Tommy Gee obituary

Original article by Wendy Barnaby

TonnyMy friend Tommy Gee, who has died aged 100, was a progressive colonial service administrator during the 1950s and 60s in Uganda, where his sympathies with the local population won him few friends among the expat community.

On Uganda’s independence in 1962 the prime minister, Milton Obote, asked Tommy to stay on to oversee an expansion in education that led to a doubling in the number of secondary schools from 21 to 42 in three years. Later, back in the UK, he became administrative director of the newly formed Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, after which he helped to establish the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

Born in Nottingham, Tommy was the son of Tom, a butcher, and Beatrice (nee Whitby). After attending High Pavement grammar school in Nottingham he gained a mathematics degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, and went into the Royal Navy at the end of the second world war, rising to be chief navigator on HMS Glasgow.

Afterwards he passed the civil service exams and was posted to Uganda, where his first role was as an assistant district commissioner. He later became district commissioner for the kingdom of Bunyoro and then secretary to the legislative council in Kampala.

A proponent of Africanisation, Tommy’s stance put him at odds with most of his work colleagues, who envisaged the British empire continuing for many more years than it did. When he vocally opposed the deportation of the King of Buganda to London, it looked as if he would be sacked for his outspokenness – until the secretary of state, Alan Lennox-Boyd, said he agreed with Tommy’s standpoint and he was allowed to keep his job.

After independence Obote appointed Tommy on a three-year contract as a permanent secretary in the ministry of education, tasked with dramatically increasing school numbers, which he did via enterprising solutions such as enlisting western volunteers in the classroom until local teachers could take over. He was appointed OBE in 1965.

Back in the UK he worked for a while as a principal at the Ministry of Overseas Development before accepting an offer to set up the IDS at Sussex University. While at Sussex, he went to Fiji in 1969 to write a report on the viability of setting up a University of the South Pacific, and was subsequently made the university’s registrar in 1970. He moved on to be registrar of the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in 1985 and left three years later.

In retirement he lived in Keymer, West Sussex, where he was a Liberal Democrat county councillor. He relocated to Suffolk in 1996, serving as a prison visitor in Norwich until moving back to Sussex in 2020.

Tommy had a perpetual twinkle in his eye, plenty of stories to tell, and was open to change even in old age. At 85, after a lifetime in the Church of England, he became a Quaker (which is how I met him), and at 98 he journeyed up the Amazon with his son Nathaniel.

He married Anne Smith in 1948, having met her at a ball at Brasenose. She died in 2010; he is survived by their children, Nathaniel, Simon and Sarah, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.