Wolfson College Record 2021

his retirement in 1995 and his subsequent appointment as Emeritus Fellow.
Chris’s childhood was spent in Heaton Moor, where his father was Deputy Registrar
of Manchester University. He attended Stockport Grammar School followed by
National Service spent largely in the Middle East, and then Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge, where he acquired his lifelong love of rowing. After graduating
he started his career with the Commonwealth Development Corporation where he
spent eleven years alternating between London and Lagos – where he and I met, as I
had just arrived to work at Government House. After our marriage he was sent to
Nairobi, Kenya, where we lived for six years and where he initiated and established
the Kenya Tea Development Authority for smallholders, which made Kenya the
largest tea exporting nation in the world at the time.
On returning to England in 1965, he spent a couple of years with a tea company
in the City of London, when there came an unexpected offer of an appointment
to the World Bank in Washington, where we lived very happily for almost twenty
years, during which time Chris travelled extensively, mainly to India and Africa.
On returning to England and living very happily in Oxford, Chris became involved
in many aspects of life here as well as enjoying his life at Wolfson before and after
his retirement. He was a Governor of Stowe for thirteen years, Financial Advisor
to the Oxford Union Society, and a Governor of Pusey House, Oxford.
However, his greatest love was the Oxfordshire Historic Churches Trust which he
served first as Chairman and later President, for which service he was appointed
MBE in 2011. This gave him the chance to enjoy his greatest interest, Church
history and architecture.
He was able to keep very active until his last few months, still living on Boars Hill,
until he sadly died at the age of almost 91 on 29 April after a very full and active life.
Judith Walton
Personal News
Nicholas Justin Allen
(1939–2020)
An obituary was published in last year’s Record. R S Khare, Professor Emeritus of
Anthropology at the University of Virginia, has sent this Appreciation.
Professor Rodney Needham introduced me to Nick Allen in the first week of
June 1976. I was visiting Oxford to meet Rodney at All Souls, and Nick met me
briefly for the first time on the afternoon of 3 June at the Institute of Sociocultural
Anthropology on Banbury Road. His courteous and sincere, yet reserved social
stance was consistently his. We talked of our main research interests, his field
study of the Thulung Rai groups in Nepal and my own study of the complex
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