As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show, To move, but doth, if the other do.
John Donne: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’
Teenage sweethearts from the age of fourteen, it seemed like Chris and Peta were always meant to be together. They were like the two feet of a compass.
The Frampton family (of which Peta was the second youngest of five siblings) lived in the ‘big black and white house’ opposite ours in St Brannocks Road in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton Cum Hardy. It was a fairly unremarkable place, save for the fact that it was made famous by the four Bee Gees brothers spending their early years there.
Peta was intelligent and of a shy disposition, but, like Chris, also strong-willed. She was family-oriented and close to her parents, John and Ambrosine (known to us all as Sammie) and her three brothers, Blaise, Toby and Justin and her older sister, Rochelle (she preferred to use the name Rocki). Chris and Peta’s was an intense romance which, unlike so many that fall by the wayside, withstood the pressures and temptations of the teen years to mature into adulthood.
It was a source of great pride to Mum and Dad that at the age of eleven, Chris won the Manchester Lord Mayor’s prize for achieving the highest grade in the 11 Plus examinations and the top scholarship to Manchester Grammar School (MGS), a selective academic school in the Northwest. This, of course, bolstered his innate self-confidence, although he wore it lightly and was never arrogant. From the age of ten he set his heart on becoming a doctor, overcoming his fear of blood after fainting at school whilst dissecting a frog.
A risk-taker he was not, but spirited, yes, most definitely. He had a lust for adventure and an insatiable appetite for new experiences. He exuded a sense of invincibility. His school friend, Phil Boothman, recalls how, in their first year at MGS, he and Chris went on a school trip to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Neither of them fancied looking round the house and grounds so they stowed away their fishing rods and tackle on the coach and, unbeknownst to the teacher, bunked off and went fishing for the day. All was well until on the way back, the fish they had caught to bring home to cook started smelling in the hot crowded coach and they were duly discovered.
Another time, Chris and his friends went fishing at nearby Lyme Park in Disley, Cheshire. The lake was frozen, but Chris in his wisdom wanted to test the thickness of the ice. Doubtless he used up one of his lives when he decided to venture out across the ice and inevitably fell in. He was saved by the quick thinking of his friend, Tom Brown, who inched across the ice on his stomach and pulled him out. Undeterred, dripping with water and very cold, Chris was determined to continue on his fishing trip with his friends.
The seeds for his love of sailing and fishing were sown annually on our family’s ‘bucket and spade’ holidays in Trearddur Bay, on the Isle of Anglesey. My parents rented a cottage and for those two weeks of each summer the five of us would sail, swim, eat sand-filled sandwiches, climb rocks and go rockpool and sea fishing. They were happy days. It was the stuff nostalgia is made of, and, returning each year, Anglesey became the yardstick for measuring all that had happened to our family in the previous twelve months. Collectively acknowledged, Anglesey is our family’s spiritual home. Now, blessed with three children of my own, they have all been initiated into its charms and enjoy nothing more than returning each year for sand, sea and invariably, rain!
Nigel recalls: ‘Chris and I loved our days spent on the windblown beach and we were lucky that Dad built two Mirror sailing dinghies for us. Mum and Dad gave us strict guidelines as to how far we could sail. There was many an occasion when Chris and I would sail out and explore the edges of the bay to see what was around the corner. Chris found Dad curbing our explorations almost intolerable and no matter how far we ventured, it would always be a source of frustration to him when we had to turn back. He questioned boundaries.
‘By the time Chris approached his mid-teens he had developed a mature, strong and colourful character. I cannot recall him ever failing to achieve a goal that he set his heart on and he set his heart on many. At the age of fourteen, he told Mum and Dad that he wanted to travel to France with two school friends on their own. They forbade him from going, saying he was too young. They were confident that he wouldn’t disobey them because he didn’t have enough money. However, he got a Saturday job packing Christmas cards, saved his hard-earned cash and went with two friends for three weeks, staying in youth hostels.’
Manchester was at the heart of the Swinging Sixties and Chris was a poster boy for that generation. With the city’s burgeoning club scene, sportsmen, such as the Manchester United footballer, George Best, were breaking the mould and moving from a presence on the field to wider celebrity. Whilst Best had investments in Manchester nightclubs, he also had a unisex hairdressing salon and boutique in Deansgate, in the heart of the city. Here, Chris found Saturday employment, giving him an introduction to a broader and more diverse culture than previously experienced. Not afraid of embracing the trends, he wore bell-bottom trousers, cropped tops, had his ear pierced and spray-painted his cowboy boots silver. He enjoyed being outrageous but he was authentic and made things his own.
Chris and Peta’s partnership crossed over into many aspects of their lives. At one stage, they turned entrepreneurs when they began producing hand-sewn unisex suede leather shoulder bags. Together they sourced the materials, sewed the bags on an old Singer sewing machine on our kitchen table and then distributed them to boutiques. They organised the negotiating, manufacturing and logistics and until school examinations became pressing, they had a lucrative cottage business.
The strength of the bond between them was demonstrated when Chris passed the entrance exam to study medicine at Cambridge University but turned it down as he and Peta had made a lovers’ pact to go to the same university together. My father, Charles, was a medical student at King’s College, Cambridge in the late 1930s before two years later giving up his studies and joining the Army to help the war effort. Meeting my mother, Audrey, and finding it hard to return to studying in 1945, he took up a career in the BBC. Dad would have undoubtedly liked to see Chris follow in his footsteps by taking up his place at Cambridge University but my parents knew their son was a resolute character. Chris wanted a more practical, hands-on medical course than Cambridge could offer, and, above all, he wanted to be with Peta. His mind was made up, so Mum and Dad knew there was no point in remonstrating with him.
Dad and Chris had a robust and occasionally confrontational relationship. My father was ‘old school’ and with his fondness for tweed jackets and sturdy brown Commando shoes, he was one of a dying breed. Emotionally, Dad was as buttoned-up as the tie he insisted on wearing, whatever the temperature. The two of them would invariably lock horns over Chris’s long hair, hippy clothing and liberal views and both were equally strident, stuck in their own corners and unwilling to capitulate to the other. But scratch beneath the surface and you could see there was huge mutual love and respect. In the decades that were to follow, no father could have done more in his quest to seek justice for the unlawful killing of his son.
With their supreme intellect they were very similar. In the BBC Manchester News room, where Dad worked as a director, he was known as ‘Mr Fix-it’. There was very little that he couldn’t turn his hand to or fix – from making his own wireless and television set (so that he and Mum could watch the Queen’s Coronation in 1953) and doing his own car mechanics (a skill he passed on to both his sons) to constructing detailed scale models of Tiger Moth planes and fishing boats and building two Mirror sailing dinghies in the garage. He taught my two brothers and me well. But far from being one-dimensional, Chris and Dad’s scientific, pragmatic exteriors belied more complex, sensitive and artistic souls and both were given to writing beautiful poetry.
They were both humanitarians. My father’s donation of his body to medical research on his death in 2013 was typical of the man. Likewise, there was no surprise in learning, some 38 years after Chris had died, that his death was brought about by altruism and defending someone less able.
Blessed with a photographic memory, Chris didn’t have to work very hard at bookwork to achieve outstanding scholarly success. A year ahead of his academic cohort, and finishing his A-levels at seventeen, he stayed back to work in the haematology department of Salford Royal Hospital whilst Peta finished her schooling. Working in the laboratory, he blood-matched for emergency operations. My mother recalls how, much to Chris’s amusement, he would sometimes be given a police escort to the hospital in his battered old yellow Triumph Herald to get him from home to the lab quickly in an emergency. Yes, those were the days when the police force wasn’t so stretched!
Peta having finished her schooling at Manchester’s Whalley Range High School for Girls, the two of them enrolled at Birmingham University, she in law school and he at medical school. Shunning halls of residence, they moved into a flat together. Popular, and part of the ‘cool’ crowd, they were well known for their lively parties. They were certainly unconventional and had an eclectic mix of friends, drawn not just from medical and law school.
Chris loved medicine and was convinced that he’d made the right career choice. His fear of dissection long gone, his ambition was to become a surgeon.
Good friend and fellow Birmingham medical student Dr Nigel O’Farrell recalls: ‘My memories of Chris are as clear now as they were 40 years ago. When I was struggling to complete the medical course, Chris would drop round to cheer me up and encourage me, despite the fact that I was two years older than him.
‘I always remember Chris defending the underdog and wanting to redress any social injustice. I clearly recall an incident in our fourth year when a lecturer made an anti-gay comment. In the middle of the lecture hall, Chris stood up from his seat and harangued him for discriminating against homosexuals, rendering everyone, but particularly the lecturer, speechless. Chris was a giant of a character, unique in many ways, and he literally breezed through medical school. Super-talented, he was one of those who really could have gone into any area of medicine he chose. He was undoubtedly the most charismatic guy in our year and had he lived, he would have been destined for great things. His memory will live on. It was a privilege to have known him.’
Another of his cohort at medical school, Dr Alan Kohn, said: ‘I will never forget your lovely brother. He was a trusting sort of guy who always looked for the very best in people. In fact, I say it without reserve and without the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia and sentimentality, both Chris and Peta were two of the nicest people I’ve ever met.’
Following Chris’s death and whilst sorting through the few clothes and personal belongings he had left behind in the UK, we discovered a number of cards and presents from grateful patients he had treated as a junior doctor, including a beautiful engraved pen. I think it’s fair to say that had his life not been brutally cut short, he would have made a good doctor.
My own abiding memory of Chris was that he was anything but dull; in fact, he was enormous fun. He didn’t take himself seriously and he had a mischievous streak. Peta’s brother-in-law, John Mills, described him as having: ‘A wonderfully childlike sense of humour; he was a very special person.’
His passion was music and as he was leaving for university, Mum and Dad bought him a record player on which to play his extensive record collection. Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Yes, Genesis, David Bowie, Jefferson Airplane, Supertramp, Jimi Hendrix, Journey and Santana were amongst the soundtracks of his years and listening to them transports me back to memories of him.
Aged sixteen, I remember sitting in a pink American Chevrolet belonging to one of Chris’s more alternative friends. It had three seats in the front and I was sandwiched between the two of them, listening to the opening track of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album. For me, it was the epitome of cool – I’d ‘arrived’!
Maybe it was a younger sister’s adulation but with him around, life always seemed that bit more exciting and edgier. Shortly before they left for their travels, I spent a weekend with Chris and Peta in Birmingham and, much to the chagrin of our Mum, Chris took me back to the train station on the back of his motorbike. I can still remember the thrill and exhilaration of being a pillion. It was the one and only time I have ridden a motorbike.
Travelling played an important part in Chris and Peta’s lives; it was something they did at every opportunity. Many of their holidays were spent exploring Europe, which they funded themselves by doing menial jobs such as picking fruit, driving for hire car firms and working in factories. They spent Chris’s three-month medical elective in North Africa and visited Morocco several times, which they loved for its mysticism and different culture.
Very much children of the sixties and seventies in their desire for adventure and exploring new horizons, they lived life precariously. Best friend Rick Henshaw remembers how in 1973, he and Chris, and a couple of other friends, travelled across Europe in a battered old Morris Minor, Chris with the music of JJ Cale blaring out and on repeat. On reaching Morocco, they were involved in a road accident in which the car flipped over. Rick remembers Chris shouting to them all to get out as the petrol tank, which had ruptured, was spewing gasoline all over the road and he could see sparks coming out of the car. Shaken but unscathed, they were not thwarted and after getting the car repaired, they continued their progress to Tangier, camping in the desert before returning some weeks later to England.
With travelling in their blood, Chris and Peta lived for the day when Chris had finished his pre-registration houseman’s year at Birmingham Accident Hospital and the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital and they could take off. My mother recalls: ‘They had such a love of life that wherever they went, they generated a feeling of excitement and for those of us left behind, they imbued a feeling of dissatisfaction and restlessness with one’s own lot.’
It was their long-held dream to see the world together. In retrospect, it was lucky that they were so driven to live life to the full because all too soon it was to come to an end.
It was a touching reminder of just how close the two of them had become that before they set off for their year abroad, Peta wrote a will and declared her wish to leave her few worldly possessions to her ‘beloved friend’ Chris. It’s startling that at the tender age of twenty-four she had had the foresight to make provision in the event of her death.