shack in a state of considerable shock and subsequent anger.

Back home and to Emmanuel College, Cambridge University where Tim read engineering, but travel and adventure were never far away. Tim went to live and work in Tasmania from 1962-67, where he spent most of his free time exploring the wilderness, naming various peaks and lakes. Some of the modern-day names in Tasmania’s backcountry are Tim’s: the Ellerwey Valley is so-called because Tim and colleagues said whilst there, ‘Where the hell are we?’ 

On one expedition to a group of sea stacks called the ‘Candlesticks’, the only way Tim could find to scale them involved getting their ropes from one stack to another by attaching them to hydrogen balloons and then floating these 120 metres from one stack to the next with the use of a bow and arrow. In a modern guidebook this is still called ‘one of the most bizarre ascents in Australian climbing history.’ On another occasion Tim was piloting a light aircraft (I had no idea he even flew planes) with a couple of passengers on board in a very remote part of the country. Disaster struck and the plane crashed. Amazingly all three walked away unharmed. They were miles from anywhere with little or no provisions. If the crash didn’t finish them off, they were now lost in the wilderness. Yet by some miracle a passing helicopter spotted them and they were saved. He never told his mother that story.

Back in London, Tim recalled that one particularly wet and miserable day in 1969 he saw an advert in the paper placed by British Antarctic Survey. They were looking for surveyors and his great friend and Cheltenham College physics teacher, David George, had just returned from the Antarctic. Tim spent the next three years in Antarctica mapping parts of it - the Christie Peaks in Palmer Land are named after him. As a child at the time, this is how Tim came to be defined at least in my mind. 

Tim kept a very detailed diary in Antarctica. He describes the frustrations of the equipment they were using: the theodolites designed for tropical conditions that froze up so you couldn’t see the thing you were trying to survey or the countless times they had to repeat their readings because the wind blew everything over. He describes their sledging arrangements (i.e. how they got about). One entry is as follows:

‘We had taken on massive loads from the depot – about 30 days of food for 6 men and 37 dogs which, with our camping and survey gear amounted to some 4 tonnes. One sledge was still gaining speed and had over-taken the dogs when it reached the steep section. Mike had considerable strength to throw the sledge on its side otherwise the whole load and all our plans for the summer would have been hurtling irretrievably 3000 feet down the mountain dragging the dogs to a nasty grave.'

On base on 21 June 1970, Midwinter’s Day, Tim writes:

‘…had a shower and changed into a suit. Couldn’t find my shoes. Think I left them on the Endurance last February. Had to wear my shirt inside out as so dirty. Pea soup in this environment tasted superb and though the steak was so tough it was inedible, one felt one was at a real banquet. Paul somewhat lowered the tone by appearing without a shirt, he did have a tie on though. Songs afterwards, me on the ukelele, Sea Shanties and I accompanied them on the piano.’

No expedition would be complete without people issues. Sledging partners were all part of the experience. He wrote:

‘I was told I would be sledging with Miles. If there was one person who got up my nose it was him. Half way up the glacier Miles said to me “I hear you told the base commander you didn’t want to sledge with me.” “How do you know that?” I said. “He told me when I told him I didn’t want to sledge with you.” We both roared with laughter and from then on we really got on pretty well.’

After Antarctica, Tim continued his career as a civil engineer living in Bristol and specialising in engineering design of bridges. His most well-known was the award-winning road bridge over River Torridge at Bideford in Devon. Designed in 1980, construction was completed in 1987 and I had the good fortune to visit it with Tim whilst it was being built. One of his work colleagues, Chris, recalls ‘Tim’s practical demonstration in the office of how the bridge was constructed using matchboxes and rubber bands to simulate fixing and extending the segments.’ Other colleagues refer to him as ‘a legend,’ ‘a lovely guy,’ and ‘a brilliant mind and a man of real integrity and compassion.’

Away from work, though, expeditions were never far away: Arctic Norway, Alaska, the Caucasus, the Atlas and other remote places, often with his partner in crime, David George. Love of the outdoors and exploring lasted well into his old age. 

The outdoors and the young – that was Tim. As we had our own family, we took Anna and Megan on several camping trips with Tim in Wales when they were young. Tim was still using his Antarctica paraffin stove even in 2009 and our girls recalled how tech savvy Tim was with what was then the early iPhone. But more importantly, Tim gave so much of his time working in various youth clubs in Bristol inspiring many with his love of the outdoors and how there were no barriers to what they could achieve.  

I want to conclude with just a few other memories of Tim: the mountain of butter Tim would put on his toast, his sweet tooth, lots of KitKats and ‘dream topping’ – a revolting, sweet, powdered confection that he served with pudding. Of course, as an engineer and with his Antarctic experience, Tim was a practical man; a great ‘jobbing gardener’ says his niece Mandy, who recalls asking him when he last used a chain saw – ‘to cut up frozen seal meat in Antarctica’ was of course the repost. And he gave a friend’s son an angle grinder for his 8th birthday, telling the mother it was important he learnt how to use such tools.

What a wonderful, interesting, exciting and full life Tim had. He will be greatly missed.

Angus Dodd (H, 1985) adds:

Tim Christie was well-known to many OCs after his return from Antarctica in 1973 right through to the early 1990s. The Mountaineering Club was established in the early 1970s by Guy Dodd and David George (D.B.G.) and supported by numerous other members of staff during that period – and Tim.

Almost every Cheltonian magazine during that period mentions him as a participant in climbing trips at home and overseas. In the winter he regularly showed his slides of Antarctica and Tasmania to the Mountaineering Club and the Photographic Society (also run by D.B.G.). In the 1992 Cheltonian, D.B.G. wrote about a trip over the Mingbo La pass in the Himalayas, ‘At least I had got higher than my old friend…Tim Christie O.C., but we were a geriatric mob and weren’t really fit.’

Tim’s quiet but immense hardiness and deep experience of the mountains and the wilderness in many ways aligned him more closely to the era of Edward Wilson (Day Boy, 1891) than modern day climbers and explorers. Many OCs who continued to climb after College would credit Tim with some of their enthusiasm and skill. We will remember his willingness to give his time without any expectation of reward, his enthusiasm for the success and exploits of others and his unassuming guidance and advice.

On a personal note, he was very much part of the Dodd family and we shared many of the experiences Tom Price mentions in his excellent eulogy. In the summer of 1987, he inspired and encouraged me and a student friend to spend six weeks exploring and climbing in the islands, mountains and fjords of Arctic Norway, repeating a trip that Tim had undertaken with Cambridge friends in the 1950s. Tim and I were still exchanging photos of those wild places until the day he died.