Forde Abbey, Dorset; the family home of Christopher Roper.
CHRISTOPHER ROPER, BORN 1941
JOURNALIST & ENTREPRENEUR
After Cambridge University, Christopher Roper spent a year teaching in West Africa; then joined Reuters News Agency. He reported on three military coups, in Algeria (1965), Argentina (1966) and Peru (1968). As the Reuters correspondent in Lima, his territory also covered Bolivia, where Che Guevara launched his final revolutionary enterprise in 1966. Through good luck Roper was in Vallegrande when Che Guevara’s body was brought in strapped to the landing gear of a helicopter; it was 24 hours before rivals from AP and AFP caught up. Settling down after life as a foreign correspondent, Roper launched a firm publishing educational software for schools. This was the era of Acorn’s BBC microcomputer, and schools were hungry for sofware. He built a successful company, Logotron, which was sold to the educational publisher Longmans.