Christopher Thomson, was born in India on 13th April 1875. He was educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy and joined the Royal Engineers in 1894. From 1896-1899 he served in Mauritius and then from 1899-1902 in the Boer War at which time he won two medals and was mentioned in dispatches. He then went on to serve in the War Office and as Military Attaché to the Serbian Army.
At the start of WW1, he was sent to Belgium as a liaison officer with the Belgian Army. In 1915 he became the military attaché in Bucharest and after the German invasion of Rumania he was sent to Palestine where he took part in the advance on Jerusalem. He commanded a brigade at the capture of Jericho and in 1918 was awarded the DSO.
Promoted to Brigadier General he was a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1919 he resigned from the army in 1919 and had several failed attempts to become a Labour MP. When a Labour government was formed in 1924 PM Ramsay MacDonald gave him a peerage and appointed him Secretary of State for Air. It was in this capacity that he was responsible for the government’s decision to revive the airship program. At the fall of Ramsay’s government Lord Thomson became leader of the Labour Party in the House of Lords but in 1929 with the re-election of Ramsay Macdonald he was once again the Secretary of State for Air. It was in this capacity that he was on board the R101.
Tragically, lost his life in the loss of the R101 on 5th October 1930.