The funeral will take place on Wednesday August 22nd, at 11.30 at:

St. Paul's Church,
Brackley Road,
Beckenham  
Kent, BR3 1RB

All are most welcome to attend.

The nearest station is New Beckenham BR.

This tribute to Chris was delivered at his funeral on August 22, 2012 by former colleague Paul Legg:

Chris was a journalist for the best part of a remarkable forty-five years.........

He trained in the north-west of England and started work on local newspapers. But in 1967, barely 22, he became a "Ten Pound Pom" and emigrated to Australia. There, he found work on The Brisbane Courier, The Melbourne Age and then with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC. He was having a great time and might well have stayed but it was his mother, I'm told, who spotted an advert in the British press for editors at the BBC World Service. He travelled home overland, sat the newsroom test and was gratefully recruited.

Chris joined the BBC in 1971 and would have been immediately thrown in to writing stories about the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Apollo missions to the moon. He did his last shift at Bush House -- 38 years later -- in November, 2009, when making sense of the global financial crisis and the search for the so-called Higgs Boson particle would have made for a different sort of challenge. There were, of course, a few fairly big stories in between!

Chris was no One Department Man.... He did a stint in the domestic radio newsroom early on in his career, twice worked for the parliamentary unit and also had a spell at World Service Television. But he kept coming home to Bush House where his international outlook, open-mindedness and total lack of ego made him so well suited.

In the days since Chris died, there has been a flood of tributes from former colleagues which testify not only to the regard with which Chris was held as a journalist but the deep affection for him as a colleague and friend. There are too many to quote in their entirety, but I'd like to give you a flavour of them now:

One current editor wrote: "When I arrived in the newsroom in the early 1980s, I very quickly realised that Chris was regarded as a model writer. Years later, when I became a Senior Duty Editor, Chris was my right-hand man -- calm, wise, judicious; he was my rock."

Another former editor said: " Chris was a dream to work with: top writer, great judgement, totally reliable, utterly unflappable. But more important, a really smashing chap."

And from another colleague: "a true gentleman and a first class journalist: thoughtful, conscientious, self-effacing and a joy to work with -- a thoroughly decent bloke."

That word "decent" crops up countless times in the tributes to Chris, along with "lovely" and "gentle." Those are not normally adjectives associated with journalists...... But Chris was the polar opposite of the cynical, hard-bitten hack....

As someone else commented: "I never heard him say a mean word about anyone. And I never heard anyone say a mean word about Chris." Not a bad accolade that......

I'd like to leave the final word to one of Chris' oldest newsroom friends, Alex Kirby, who I'm sure speaks for all of his former colleagues:

Alex wrote: "...part of what made him Chris was to be so unassuming that I think he would be surprised to find just how much of a gap he leaves in so many lives and how deeply his colleagues valued him. I can't think of many, either at World Service or the domestic BBC, who have evoked such a single-minded response and so much sadness at his loss."