Christopher Whitehouse
Profile
The dominant themes in the life of Christopher Whitehouse might seem to be science, music, and religion; but interwoven with them are many unexpected minor themes – among them creative writing, hill walking, playing competitive bridge, genealogy and investing – which between them add subtleties to the complex composition of his life.
Born in London in 1959, Christopher was educated between the ages of 8 and 13 at St George’s School in the grounds of Windsor Castle, where he sang in the chapel choir (two services a day) and learned to play the cello and piano. From Windsor he went to Radley College, but instead of going straight from there to university at the age of 18, he spent nearly two years in Germany and London, working latterly in investment management, in the footsteps of his merchant banker father. When eventually he began his degree course at Balliol College, he chose to study Chemistry – although it has to be said that he spent much of his time as an undergraduate singing in choirs such as the renowned Schola Cantorum and playing bridge, a passion that he has inherited from both parents.
After graduating in 1982, Christopher moved to the wilds of Scotland, vowing never to set foot in a chemistry lab again, and determined to try his hand at writing. For a year he worked on a novel that he describes as ‘a love story with a twist – but more of a twist than a love story’, seeking to express in it some of his concerns about contemporary society. Having satisfied himself that he was not up to this particular challenge, he returned somewhat reluctantly to the world of high finance, working in the City of London as an investment manager by day, but by night immersed in the creation and management of the Elysian Singers, a now well-established London chamber choir. He still sings bass with the choir, which has broadcast on radio and television, made several commercial recordings, and commissioned works from a number of contemporary composers.
It was during this period in his life that Christopher – born and raised as an Anglican – realised that he could no longer recite the Creed with conviction. While sorting out books and papers after his father’s death in 1991, he found a book about Unitarianism that sent him on a quest around five chapels in the London area until he settled in the Croydon congregation, where he felt most at home. His paternal grandfather would have been gratified: born in 1894, the self-educated Sydney Whitehouse (who left school at 13) had encountered Unitarianism almost certainly, according to Christopher, in the person of Revd Gertrud von Petzold in Leicester. Sydney trained for the ministry at Manchester College Oxford in the 1920s, eventually serving congregations in Belfast, Dukinfield, and Bournemouth.
Christopher’s own form of Unitarian ministry has consisted of sitting on various local and national committees such as the Croydon Unitarian Housing Association, and serving as a trustee of Essex Hall and as a consultant to the investment sub-committees of the London and District Provincial Assembly and Dr Williams’s Library. He was also church auditor, website creator and manager, and occasional choir conductor for the Croydon congregation.
After 14 years in the City the need to write reasserted itself, and Christopher decided in 1998 to quit the world of insurance and pension funds for another attempt at novel writing. Four years of intense hard work culminated in a book that elicited some kind remarks from literary agents but no publication offers. But he still writes a journal, to give shape to his inner life and to keep his hand in, so it is hard to believe that this particular theme will not recur at some point in the future. Because that seems to be the pattern of Christopher’s life: major and minor themes intertwining, receding, and reappearing. The most pronounced example of this trend was his decision in 2005 to return to Oxford to work for a D.Phil in Metalloproteins. When asked why, he replies simply that he needed a challenge. His research project is going well, and he expects it to occupy him for at least two more years.
Meanwhile, Christopher commutes back to London once a week to rehearse with the Elysian Singers at their base in the church of St Anne and St Agnes, near St Paul’s. Recent concerts have included Rachmaninov’s Vespers and ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ by Morten Lauridsen. Christopher is the choir’s website manager and current chairman. If he is not in our chapel on a Sunday, it is usually because he is playing in a bridge competition at county or national level. Whenever possible he gets away from it all by walking alone in the hills: he has hundreds, if not thousands, of miles on the clock. His favourite places are the remote, lonely expanses around Borrowdale and Ennerdale in the Lakes, and the Scottish Isles and west coast.
Interviewing Christopher for this profile, I was interested most of all in the interplay in his life between materialism and spiritual experience: how does he, a scientist, view God? I challenged him to sum up the ‘magnum mysterium’ as he sees it in two or three sentences, and this is what he said: ‘Molecules, like species, may have evolved over the millennia by a process of natural selection, but to my mind the underlying atomic basis for life cannot have evolved or created itself. For as long as we don't know the answers, it will be in our nature to carry on pondering the awkward questions. But perhaps that's the point.’
This strikes me as a classically Unitarian statement, in its willingness to confront a paradox without jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Likewise Christopher himself is a paradox, an individual who cannot be neatly pigeon-holed; but I hope that this Profile captures some of his qualities without misrepresenting him.
Catherine Robinson (December 2006)