My friend Christine Stone’s last home was an unkempt flat in Fort William at the foot of the Ben Nevis path. She left very few possessions except books, and her clothes would not have filled even one bin bag. It might have seemed a strange last home for a Cambridge graduate and an influential educator.
Christine, who has died aged 77, never had a television or a smartphone. She rarely invited anyone round, liked her own company and cared little about her appearance. 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 shrinking violet.
A committed Christian, Christine spent her whole life serving others, usually the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Her legacy resides mostly in her work alongside the Nepali government providing teacher training and writing textbooks. A colleague recalled that 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 volunteers with Teach for Nepal, the Fulbright programme and similar organisations.
Christine was born in Hong Kong into a forces family but was evacuated as a baby to Australia. Her father, Maj William Stone, became a prisoner of war in Burma and Christine did not meet him until she was six; her mother, Iris (nee Hill), had been a teacher before getting married.
After the second world war the family lived in Germany, Belgium and Cyprus before finally settling in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. After Abbeydale girls’ grammar school in Sheffield, Christine graduated in natural science from Cambridge University in 1962. She went on to teach in Sheffield, Eritrea, Scotland, Tristan da Cunha and finally, in 1982, Nepal, where she lived and worked for 33 years. For a long time she taught in village schools and then in secondaries in Pokhara and Kathmandu.
She influenced generations of students and teachers, with her practical, fun and enormously effective approach. In 1988 she was appointed OBE for services to education in Nepal.
When she finally “retired” in 2015 to live near me in Fort William, she threw herself into all kinds of volunteering, from taking elderly people shopping to teaching children in care. In her spare time she studied archaeology and European history. When, latterly, she was ill in hospital, visitors poured in to see her every day.
Christine is survived by her brother, Clive.
