Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Important role played at charity to help young
CHRISTINE Lillington was volunteer administrator of the unique University of Withywood for 20 years and achieved so much in her 83 years. She represents an increasingly rare generation who lived all their life in one parish. With her husband, Michael, she gave much to the community of South Bristol.
From an early age, Chris was a photographer and an archivist. Her 50-plus photo albums are a wonderful family archive. Some of her photography and her poems have been published in the local media.
Born in Valley Road, Bedminster Down, her early life was very much influenced by the noise, damage and fear of the war. But as a young girl she loved to go for picnics with friends, or to go with the milkman on his rounds on a Saturday morning.
She met Mike when she was a teenager and they went on cycle rides together. After completing school, Chris trained as a secretary and got her first job with Reyrolle & Company, at a small office in Bristol, and aimed to cycle home with Mike from his job each evening.
About this time, she joined Bristol Women’s Cricket Club. She played two seasons but said that when she dropped a catch at mid-off at the Cheltenham Ladies College, that was the end of her cricketing career.
In July 1957 Chris and Mike were married in St Oswald’s Church, Bedminster Down, with a guard of honour from the Scout band followed by a week’s honeymoon in Cornwall.
For most of the 1950s Chris and Mike’s life centered around Scouting. They met the famous Ralph Reader, founder of the Gang Shows. He kept his promise to send tickets for the London Gang Show. To go to London then was a great adventure, and they loved all Ralph Reader’s songs.
Their small house in Headley Park was filled with their four children Ian, Ann, Matthew and Kay. Tasks included getting the children to school, wrestling with the ‘twin tub’ on washing day, putting six people’s clothes through the mangle and helping to make school projects from empty plastic bottles and sticky-backed plastic. Then there was the annual holiday to organise, often by train to Bournemouth.
Once the children were at school, Christine put her sewing skills to use and started a home-business of making hot pants. Earning a few extra pounds, the dining table and floors that were covered with pat- terns and pins and rolls of brightly coloured Crimplene.
Chris took a part-time job as the administrator of the National Federation of City Farms. She helped the federation develop and build a new hub next to the city farm, where the organisation continues today. Simultaneously she was supporting her husband and sons as they started their own businesses. There was always a letter to be typed or an invoice to be sent and Christine was happy to embrace new technology, moving on from the manual typewriter, to word processor and later a computer.
Grandchildren arrived, and this proud grandma would travel to visit them - even to Australia soon after her second grandson’s birth. Travelling alone, this was a trip she was to repeat twice more in subsequent years, visiting the desert town of Alice Springs – where it rained!
Chris took on volunteer roles in the Malago Society, and then the University of Withywood, becoming the unpaid full-time assistant to Anton Bantock. Anton sent ragged bundles of paperwork from all corners of the globe recording his travel adventures, in tiny script, which Christine transcribed. From the 1990s to 2014, the charity raised £250,000, which all went directly to help with the education of young people in developing countries.
On a beautiful summer’s day in July 2017, 100 people gathered to celebrate Chris and Mike’s 60th wedding anniversary. Known as Mum, Christine, Mrs L, Chris – mother of four children and doting grandmother to seven boys and three girls; and great-grandmother to Max.