17 Facts About Chris Tame

Christopher Ronald Tame was an English libertarian political activist.

Chris Tame is best known as the founder and Director of the Libertarian Alliance, a free market and civil liberties think tank.

Chris Tame's father, Ronald Ernest Tame, was a printer who had spent the war in the Eighth Army as an escort to Montgomery and had been mentioned in dispatches.

Chris Tame later became a process engraver and shop steward, and he and Tame's mother Elsie Florence, a nurse, had met and married just after the end of the Second World War.

Chris Tame was an only child, who grew up in post-war Britain.

Chris Tame was brought up in Godalming in Surrey, where his family had moved.

Chris Tame joined the Conservative students' organisation at Hull, and became active in the organisation.

In 1967, Chris Tame founded the Libertarian Alliance as an informal discussion group, drawing ideas from Ayn Rand, among others.

In 1978, Chris Tame set up the Alternative Bookshop and was its manager.

Chris Tame did not believe in seeking political power nor propagandising the masses, but saw the importance of influencing the intellectual debate.

In 1983, while researching for an article on how easy it was to acquire guns, grenades and other military items with a credit card by mail order from the United States, Chris Tame duly did so and carried his acquired collection of light armaments in his knapsack to work further in the library at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London.

Chris Tame was a non-smoker and keep-fit enthusiast, but he philosophically regarded that smokers' bodies were their own and that a person's liberty must extend to the freedom to make foolish decisions in this regard.

Chris Tame defended the rights of tobacco smokers as Director of pressure group FOREST from 1988 to 1995.

Chris Tame saw off three Directors of ASH and forced ASH to refocus the debate away from the paternalistic desire to preserve the health of the smoker or would-be smoker to the harm of passive smoking to non-smokers.

Chris Tame was an avid collector of economic and philosophical books, and had amassed a collection of some 40,000 works, including a number of rare classical liberal documents, some of which were donated to the Foundation for Economic Education in New York.

Chris Tame was an avid user of the public library system notably Westminster Library and the Great Smith Street library.

Chris Tame died on 20 March 2006 from an aggressive bone cancer, diagnosed a year before.