Life Stories
Christopher Charles Wood
Christopher Charles Wood (1960 BA Geography) died on 11 August 2024 aged 82, after a short illness.
The son of a railway worker and a bookshop assistant he attended King Edward VI School, Southampton. He came to Keble to read Geography under the tutorship of Gordon Smith. While at Keble he took up hockey, becoming a 1st team regular, and was a member of the Keble College Expedition to Iceland in 1962. After getting a Second, he joined IBM where he enjoyed a diverse career over a thirty-year period based in UK, East Africa and Paris. He developed particular skills in managing large programming projects and large data centres. In 1994 he took early retirement and set himself up as a self-employed ‘trouble-shooter and interim IT manager’, undertaking diverse contracts as far afield as Hong Kong. In 2001 he retired from work and occupied himself performing roles in the community in and around Chichester, including chairmanship of a cancer charity and of a parish council. The hockey that he took up at Keble played a major part in his life. He played in the 1st XI’s of Cheam and Chichester Hockey Clubs and represented Sussex. He was a founder and a key organiser of the annual Chichester Real Ale & Jazz Festival, which the Hockey Club ran for 31 years and grew to an annual turnover of £250,000. In 1965 Chris married his dearly beloved wife, Lesley Browne. He is survived by their three children, James, Matthew and Sophie and two grandchildren, Rosina and Sam.
Kindly provided by his daughter, Sophie Wood