Tim Lund (OW 1974)

(5 April 1957 – June 2023)

The Waynflete Office has been informed by his wife Vivien of the death of Tim Lund at the age of 66.

We are grateful to his close friend and fellow OW David Bowen (also 1974) for this obituary.

Tim Lund died of cancer in June 2023, aged 66.

Tim was one of the true eccentrics at MCS in the early 70s, with a reputation as a mathematical genius that (rather to his irritation) hid an incredibly wide range of interests that he kept up and developed through his life.

He was brought up in Binsey in an unusual but very loving family – his father taught engineering, his mother was a force of nature. His older brother David was already at MCS when Tim joined, and he soon got a reputation for being very clever, very opinionated but, to those who knew him, very kind. He was most obviously brilliant at maths. I remember Frank Garside giving us a complex problem to solve. Tim wrote down the answer straight away, and Frank explained that ‘it may be obvious to you Tim, but the examiners will think you’ve cheated’. He was also a keen actor and loved the outdoors – he was so happy walking (or running) up mountains with the CCF. Again something he kept up (along with long cycle rides) right until his illness stopped him.

He went to Wadham College, but was never really happy there. He also spent a year at INSEAD in France, where he made good friends. His career was in the City, though he always made sure his work-life balance tipped the right way. He and Viv were married in 1988, and had two lovely daughters. He could do magical things with spreadsheets and made himself very useful to several companies, including a hedge fund. He was not however trapped by the City’s gold, and by the time he was 45 and was living largely on food he and Viv grew themselves, with no car and plenty of other interests. In the last 20 years he spent much time on his allotment and involving himself in the local community and politics (ultimately Labour, but he was far from tribal). He also read and liked to chat about an astonishing range of subjects – sociology, the field systems of Binsey, General Gordon … almost, it seemed, anything. He held a ‘living wake’ at the end of 2022, and I suspect everyone there learned about activities of which they knew little. A few weeks before he died he was working on a computer program to solve Wordle; that was typical.

He loved his family and was a brilliant father to Annie and Maggie. When he was ill he learned Norwegian so he could speak at Maggie’s wedding to Mads. He just missed meeting his grandchildren, which made him very sad.