Christine Stone
Sitting here in Christine’s flat in Fort William, literally at the end of the path up Ben Nevis, seems to me to be a fitting place to write a tribute about our dear friend. A slightly down at heel place, in a small housing scheme, it seems a most unlikely last home for a Cambridge graduate, a highly influential educator and a recipient of the OBE. Yet somehow, it sums up all that Christine was and stood for.
The flat’s interior is sparse. The entire bathroom’s contents are a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap. Her clothes, which seem uniformly faded grey/brown in colour would not even fill one bin bag.
The only thing there is a lot of, is books. Novels, children’s books, books of games, maps, flower and bird identification books and weighty academic tomes such as Europe’s Tragedy. A new History of the Thirty Years War and The Neolithic of Mainland Scotland.
Christine never had a television, a smart phone or social media. She rarely invited anyone round, liked her own company and could not care less about her appearance.
She seemed to live on cabbage and custard and kept her beloved collie as skinny as she was.
She was an expert on everything, would happily talk over you and give you a stern telling off whether you were a university professor or a fading violet.
Yet, despite all this, Christine was respected and loved by, literally, hundreds upon hundreds of people.
Why? She spent her whole life serving others, usually the poorest and most vulnerable.
A committed Christian, she followed Jesus to where the need was greatest.
Born in Australia into a forces family in 1942, she lived in Germany, Belgium and Cyprus before finally settling in Newcastle Under Lyme.
Christine was an avid learner. Even in her last days she was trying to access the University of Highlands and Islands remote learning digital link up from the Invernevis Care Home to continue her archaeology course. Bet that was a first.
Going through her things, we discovered two certificates from Lancashire University in the study of cosmology and astronomy, both courses she must have undertaken when in Nepal. She modelled what it was to thoroughly enjoy learning which was probably the key to her success as a teacher. She enjoyed learning which meant she made learning so much fun.
After studying Natural Science at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1962, Christine went on to Bristol University to train as a teacher and later through Trinity College London added a TEFL qualification. She taught first in Abbeydale Grammar School in Sheffield for six years and then moved to teach in an international boarding school in Eritrea.
In 1972, she arrived at Thorntoun School in Kilmarnock, a school for senior boys with severe behavioural needs, to teach maths, science, geography and adventure activities. It was there that my family met Christine and she became lifelong a friend of us all, and our home became hers when she returned from overseas.
Her next adventure took her as a teacher to Tristan da Cunha, a remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic with approximately 200 inhabitants.
As a child, I vividly remember 20 or 30 airmail letters arriving all at once as there was only a boat twice year, full of entertaining tales of pillow dances; islanders holidaying at the potato patches; the mad padre; walks to the top of the crater and collecting seagull eggs.
While there Christine took part in a study of Rockhopper penguins by a university in South Africa.
But her legacy is mostly in the work she undertook alongside the Nepali government providing teacher training throughout the country and writing text books.
‘Christine basically wrote Nepal’s secondary science curriculum,’ one colleague remembers.
Another wrote: ‘She was in enormous demand, and the teacher training took her all over Nepal, on a schedule that only Christine could have coped with.’
She was also involved in training of volunteers with Teach for Nepal, Fulbright, and similar organisations.
Christine was awarded an OBE by the British government in the 1990s for services to education in Nepal.
She influenced generations of students and teachers, with her practical, fun, and enormously effective approach to teaching and learning.
When she finally ‘retired’ to live near us in Fort William, I thought she might at last rest and enjoy herself.
Not a bit of it. She threw herself into volunteering, ranging from taking the elderly shopping to teaching children in care.
I lost count of the number of things she was involved with. In her spare time she studied archaeology and European history.
When finally she was hospitalised by the colon cancer with which she had battled since she returned to the UK, I was privileged to get a glimpse of the legacy she was leaving behind her.
Every day visitors poured in to visit her, testifying to how much they loved her and how she had inspired them. People of all ages wrote, rang and visited to wish her well on her last, and greatest, adventure.
She died on March 17, 2018, at 77, perfectly content with her lot and leaving me feeling it was an honour to have known her.