My friend Christopher Roper, who has died aged 86, was a businessman, publisher and former correspondent for Reuters. His belief that work should be an adventure was at the heart of what made him tick.
His territory while working for Reuters included Bolivia, where Ernesto “Che” Guevara had launched his final insurgency. In October 1967, Christopher was one of two journalists to witness Guevara’s body being brought into the town of Vallegrande strapped to a helicopter’s landing gear. The scoop won him front-page bylines in the New York Times and the Russian newspaper Izvestia.
Born at Forde Abbey, in Dorset, Christopher was one of four children of Diana (nee King) and Geoffrey Roper, a forester and landowner. The 1930s agricultural depression had taken its toll on the family fortunes, leaving the silver spoon slightly tarnished. During the war his mother housed evacuees and aged relatives, who shivered in the unheated former Cistercian abbey.
Christopher boarded at Bradfield college, in Berkshire, which he hated. Before going to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to study theology, he spent some time doing voluntary work in Alaska.
After graduating in 1962, and a spell spent teaching in Sierra Leone, west Africa, Christopher joined Reuters aged 24, covering the military coups in Algeria (1965), Argentina (1966) and Peru (1968).
His marriage to Penelope Plowden ended in divorce in 1975, by which time he was living with his future second wife, Janie Prince, and her two small children, Lucy and Mischa, in a Stockwell commune built around political and environmental concerns. Christopher was one of a two-man team publishing weekly Latin American newsletters. The commune filled with Argentinian refugees fleeing imprisonment following the overthrow of Isabel Perón.
By 1980 the newsletter service employed 30 people, but Christopher was burnt out. Learning of the invention of a computer programming language for children called Logo, and fuelled by a belief that children should be in charge of computers, not vice versa, Christopher launched Logotron, which soon became the UK’s leading supplier of software to primary schools.
Following its sale to Longman in 1996, Christopher returned to west Dorset, at first Lyme Regis, and co-founded the Landmark Information Group, a database digitising past and current Ordnance Survey mapping. It enabled planners and surveyors to determine whether land is subject to contamination or environmental risks.
Christopher retired in 2002, and eventually settled in Wootton Fitzpaine. My own friendship with him stemmed from our mutual research into Dorset’s history, but there was little that did not interest him. Ideas bubbled up as if from a spring. He was a keen plantsman, readily sharing cuttings and creating a garden filled with rare and unusual plants.
Idealistic, impractical, resilient, blessed with boundless curiosity, Christopher had an ability to turn potential disaster into triumph, ensuring a life lived to the full.
Christopher and Janie married in 2003. She survives him, as does their son Will, and his stepchildren, Lucy and Mischa.
