Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

intoxicating; and most of us, Etonians excepted, had lived under a repressive
regime; and now the cork was fairly out of the bottle.”The links to Bloomsbury
represented by Maynard Keynes and Dadie Rylands were in the ascendant.
Christopher read Classics: “Plato struck me like a lightning flash; what I read,
in the Phaedrus and Symposium especially, was a vision of enlargement and
delight, but could it possibly be true? … For new currents were stirring in
Cambridge with Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein which threatened to strike a
fatal blow at Platonism, and indeed at any philosophy which countenanced an
immaterial world, whether as an absolute Good or as a God in heaven.”
These misgivings led Christopher to the drastic step of deserting Classics to
read what was then called Moral Science. He screwed up courage to ask
Wittgenstein to tea, and felt he had gained approval when he recognised
that the philosopher came in whistling the opening Kyrie from Bach’s Mass
in B Minor. Nevertheless he felt compelled to ignore Wittgenstein’s advice
never to read any philosophical books on the grounds that they would only
muddle his thinking.
Already the winner of a Pitt Scholarship for Classics, Christopher secured a
First in Moral Science and King’s gave him a studentship and encouraged him
to turn his hand to research. Meanwhile he was in the orbit of the Chaplain
at King’s, a gifted Anglo-Chinese named Roy Bowyer-Yin, who was a versatile
pianist with a devastating flair for parody. Roy Yin was not so much in thrall
to the High Church Anglicanism inspired by Dean Milner-White as most other
Chapel-goers, although throughYin he came under the influence of the group
styled the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, and began to give much time to
private prayer, and even private confessions. Another friend he met through
Yin was a King’s ordinand, Michael Peck. Michael invited Christopher to go
sailing on the Norfolk Broads with a group of teenagers, thus introducing him
to a sport in which Christopher found a lifelong satisfaction.
Christopher chose to research a dissertation on Kant’s teleology, a subject
which he later came to feel was a mistaken choice. At the second time of
submission he won election to a Fellowship in 1938, and a post as Lecturer
in Divinity, but by this time he had offered himself for Ordination and
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OBITUARIES