My friend and fellow councillor Peter Christie, who has died aged 73, was Britain’s first Green party mayor and the youngest mayor of Bideford in Devon.
He joined the Greens (then known as the Ecology party) in 1981 after hearing a talk by Edward Goldsmith, founding editor and publisher of the Ecologist magazine. Within a couple of years he had been elected to Bideford town council, becoming mayor in 1985. He fulfilled that role on a further three occasions, topping the polls in the next 11 elections in which he stood.
In 1991 Peter was elected to Torridge district council, becoming chairman in 2014. As a councillor he co-founded a local nature reserve, set up a scheme to help establish local businesses and highlighted many environmental issues.
Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to Roy, a youth employment officer, and Sheila, a college secretary, Peter lived for a time in one of the prefabs hastily erected in that heavily bombed city after the second world war. His parents later moved to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where he attended King Edward VI grammar school.
After leaving school he had a gap year in the merchant navy (1969-70), sailing around the world with the Shaw-Savill line as an ordinary seaman. He then did some archaeological digging as a volunteer before completing a geography degree at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now University of Portsmouth), later undertaking an MA there.
In 1976 he obtained a lecturing post in geography at North Devon College in Barnstaple, staying there until 2012, when he retired. On Saturdays, for the best part of 30 years, Peter also ran a secondhand book and record stall on Bideford market. Later it became a small shop staffed by a full-time employee.
As a historian he wrote, co-wrote or edited 41 books on North Devon history, plus more than 1,000 articles in the North Devon Journal and the North Devon Gazette, drawing on his extensive collection of local photographs and documents.
In addition, from 2006 onwards Peter penned a weekly column, Bideford Life, for the North Devon Journal, and provided the newspaper with a regular page of old photographs and local history titbits. From 1991 until 2004 he was reviews editor for the Local Historian, magazine of the British Association for Local History.
A popular speaker on aspects of North Devon history, he was a trustee of Bideford Bridge Trust and North Devon Maritime Museum, and chairman of the North Devon Athenaeum.
He is survived by his partner, Annette Waehler, his daughters, Jessica and Maeve, from his 1978 marriage to Judith Brown, which ended in divorce in 2001, and six grandchildren.
