Walter Henry John Christie CSI, CIE, OBE (17 December 1905 – 25 August 1983) was a British colonial civil servant in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who played a significant role in the administrative planning for the independence of India and provided continuity in governance after independence. He was also referred to as John Christie and "Red Christie."
Early Life and Education
Christie was born in Poona, India, the son of Henry George Frederick Christie. He was a King's Scholar at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Medal. He attended King's College, Cambridge, where he won the Winchester Reading Prize and achieved first-class honours in Part I of the Classical Tripos (1926) and Part II of the Historical Tripos (1927). He married Elizabeth Louise Stapleton in 1934.
Career
Christie joined the Indian Civil Service in 1928 and served in Bengal at Asansol and the Chittagong Hill Tracts until 1937. He was then posted to New Delhi and after two years became one of the secretaries to the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow. In 1943, he joined the newly established Indian Food Department, which was almost immediately overwhelmed by the Bengal famine of 1943 and subsequently tasked with raising food production in India.
He served as Secretary of the Indian Delegation at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Second Session of the Conference in 1946. In 1947, he was appointed Joint Private Secretary (alongside George Abell) to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, and worked on emergency plans for maintaining order during the transition of power. When Lord Mountbatten replaced Wavell as Viceroy with the objective of handing over power to a united India within a year, Christie and his colleague V. P. Menon recognized that partition was almost inevitable. They prepared a thirty-three-page document titled The Administrative Consequences of Partition, which detailed the administrative issues involved in dividing the state. The document was presented to party leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who were reportedly stunned to silence. Christie had the assistance of two civil servants: Chaudhry Muhammad Ali (later Prime Minister of Pakistan) and Haribhai M. Patel (later Finance and Home Minister of India).
After Indian independence, Christie remained in India as an adviser to the central government committee until 1952. He became Steward of the Indian Polo Association in 1951, helping revive the sport of polo in India. He served as Vice Chairman of the British India Corporation (1952–1958), President of the Upper India Chamber of Commerce (1955–1956), Vice President of the Employers Federation of India (1956), and President of the UK Citizen's Association (1957). After leaving India, he served on the Commonwealth Development Finance Committee (1959–1968) and became an Adviser to the East African Development Bank (1969–1970).
Retirement and Publications
In retirement, Christie wrote several articles for Blackwood's Magazine and contributed a biography of V. P. Menon to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He published an autobiographical account of his service titled Morning Drum (BACSA, 1983). He deposited many of his papers in public archives, where they have served as a source for works on Indian history. He died on 25 August 1983.
