Dundee Emeritus Professor Christopher Blake

Kit (Christopher) Blake, emeritus professor of economics at Dundee University, has died at the age of 93.

As well as having a distinguished academic career, he held a number of public appointments across Scotland.

Kit’s parents were novelist and journalist, George Blake, and Eliza Lawson, both natives of Greenock. Due to his father’s profession, he spent a peripatetic and bohemian childhood in Hampstead, Glasgow, Helensburgh and Dollar, and knew a colourful range of characters, including TS Eliot and Sir Hugh Walpole – “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Hugh”.

His progress from Dollar Academy to St Andrews University was delayed by the war. He survived naval service relatively unscathed other than life-long deafness from gunnery training.

At university he met his future wife, Elizabeth (Buff) McIntyre, from Broughty Ferry, who was reading English. According to a much-loved family tale, it was she who proposed to him and told him they would have four children. Life followed her instructions.

With a first-class degree in economics and philosophy, his first job was as a salesman for J&P Coats of Paisley but academia beckoned and he took up short-term posts teaching philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, Princeton, and then Edinburgh.

Back in Scotland, he quickly decided that academic life was not for him, preferring to be “at the sharp end of things”, and so moved on to working with office systems in the steel industry for five years.

With subsequent developments in IT, he was proud to have been involved in the early days of computers, which then took up entire rooms. He was heavily influenced by this experience in his subsequent academic career in economics, believing that managing information in a business is the key to success. He retained a fascination for technology, upgrading his mobile phones and tablets with regularity, even into his 90s.

He was tempted back into academia by a job offer from his economics professor at St Andrews. He loved returning to his alma mater and living again in the “auld grey toun”.

However, he found the work unsatisfying and moved in 1965 to Dundee, which he called “a proper university” – initially as a senior lecturer and then, three years later, a professor.

From then until retirement in 1987, he played an important role in the life of the university, as head of department, twice dean of faculty, and on the appointing committee for Principal Adam Neville. His research interests were heavily practical, for example a study into the impact of the Open Championship on the local economy.

He was much respected in these roles and always saw himself as a natural enabler and skilled at running meetings. He also had a genuine ability to connect with all, regardless of background, which stemmed from his egalitarian instincts.

When his wife, Buff, finally persuaded him to give up all his external roles, he settled into retirement in St Andrews, able to indulge in his love of golf and travelling. Sadly, he lost his wife in 2009 and his eldest son, Duncan, in 2015. He is survived by his other children, Neil, Catriona and Janet, and by many grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.

Christopher “Kit” Blake.