CAM 61

Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 61 Michaelmas 2010

In this issue:

The cost of lock-up Riots at the Garden House Is nuclear the future?

History of a friendship Autumnal heights A new Vice-Chancellor

CAM/61

Contents

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 61 Michaelmas Term 2010

Regulars Letters Don’s diary Update Diary Noticeboard My room, your room The best...

History of a friendship

02 03 04 08 11

Secret Cambridge 16 Take Three 17

Review UniversityMatters 39 Debate 40 12 Books 43 13 Music 45 Sport 47 14 Prize crossword 48

Features Autumnal heights

22

45

18

Cambridge’s bright autumn skies and freezing winters are the result of an icy blast direct from the Ural Mountains – or are they? CAM investigates

Riot at the Garden House

22

When a 1970 student protest got out of hand the reverberations were felt across the University and the country.

What price justice?

Lawrence Sherman, Wolfson Professor of Criminology, says it is time to re-evaluate the cost, and the purpose, of prison.

28 CAM is published three times a year, in the Lent, Easter and Michaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni.

It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For further information contact the Alumni Relations Office.

The opinions expressed in CAM are those of the contributors and are not necessarily those of the University of Cambridge.

This publication contains paper manufactured

by Chain-of-Custody certified suppliers operating within internationally recognised environmental standards in order to ensure sustainable sourcing and production.

Editor Mira Katbamna Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design Smith www.smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar Publisher The University of Cambridge Development Office 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288

28

Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760155 cam.editor@admin.cam.ac.uk

Cover photograph: Archway, Westminster College

by Tim Rawle.

Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760150 alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk www.alumni.cam.ac.uk www.facebook.com/ cambridgealumni www.twitter.com/CARO1209

Copyright © 2010 The University of Cambridge.

Vivienne Raper explores what – if anything – makes the human race unique.

An education in complexity

Advertising enquiries Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474 landmark@lps.co.uk Services offered by advertisers are not specifically endorsed by the Editor or the University of Cambridge. The publisher reserves the right to decline or withdraw advertisements.

What a piece of work is a man? 32

Gold Award Winner 2010 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award 2010

36

At Cambridge Judge Business School, scientists and engineers, philosophers and politicians are helping to broaden horizons for the business leaders of the future.

CAM 61 01

EDITOR’S LETTER

Your letters

Autumnal glories Welcome to the Michaelmas issue of CAM. From the CARO office window I can see the first students trundling suitcases over Magdalene Bridge.

The leaves are beginning to turn. Everywhere the October sun is washing Cambridge a hazy golden hue. Of course, everyone knows that these bright autumn skies (and the freezing winters that follow) are the result of the icy blasts that come direct to us from the Ural Mountains. Or are they? CAM explores the myths on page 18.

This year, Cambridge’s autumnal glories are being witnessed by a new Vice-Chancellor, as the University welcomes Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz as the 345th incumbent. You can read his thoughts on what the future holds in University Matters, on page 39.

Elsewhere, Lawrence Sherman, Wolfson Professor of Criminology, explains why he believes that UK justice is at a tipping point. Sherman, one of the world’s leading experimental criminologists, argues that it is time to re-evaluate the cost and purpose of prison. He talks crime, punishment and the importance of hard research on page 28.

Lastly, I am delighted to report that CAM has beaten alumni publications around the world to win two international prizes, awarded by CASE, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

The judges, praising the magazine’s journalism and dubbing it “world-class”, gave CAM a Gold Award and also named it Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year – making it the first non-US publication to win in the award’s 67-year history.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

02 CAM 61

is replaced by Rich Tea biscuits.

Incidentally, the briefer grace does not have the indicative benedicit; it has the subjunctive.

So the Latin is correct, but the translation is wrong. I suspect that the mistake is not Michael’s, but that of an over-zealous sub-editor.

Bob Knowles (Corpus 1971)

‘The punter is pretending to be a chimpanzee... but he has at least six lively young ladies with him.’

One for Hall The textual corruptions at Corpus and Magdalene, reported by Michael Bywater in his delightful article, came as a surprise.

[The words] remain engraved on my memory for life. Tiny details make civilisations, yes.

But not quite as useless as Bywater makes out: rescue when asked to say grace, and even more in demand in today’s internet age with its endless requests for constantly changing passwords and ‘memorable information’.

Martin Knowles (Trinity 1953) I enjoyed Michael Bywater’s article (CAM 60). Thinking further about ‘restaurant’ and ‘refectory’, I remembered a passage in W. D. Elcock’s The Romance Languages: “The V[ulgar] Latin companio is formed from cum and pane.”

A companion is someone with whom one shares bread, and a company is made up of breadsharers – though for many, bread

Bywater’s suggestion that the Latin graces may be a ‘demonstration of exclusivity’ is possibly confirmed by his falling into the common error of treating benedicat as indicative rather than a jussive subjunctive. Benedictus benedicat has to be translated as ‘May the Blessed One bless’.

Bywater rightly pays tribute to the amazing ‘recess of the memory devoted to useless but marvellous things’.

Timothy Stunt (Sidney 1960) Michael Bywater responds: I am delighted that Latin remains as divisive as ever, and reassured

by Timothy Stunt that I fall into a ‘common error’ over my mistranslation of Benedictus benedicat; it is as important for one’s errors to be common as for one’s triumphs to be unique. But Bob Knowles is wrong. I would love to blame a sub-editor for transcribing benedicit as benedicat but benedicat was what I wrote, and benedicat was what I then mistranslated. I can’t even blame ignorance. Sheer idleness, inattention and, very probably, drink.

This sporting life Robert Hudson gives the impression that the Boat Race became popular in 1954. In the Thirties my friends and I, as children, would support one crew or the other, although we had no connection with either university.

One stimulus to interest for boys, and indeed parents, was the

We are always delighted to receive your letters and emails. Email CAM at cam.editor@admin.cam.ac.uk or write to us at CAM, Cambridge Alumni Relations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘For Publication’. Letters may be edited for length.

Don’s Diary

Read more CAM letters at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam/letters

Professor David Baulcombe is Regius Professor of Botany

cigarette card. I still have cards from 1934 celebrating T Frame-Thomson, the Cambridge stroke of 1933, and RWG Holdsworth, the Oxford stroke.

Geoff Parker (Pembroke 1948)

Subterranean mystery Jesus’s air raid shelter (CAM 60) was very grand and solid compared with Trinity’s, which was part of a cellar below the Great Hall – the other part of which was the College’s very notable wine cellar. They were divided only by a thin wooden fence.

Whenever we had to take shelter here, we rather hoped a little bomb would destroy the fence.

Christopher Wade (Trinity 1941)

An idler’s idyll [Tom Hodgkinson’s piece] reminded me of many pleasant hours spent on the river in the 1960s, both on the Backs and in the almost magical dappled quiet of the upper river.

I never heard of the Dampers Club, though I managed to fall in several times myself.

I was surprised to read that the correct position for a punter is ‘threequarters of the way toward the stern’. Those cowards at Oxford were despised for punting from the punt floor – falling in was much more likely from the Cambridge end!

Stephen Butcher (Trinity 1964) In the main image, by Patrick Lichfield, the punter is standing in the wrong place in the punt, holding the pole awkwardly and apparently with a spare pole in case he loses his first one. He has one bored young lady in the punt with him.

In the second image, by Martin Parr, the punter is pretending to be a chimpanzee. But he stands in the correct spot on the rear deck and is at ease with his pole. He has at least six lively young ladies with him. Enough said. Class will out.

Jon Pasfield (Trinity 1959)

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

T

hese are Isaac Newton’s modest words and they describe how many scientists make discoveries. Of course Newton, like Darwin and a few other giants of science, did not have to look very hard. They had the gift of extraordinary insight and they knew where to find the smoother pebbles. Those of us with more ordinary talent rely on luck; we have teams of beachcombers and we use the equivalent of spades and detectors to help us find these beach treasures.

One of my own smoother pebbles was an extraordinary result with genetically modified plants.

With my fellow beachcombers I found that foreign genes in the DNA of a plant could suppress other similar genes. We then used deduction and genetics to track down what was going on. Eventually our work with plants converged with analyses of worms, flies, protozoans and fungi onto a process in which gene silencing is guided by RNA. This ‘RNA silencing’ is now the foundation of a billion-dollar industry and there are good prospects that it will help cure or prevent disease in plants and animals.

Of course, I am always on the lookout for the next pretty shell. At present, I am particularly interested in the emerging topic of epigenetics which is the study of how nurture can influence nature. Some of our recent work hints at an effect of epigenetics in the emergence of new species and, through this possibility, we are being led into an interest in evolution. When Conrad Waddington, one of the pioneers in this subject, was asked why his research unit in Edinburgh was called ‘epigenetics’ he replied that it was because it was next to the Genetics Department. I hope that we too will have an Epigenetics Unit next to the Department of Genetics or somewhere else in central Cambridge.

Related to my research I am very concerned about the challenge of global food security and the role of plant science. Last year, I chaired a study group at the Royal Society in which diverse technologies, including crop protection chemistry, agroecology and methods based on traditional farming practice,

were considered alongside GM and other modern approaches. Our report was well received, but I am worried that society as a whole has not recognised the seriousness of this issue. There is a very real prospect of catastrophic food shortage in the next generation if we do not tackle the problems of sustainable food production. It often takes 10 or 20 years to translate basic research into technology that farmers can use, so we need to increase the research effort now.

My link with experimental work is via the students and post-docs in my lab rather than working at the bench. In a typical day I spend quite a bit of time talking with them or helping to prepare their papers for publication. Otherwise I like to keep in touch with what other scientists are doing by reading and talking. Cambridge is central to the academic world and so I can find out a lot by staying here. However I do travel and, during this term, I have been to Japan, Israel, the USA and Italy.

I like to keep administration meetings as short as possible and, until this week, I thought that I was good at making sure that discussions were tightly focused on the business in hand. However I hear that, in my absence, a recent departmental meeting was over in 50 minutes – 10 minutes less than normal. I am sure I can cut this down even more and plan to take the chairs out of our meeting room so that, like the Privy Council, we stand for the meeting.

Since moving to Cambridge in 2008 I have been introduced to rituals and traditions of academic life. Perhaps having some very fixed procedures allows us to think freely in our research and teaching? The most spectacular ritual that I have witnessed was during a royal visit last year when my Professorship of Botany was renamed as a Regius Professorship. Apparently, the Queen wanted to give the University an 800th birthday present, and a Regius title was slightly easier to conjure up than a new college. Once the principle was accepted of creating the first new Regius Professorship since the turn of the century, the Professorship of Botany proved a good candidate for the elevation, since it was previously unadorned – and because it was the anniversary year of On the Origin of Species and JS Henslow, one of my predecessors, was Darwin’s tutor.

CAM 61 03

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM Andy Potts

AWARDS

International acclaim for CAM CAM has won two prestigious international awards.

The magazine beat alumni publications from around the world to be named 2010 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year – the first ever non-US publication to win in the award’s 67-year history.

The magazine also won a Gold Award in the category of College and University General Interest Magazines with Circulations over 75,000.

The judges’ report praised CAM’s journalism and design, dubbing the magazine “world-class”.

Peter Agar, the University’s Director of Development and Alumni Relations, said: “I am delighted that the excellence of the re-designed magazine and the commitment of the editorial team has been recognised in this way. We now look forward to hearing the views of many of our readers, through our recent survey, to point to ways in which we can improve CAM even further.”

The prizes are awarded by CASE, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. This year, 615 higher education institutions from around the world submitted more than 2700 entries in the Circle of Excellence Awards programme.

EVENTS

Alumni Weekend report

F

or three days in September, Cambridge crackled with energy as the 20th Alumni Weekend got under way. More than 1200 guests from as far afield as Australia, Canada and India returned for the event – just part of a weekend of reunions across the Colleges and the University that saw over 6000 alumni flood back to the city.

Centrepiece of Alumni Weekend was a day of lectures at the Sidgwick Site, reflecting the diverse interests of the University and its alumni. Subjects ranged from the art treasures of St Petersburg to the hunt for the Higgs Boson; and Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director-General of the National Trust, marked the International Year of Biodiversity with a keynote speech on nature in the 21st century.

Uniquely, guests were welcomed by two Vice-Chancellors, as Professor

04 CAM 61

Dame Alison Richard passed the torch to her successor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. And for the first time, members of the University’s Alumni Advisory Board were on hand to talk about their work.

There was a chance, too, for alumni to explore unfamiliar parts of Cambridge, and to take a snoop around other Colleges. Exclusive tours opened up University buildings, gardens and archives – including the Polar Museum and Darwin’s collection of plant specimens from the Beagle voyage.

Nathalie Walker, Head of Alumni Relations, said: “It is incredibly exciting that so many alumni come back for the Weekend, to be inspired again by lectures, music, ideas and all that Cambridge offers.”

The 2011 Alumni Weekend will take place 23–25 September.

New coach for CUBC Steve Trapmore MBE has been appointed Chief Coach of Cambridge University Boat Club. Previously chief coach of Imperial College Boat Club, he started working with the CUBC squad for the 2011 Xchanging Boat Race campaign in September.

Trapmore was a member of the British Rowing Team from 1996 to 2004 and stroked the gold medal winning eight at the Sydney Olympics.

APPOINTMENTS

RESEARCH

Cosmic visionaries

C

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

Eight dons join British Academy Professors David Abulafia, Mary Beard, Christopher Clark, Deborah Howard and Juliet Mitchell and Drs Alan Baker, Karalyn Patterson and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill have been elected to British Academy Fellowships. Election is an acknowledgment of ‘academic distinction’ and is granted to only a small number of scholars in any field.

ambridge cosmologists could be on the way to ending discussion about the existence of little green men – by going out to look for them.

A proposal to design a spacecraft called PLATO capable of identifying potentially habitable planets beyond our own solar system has received support from the UK Space Agency, and is one of three initiatives that have together been granted £3.65 million of preparatory funding.

If granted full support by the European Space Agency, the spacecraft will be launched into orbit between 2017 and 2020. PLATO , which stands for Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars, will carry instruments

powerful enough to detect rocky planets in the ‘habitable zone’, the region around a star where liquid water – and potentially life – can exist.

Most planets identified to date beyond the solar system have been gas giants like Jupiter. PLATO will carry a suite of space telescopes to find earthlike rocky planets by examining stars elsewhere in our galaxy for brief dimming as planets pass in front.

Researchers from the Institute of Astronomy will focus on solar systems that are close enough in the Milky Way to be scanned for biosignatures that could indicate the presence of life.

To find out more about PLATO , visit www.ukspaceagency.bis.gov.uk/ default.aspx

New Vice-Chancellor installed Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz has become the 345th Vice-Chancellor of the University, succeeding Professor Dame Alison Richard. On Friday 1 October, he was formally admitted to the position in a Congregation at the Senate House.

In his inaugural speech, he paid tribute to his predecessor’s leadership, and to the uniqueness of Cambridge in the world of global academia. Speaking of the challenges now facing the University, he identified his as role as being “to lead the University in a competitive and difficult economic environment, to secure our financial base, and ensure the best possible environment to recruit and retain academic staff and students of the highest quality.” He went on to say: “To be successful in these endeavours requires us to have a clear vision. Our research funders and philanthropic donors will not support a university that ‘muddles through’.”

Professor Borysiewicz first came to Cambridge in 1987 as a Senior Lecturer at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, joining the University and the fellowship of Wolfson College a year later. In 1991, he moved back to Cardiff, the city of his birth, to take up a chair at the University of Wales. Knighted in 2001, he served as Principal of the Faculty of Medicine and then Deputy Rector at Imperial College, London, before becoming Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council in 2007. He told the Senate House: “I am indeed privileged to rejoin the Cambridge community from which I gained so much earlier in my career.”

BUILDINGS

Science Photo Library

West Road site work begins Don your hard hat, because construction on the West Road site has begun. The site, which will be home to the Faculty of Politics and International Studies, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and other centres in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, has been designed to maximize opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. The new building, due to open next year, will include research areas, a café open to all Sidgwick site users, and a suite of shared seminar rooms and open plan postgraduate areas. The design is highly sustainable, incorporating ‘super insulation’, solar control glazing and a ground-source heat pump.

CAM 61 05

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

RESEARCH

LIBRARIES

Library to the world

R

eaders of the world rejoice: negotiating the stacks of the University Library in person could soon be a thing of the past.

Following a £1.5m lead gift pledged by Dr Leonard Polonsky, two key University Library collections will soon be available to anyone with an internet connection.

The library, which houses some of the most valuable books in the world, is to begin the digitising of its collection with two groups of manuscripts. The first group, of religious documents, will include the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, the Genizah Collection and the eighth century Surat al-Anfal. The second group will include some of the Library’s most important scientific collections, including Newton’s heavily annotated copies of Principia, his lectures as Lucasian Professor and proofs of Opticks.

Digitisation will transform access to the collections, as University Librarian Anne Jarvis explains. "At the click of a mouse, students or scholars of divinity or politics, history, physics, medieval languages or the history of medicine, will be able to plunge into the worlds of Mediterranean communities of the 11th century or into the minds of Isaac Newton and his contemporaries.”

If the project proves successful (further funding is needed and other donors are being sought), the collections of scientific giants such as Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell and Stephen Hawking could also be digitised, along with other major collections in the fields of humanities and social sciences.

Degrees guard against dementia In the old cliché, your university days are the best of your life – but a team of Cambridge and Finnish researchers has found that they are also good for your long-term mental health.

People who stay in education longer have a lower risk of developing dementia, with each additional year in education equating to an 11% decrease in risk – but until now, scientists had been unable to establish whether the critical factor was education itself or associated higher socioeconomic status and healthier lifestyles.

The new study, led by Professor Carol Brayne, found that while people with different levels of education have similar brain pathology, those with more education were better able to compensate for the effects of dementia.

To read the report in full, visit www.brain.oxford journals.org/content/133/8/

TEACHING

Lee Woodgate

Gates Scholars celebrate 10th anniversary Gates Scholars and alumni have celebrated the scholarship programme’s 10th anniversary.

Established by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gates Cambridge Trust awards 80 scholarships, covering the full cost of studying at Cambridge, each year. The scholarships enable international students to pursue graduate study or research at the University, with the aim of creating a network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

At the celebration, 220 Scholars were joined by guests and visiting speakers in a programme of events that included panel groups on topics ranging from the impact of technology on education to the future of environmental sustainability after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Each panel included leaders in the relevant field, drawn from around the UK, as well as Gates alumni working in that field, and the presentations led to lively and wide-ranging discussions.

Visit www.gatesscholar.org/media/podcasts to listen to podcasts of the weekend’s discussions.

CAM 61 07

DIARY AUTUMN/ WINTER

Booking online is the fastest and most efficient way to book your place at an event. There is no additional fee and your place will be confirmed as soon as your transaction is completed.

If you prefer to book by phone or post don’t forget to include your (and your guests’) full name, College, matriculation date and membership number (where applicable). Please be aware that all events are subject to change and that pre-booking is essential, unless otherwise indicated. www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

NETWORKING

A festive drinks evening Tuesday 7 December 2010, 6.30–9.30pm, London Sir Paul Judge (Trinity 1968) and members of the University Alumni Advisory Board warmly invite all alumni for a festive evening of drinks and canapés and the opportunity to meet fellow alumni. This event will take place in Sir Paul’s spectacular riverside apartment, overlooking the Thames.

This is a fabulous opportunity to meet members of the Board and network in style. With the Cambridge alumni community representative of the full spectrum of business sectors, job functions and organisations, we hope that you can join Sir Paul and other members of the Alumni Board as they host this special occasion in London.

This event is open to all alumni and their guests.

Tickets cost £35 per person.

OPERA

Bregenz Festival Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 July 2011, Austria

F Contact CARO: www.alumni.cam.ac.uk alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk Telephone: +44 (0)1223 332288 Cambridge Alumni Relations Office University of Cambridge 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB 08 CAM 61

ollowing the success of this year’s alumni event in Bregenz we are delighted to offer alumni the chance to attend a performance of André Chénier on the Floating Stage at the 2011 Bregenz Opera Festival.

André Chénier, by the Italian composer Umberto Giordano, is based on the life of a real historical character, a French poet who was caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution, first as an ardent supporter and then as a victim, mercilessly persecuted and ultimately sent to the guillotine.

In addition, alumni will have the opportunity to see Achterbahn (Miss Fortune), the first in a series of newly commissioned operas to be performed at the Festival House. A tale about fate and a parable about the ups and downs of life, Achterbahn is by British

composer Judith Weir CBE (King’s 1973). The opera has been jointly commissioned and co-produced by the Bregenz Festival and the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.

Alumni will be taken on a backstage tour of the Floating Stage. In addition there will be introductory talks on the two operas and a series of events organised by The Oxford and Cambridge Society of Austria and The German Cambridge Society.

We do hope that you can join us for this very special two day event.

Tickets cost £295 per person.

Please note alumni are responsible for organising their own travel and accommodation.

23–25 September 2011

DIARY AUTUMN/ WINTER

Save the date Details regarding the 2011 Alumni Weekend will be available early next year. Please check the CARO website and e-bulletin for updates. www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend

Mathew Hollow

Discover the magic of Wimbledon

Built Vision

SPORT

From 4pm, Saturday 7 May 2011, All England Lawn Tennis Club, London

J

AELTC

oin Philip Brook (Fitzwilliam 1974), incoming Chairman of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, for an exclusive visit to the remarkable Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum and grounds. Alumni will get a unique chance to enjoy a private behind-thescenes tour; as well as visiting Centre Court and No. 1 Court this will take in the Picnic Terrace, where the crowds gather, and the elegant Water Gardens, featuring sensational views of central London.

The highlight will be the tour of the Millennium Building. Entering via the Competitors’ Entrance, you will walk through the underground hallways normally reserved for tournament competitors, catching a view of the Players’ Terrace and the press interview room where champions face the world’s media. You will also get the chance to visit the outstanding

Museum, where you can hear a ghostlike image of Wimbledon legend John McEnroe talk about his experiences on Centre Court. This is a truly remarkable special effect which has taken 150-year-old technology and brought it bang up to date.

The day will finish with a threecourse meal in the company of Philip Brook. Philip will give a glimpse into the workings of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, in the elegant surroundings of the Museum.

Tickets cost £150 per person.

MUSIC

Handel House Museum Wednesday 16 February, 6.30–8.30pm, Mayfair Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) is bringing some of Cambridge’s finest student soloists to Handel House Museum, London.

The House, which was the eighteenth-century London home of the great and much-loved composer, was where Handel composed his most famous music, including the Messiah and the Coronation Anthems. Today, the House is a beautiful historic building filled with music and works of art. Recitals and events take place in the Performance Room, in which Handel used to entertain and rehearse with the musicians of his day.

The programme will include a selection of performers from the new University lunchtime recital series.

The evening will consist of an introductory drink, the performance, a tour of Handel House and further refreshments afterwards.

Tickets are very limited in number and cost £70 per person, including champagne and nibbles. CUMS would especially welcome anyone interested in supporting a continuing programme of music making in London by current Cambridge student soloists and ensembles.

CAM 61 09

Noticeboard

Virtual volunteers wanted We are currently developing our online services for alumni and are looking for volunteers to help us test them out over the coming months.

If you are interested in being involved, please contact Chiara Ferrara on chiara.ferrara@admin.cam.ac.uk

Do we have your email address?

Each month, CARO sends out an e-bulletin with news about alumni events and activities and with updates from across the University, including a selection of the latest research news from Cambridge. If you don’t currently receive the e-bulletin and would like to, or if you have changed your email address, please let us know at alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk

Steve Bond

Online Alumni Notice Board If you have something you would like to advertise to your fellow alumni, email us at alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk with your College, matriculation year, and details of what you would like us to include, and we will post it online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/contact/ noticeboard.

Alumni groups Cambridge now has over 380 volunteer-led alumni groups across the world, with new ones being established all the time. To find out about the group nearest you, go to: www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/networks.

Included in the network are many shared interest groups, information on which can be found on the website.

Recent additions include the Cambridge University Motorcycle Club (contact Julian Bond on julian_bond@voidstar.com) and the Cambridge Film and Media Academy (contact David Clouter on alumni@camfa.org).

In addition the University Gilbert and Sullivan Society is preparing for its 50th anniversary; old members are invited to register for updates for the anniversary Ball and other events by emailing theodore.hong@gmail.com

Make it a Cambridge Christmas Whether you’re looking for a gift for a fellow graduate or want to treat someone who has just started studying at Cambridge, we can help you find the perfect item...

Globetrotters will love our travel set of passport holder, luggage tag and bookmark available in light blue or black, while the set of four earthenware mugs, each featuring the University motto, would make a great addition to any kitchen or desk. Our exclusive,100% silk alumni tie in Cambridge blue has the University shield embroidered in full colour. New Year resolutions to visit the gym will be made easier with the Cambridge sports bag. And to stay in touch with alumni friends and family this Christmas, choose from the specially selected range of Christmas cards from the Fitzwilliam Museum. Each pack contains 10 cards (of one design) with envelopes.

Note: last order date for a UK Christmas delivery is 17 December. For information on overseas delivery call 0800 0612207 (freephone) from within the UK; +44(0)207 3756470 from elsewhere.

Lost alumni We have received enquiries about the following alumni: Peter J Botsford (Corpus 1971), Christopher Charles Porter (Sidney Sussex 1970), Dr. José Israel Vargas (Fitzwilliam 1957).

If you know them, please ask them to contact the Alumni Relations Office.

A list of other alumni for whom contact details are sought can be found at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/contact/lost Cambridge10 Cambridge10 is a new crosscollegiate Group for alumni who graduated in the last 10 years, bringing together recent graduates and young professionals. The Group organises events in London and partners with other Cambridge alumni societies and external organisations to help alumni make the most of their Cambridge connections.

More information can be found at www.cambridge10.com

To see the full range online and to order visit www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/merchandise

CAM 61 11

MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM KENNY A3, DOWNING

Words Olivia Gordon Photograph Charlie Troman Annie Vernon (Downing 2001) rows for Great Britain. She won a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics and is currently in training for the Games in 2012.

12 CAM 61

Cameron Smith is a first year Engineering student.

At the time of our interview he had been in Cambridge for exactly eight days and had just made it to the end of freshers’ week.

“

W

ow, it’s been done up a bit!” Annie Vernon has taken a day off from Olympic training in Henley to zoom back to Downing in a red sports car. Standing tall, muscular and super fit, she is impressed by the changes that have taken place in her old room in the last decade. “It didn’t have carpets when I was here, or an en suite. It all looked more sixties.”

As A3’s current resident, Cameron Smith, shows her around, they work out that the old bathrooms at the end of the communal hall – “like a prison washroom with rows of metal sinks and showers” remembers Annie – are now an extension of Kenny A’s kitchen, with which Cameron is delighted. “Eighteen cupboards between seven students!” he exclaims – “not that anyone’s turned the oven or hob on yet.”

As Cameron demonstrates how his single bed converts into a spacious double, Annie tuts, “We didn’t have those luxuries. Really, students should slum it a little bit”. But despite the room being more basic in her day, as a fresher from a comprehensive school in rural Cornwall, Annie says she was struck “by what

THE BEST...

SIGN IN CAMBRIDGE Charlotte Runcie is reading English at Queens’

I

t’s difficult to go anywhere in Cambridge without being told off.

Like any city, it’s sprinkled with signposts like a cake with sugar, but in Cambridge the signs seem to specialise in reminding us not to do things. In the alleyway linking Queens’ Lane to Trumpington Street there is a sign that simply says ‘no’. Maybe this is all that remains of something longer, or maybe it was always like that: a sign that says, ‘Whatever you’re doing, stop it.’

Whenever I walk past I feel chastised for talking too loudly, for chewing gum or wearing inappropriate shoes.

Attempting to choose a favourite sign might seem a mundane task, but search among the ‘keep off the grass’ warnings and the formidable ‘no cycles’ badges that police the gaps in each street’s colourful tangle of chainedup bikes, and there are interesting runners in a strong field.

My favourite sign, for example, doesn’t look like it was commissioned by a porter in a bad mood. It is scrawled in chalk in foot-high letters on Trinity Street, and is accompanied by an arrow.

It reads, simply, ‘to the river’.

There’s an exuberance about it that can’t help but make you smile. It’s like it’s been written in a rush by somebody who has just discovered the existence of the Cam and thinks everyone should know about it: that we should hurry and grab a punt and come and have a good time.

There used to be the word ‘punts’ written alongside it (often adjusted by other chalkers to say ‘punks’ and ‘runts’ and ruder things besides), but now only the direction to the river is left. It’s been there for years, but always looks like it could be washed away at any moment in a sudden storm.

I know that the most likely signwriter is Scudamore’s punt hire company, hoping to attract business for tours.

But I like to think it was written by somebody who was tired of being told what not to do and where not to go.

Somebody who enjoyed the thrill of a wild swim or a slow glide under the Mathematical Bridge. Somebody who knew that, despite its occasionally intimidating history, the city was once just a bridge over the River Cam, and that even now, the water’s the best place to be.

Charlie Troman

seemed a massive room with a beautiful view out of the windows. I loved Downing and I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to be here.” Newcomer Cameron seems equally happy: “It’s much better than I expected – bigger than my room at home, light and in the middle of the city. And unlike at the older Colleges, you have good amenities and don’t have tourists walking past your window all day.”

For him, coming from “the middle of nowhere” on the edge of Salisbury Plain, Cambridge seems a “big move to a packed city”, an excitement Annie laughingly remembers too. “I felt the same – the shopping seemed so good and to me the nightlife was crazy!” One of the room’s surprising perks, Annie informs him, is its proximity to the bike sheds – “you open your window in the morning and hear everyone’s gossip about the night before.”

Kenny A is a sociable and close-knit block, Annie recalls. “We had t-shirts printed saying ‘Kenny’s finest.’” Cameron agrees. “We have a bitter rivalry with Kenny B already – it only took a day to start up.”

Downing, of course, has a sporty reputation, and Annie is delighted that the room has been passed from one sportsperson to another. Where once there were oars propped against the walls, now there are golf clubs. A keen golfer, despite having only just arrived in Cambridge, Cameron has already found a place on the University golf team – and he’s planning to get involved with Cambridge rowing, squash, football and even table tennis. He has enjoyed freshers’ week. “They’ve kept us busy all the time and I now recognise most of the 130 freshers in College. Though it was weird wearing a gown at matriculation for the first time.”

Annie rowed at Cambridge, and was a member of the Boat Race crew in her second year, but didn’t start competing internationally until her third year, so there was plenty of time for the rest of student life. “I loved doing History and my studies always came first,” says Annie. “It wasn’t my intention to carry on rowing after graduation – I expected to get a job and be normal.”

Did she have many rowdy rowing nights out? “It hit me early on when I got here that all the interesting, fun people in College seemed to row and they had a great social life,” she says. The exact nature of the high jinks, though, she insists, are ‘Annie was a member of unsuitable for public the Boat Race crew consumption. All she in her second year, but will say is that “we didn’t start competing used to climb onto the internationally until her College roof to party third year. “It wasn’t my – which I don’t think College knew about.” intention to carry on Cameron wants rowing after graduation to know how late – I expected to get a job night partying fits in with dawn starts and be normal!”’ on the river and early lectures, at a University where, as he has already observed, “everything else comes behind the academic stuff”. “Well, luckily I didn’t have nine o’clock lectures,” smiles Annie.

“Being 19 was scary but being a student is so simple – everything’s on tap and you only have to stress about your next essay.” She turns to leave the room, confessing: “I’m feeling a little nostalgic.”

CAM 61 13

Left to right: Hannah Hobday, Lucy Cleland, Philip Hobday.

Lucy Cleland (Ridley Hall 2002), Philip Hobday (Ridley Hall 2003) and Hannah Hobday (Ridley Hall 2004) met while training for ordination.

L

aughter interrupts the stillness of the quadrangle at Ridley Hall, the theological college affiliated to the University, as three friends, two now married, meet again on the small chapel stairs. Lucy and Philip were the first to meet, Philip arriving as a fresher in Lucy’s second year, with Hannah joining the following year.

Hannah recalls: “I met Philip at my interview. I was quite scared by the whole thing, and knew only that I was being collected from the common room by a ‘Philip Hobday’. Then a Daily Telegraph rustled in the corner…”

“Hannah and I had been at Oxford together, but never met, although we later realised we’d actually lived on opposite sides of the road,” says Philip. “One of my first thoughts on meeting her was ‘that’s the kind of person that people would expect me to fall in love with’.

I suppose deep down I realised she was the person I’d want to marry, although I’m not saying I knew that at the time!”

So what was life at Ridley Hall like for the would-be vicars? “It’s quite a laid-back community,” explains Lucy. “We’d be around at weekends, so you could either have coffee, or go to The Granta for a drink. And being students, there was time when you’d just be around college, chatting in the common room over a newspaper and some cake.”

For Philip, this close-knit character was unique. “Ridley is quite monastic, not in the sense that it’s sparse, but [rather that it’s] close, and people live, work and relax together.

Ideally, you share the whole of your life,” he says. “One way that a theological college differs from regular colleges is that most students on the whole don’t pray together.

Praying together changes a community – it makes it closer. It’s partly the mere fact that you tell people more. You open up to your delights and struggles in a different way.”

“You’d pray with people, and also you’d be in each other’s prayers while taking exams or looking for jobs. I guess that’s one spiritual outworking of relationships,” reflects Lucy.

The three also shared a more prosaic link – being Senior Student, akin to JCR president, in consecutive years. “I was closer to Lucy then, who’d been Senior Student previously, and I relied on her for practical and moral support,” says Philip. “I think there was some of that when Hannah became Senior Student the year after me, but we weren’t as close until almost the Easter term when I was about to leave.”

Hannah picks up the story: “Philip and I got together just before he left, and were engaged the following October. It was a long, rather tortuous road,” she smiles. “I asked him out for coffee.”

“And I said no, because I thought she just wanted to complain about something – part of being Senior Student is that people ask you out for tea to complain about stuff,” admits Philip.

Told how busy Philip was, Hannah naturally concluded he was not interested – so when he eventually took her out for dinner, thinking it would be enough to make the point, Hannah just thought he was being nice. “I thought he was being pastoral,” says Hannah.

“I remember going around college saying, ‘Wasn’t that kind of Philip?’ We spent more and more time together though, and eventually I had to ask ‘What’s really going on here?’”

One person who was not surprised at the turn of events, however, was Lucy.

“Pretty early on, I’d thought ‘yes, hmmm’ – probably at the end of Hannah’s first term.”

“A year and a term before we worked it out!” laughs Hannah.

Back around the common-room table, they muse on their friendship, passing observations around with the tea and biscuits. “Philip talks

HISTORY OF A FRIENDSHIP

COFFEE COCKTAILS CLERICS Words Anna Melville-James Photographs Christoffer Rudquist

CAM 61 15

If you would like to share the history of your friendship, do get in touch by email at alumni@admin.cam.ac.uk or by post (see page 8).

SECRET CAMBRIDGE

Roman remains Roman Cambridge is well-documented, but surprisingly well-hidden, as Diya Gupta discovers.

the most,” Hannah declares. “And Lucy is a good person to go to if you need to know the specifics about what to do in a situation.

She doesn’t wing it, she knows.” College memories (from Friday cocktail hour to fierce competition on the Ridley croquet lawn) abound, but this is very much a friendship lived day-to-day not just a collection of memories. And that’s something made simpler by the fact that all three friends have now returned to live in Cambridgeshire: Lucy in Waterbeach and Hannah and Philip in Cambridge itself.

“It’s easier to meet up more now that we all live locally,” says Hannah. “And being in the same kinds of jobs, you don’t have to start as far back as you might with friends who do different things. There’s a quality of understanding.”

“Being a priest, the job and the life go together, and everyone knows who you are, which makes it intense,” says Philip. “It’s easy to trust other clergy you know well – often more than other friends. You don’t have to constantly look over your shoulder and think should I be telling them this? Sometimes it’s easier to be real.”

Lucy agrees. “I wouldn’t necessarily talk to people in the vicinity about particular challenges with my parish, but I can ring up Hannah and Philip,” she says. “I’d also think twice about talking about my own struggles or weaknesses with other friends or family – because sometimes there’ll be assumptions: ‘Oh you must have life all sorted because you’re doing this wise sort of job…’”

“Particularly about spiritual things,” adds Philip. “There’s a lot of discussion about church in a theological college – and just because you’ve got a place full of Christians, like Ridley, it doesn’t mean they all agree on everything. Deep discussions about God – more complex, more intimate – were, and are, rare and more precious, however. It’s the stuff of people’s souls and their beliefs.”

He reflects further for a moment. “I trust both Lucy and Hannah, aside from the fact I’m married to one of them. If I were struggling with something and couldn’t get my head around it, I wouldn’t think twice about talking to them about it. Sometimes just knowing that is enough.”

16 CAM 61

F

or most residents, Castle Hill is just an especially uphill cycle ride in Cambridge, occasionally tempered with a visit to the Castle pub or perhaps to the Maharajah curry house.

But many hundreds of years ago, Castle Hill formed the city centre of Cambridge, part of the upper town where settlements were based, and separated from the lower town by the river. In Iron Age times, the upper town was the seat of power and commerce, and human dwelling around it was widespread.

The development went further with the Roman occupation of the upper town from the late 1st century ce onwards.

Unassuming Castle Hill bears testimony to these centuries of human habitation.

As Christopher Evans, Executive Director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit explains, St Peter’s Church, next to Kettle’s Yard, today possesses the only visible signs of the long gone days of Roman Cambridge.

Long, flat, reddish roof tiles or tegulae can still clearly be seen on the outer walls of the church. Together with curved imbrices, they once formed overlapping roof tiles that served as a waterproof and durable covering for buildings. While the tegulae would be laid flat on the roof, the imbrices would arch over the joints between their vertical edges, thus enabling rainwater to flow along the surface of the tiles, finally descending into the gutters below.

In ancient Rome, tegulae were made mainly of fired clay, but sometimes also of marble, bronze or gilt. These tiles formed an intrinsic part of Roman architecture, from humble outbuildings to magnificent temples and public facilities.

In Roman Cambridge of the 2nd century ce, however, it is unlikely that they were part of any grand design. The hilly upper town of Cambridge might have formed a good location for a fortified Roman town, with a defensive position over a major river crossing, a confluence of many roads and an interface of a variety of agricultural regions.

But it wasn’t a site of Roman grandeur.

In fact, Roman Cambridge has been designated as a town today largely by virtue of its defences. Evidence of these defences can be still be traced along the steep banks of Mount Pleasant, in the gardens of houses along the top of the slope which formed part of the town’s walls more than 17 centuries ago.

How then did these tiles or tegulae make their way on to the walls of St Peter’s Church? Christopher Evans believes that the reason is purely functional. In the 12th century, stone was at a premium, and church builders would have made pragmatic use of available Roman ruins as quarries.

This was a fairly common occurrence in England; in Colchester too, for example, evidence has been found of Roman masonry being reused in medieval times. And with substantial Roman foundations being excavated during the creation of the disabled access at Kettle’s Yard in 1992, we can assume that such building material must have been available in medieval Cambridge as well.

The tegulae on St Peter’s wall had humble origins, yet they have remained witness to vast changes in topography and human development in Cambridge. In the 2nd century ce, the slope of Castle Hill would have been much steeper, and Evans says we still don’t fully know how the Romans would have accessed the hill.

Today, the landscape is far more gradual and terraced, and the human inhabitants less concerned with building defences.

Supporting the walls of St Peter’s, the tegulae have seen the growth of the University town and the evolution of a gentler Cambridge.

More than twice as old as the University itself, they seem ready to quietly weather further passages of time.

With thanks to Christopher Evans of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Other sources: Alison Taylor, Cambridge: The Hidden History (NPI Media Group).

TAKE THREE

Joseph Szarka (St John’s 1976) is Reader in European Studies at the University of Bath. His research and teaching concentrate on politics and policy-making in the EU, especially environmental, energy and climate policy.

He is the author of Wind Power in Europe (2007) and The Shaping of French Environmental Policy (2002).

Could nuclear power be the solution to the UK’s energy crunch?

David Newbery (Trinity 1961) is Director of Research at the Electricity Policy Research Group and a Professor of Economics.

He is Vice Chairman of Cambridge Economic Policy Associates and an occasional consultant to the World Bank. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academic Panel of DEFRA.

Julian Huppert (Trinity 1996) is an academic and Liberal Democrat politician, and was elected MP for Cambridge in May 2010. His academic research has focused on the structures of DNA and its influence on cancer and nano-technological objects.

Interviews by Lucy Jolin Gillian Blease

0

20 10

2020 203

JOSEPH SZARKA: Nuclear is not ‘the solution’, and indeed there is no single answer.

Nuclear energy provides only a small proportion of the UK energy mix. In 2004, nuclear provided 9% of primary energy supply and some 20% of electricity generation, falling to 16.5% in the first quarter of 2010. This proportion is set to fall further because of plant closures.

New nuclear reactors could be built, and there are major players who want this to happen. Many countervailing factors exist, however, including technological risks, regulatory issues and public acceptance.

Then there is the sector’s problematic economic model (made worse by market liberalisation) an unfavourable commercial context and a poor investment outlook. Given the many precedents of construction and cost over-runs, it is unlikely any new nuclear power station will be built and producing electricity for the grid in the UK before 2020.

Consequently, the UK needs a diversified fuel mix, both overall and within the electricity sector. The UK is now committed to sourcing 15% of energy from renewable sources by 2020. This will be very difficult given current policies, technologies and market conditions. Yet 15% is too low for the long term. The real questions, then, are how the energy mix will evolve, and what can be done to direct its evolution towards long-term sustainability.

‘Nuclear looks the least-cost solution to decarbonising the electricity sector, while reducing our import dependence on gas.’

DAVID NEWBURY: Britain faces an energy

crunch in 2015. Some 12 GW of our coal-fired power stations (or the equivalent of six large power stations, one-third of total coal capacity) must close because of environmental regulations, and another six GW of old nuclear power stations will have been decommissioned – together, nearly one-third of peak demand.

Gas imports are rising rapidly and will account for half our peak demand by 2015.

Gas-fired power stations will then provide the bulk of our electricity.

New nuclear power stations will not be ready before 2018, assuming that they secure approval and financing (and they are not attractive at the current prices of fuel and CO2) so they will certainly not be ready to address the looming energy shortfall.

But the government has committed itself to supporting the carbon price, and nuclear power has the potential to help decarbonise the electricity sector, an essential first step to the low-carbon economy that we are committed to deliver. One nuclear station delivers the same average power as nearly 2,000 large on-shore wind turbines covering 750 sq km, but with greater predictability, and at lower cost. And it should still be generating in 2060.

Replacing a nuclear power station with one fuelled by biomass would require all the land within a radius of 55 km devoted to energy crops. In short, nuclear power currently looks the least-cost solution to decarbonising the electricity sector, while reducing our import dependence on gas.

JULIAN HUPPERT: Long term, the answer is clearly nuclear fusion. We are currently 25 years away from having that. We’ve been 25 years away from having that for the last 50 years. But I hope that some day we’ll only be 20 years away from it. In the meantime, we have to find a good source of energy.

One solution might be to examine importing energy from elsewhere. A large part of the planet is desert with very high solar incidence, and large-scale desert solar produces a huge amount of energy. We also have the capacity to meet our energy needs with green energy.

But there are trade-offs and costs to that.

It takes a lot of space. You have to have countryside and power plants. It can be done – but that’s not necessarily the same as saying it must be done.

I would certainly not rule nuclear out.

It has a lot of benefits but it also has a lot of problems. This is why we must work out the cost of nuclear – the timeliness, the safety, and how you deal with issues such as residual waste – compared to other decarbonised forms of power. That’s the analysis that has to be done and is, I believe, being done.

Therefore, I take an agnostic position. If it turns out that nuclear is the way forward, great. If it’s not, then we shouldn’t do it.

CAM 61 17

AUTUMNAL HEIGHTS 18 CAM 61

Left Downing College Right Trinity College Far right Clare College and King’s College Chapel

Everyone knows that Cambridge’s bright autumn skies and freezing winters are the result of an icy blast direct from the Ural Mountains.Or are they?

Bea Perks investigates.

Photographs Charlie Troman and James Appleton

T

HIS IS HOW LEGENDS BEGIN. “Let us choose a clear day and, starting from Cambridge, follow Hills Road on to the Gog-Magogs until we reach the high ground by Gog-Magog House. We are now standing on the chalk ridge known as the East Anglian Heights,” declared Thomas McKenny Hughes, then Woodwardian Professor of Geology, in the 1909 edition of Cambridge County Geographies.

“To the native of a mountainous country our hills are mere rising ground, but everything is relative, and they are our Alps,

which raise us above the plain into the purer air, with nothing higher, eastwards, between us and the Ural Mountains.”

Ah, there it is: the factoid dearly beloved of Cambridge residents as they wrap up against the chill wind that whistles through the city’s streets and which heralds the arrival of autumn. “There’s nothing between us and the Urals,” everyone nods, sagely, pulling their coats in tighter, clutching at their scarves.

The wind really does whistle through Cambridge’s streets come autumn. And it doesn’t really rain all that much, which makes for the cloud-free beautiful blue sky which for each succeeding generation comes to mean autumn in Cambridge, a new term and fond memory all rolled into one.

But surely it’s all myth, this freezing wind and autumn sunshine, just the memories of youth? To find out what the weather is really like in Cambridge it’s worth paying a visit to the University’s Botanic Garden.

They really know their weather there. In fact, the garden’s meteorological records, kept meticulously since 1904 – before Professor Hughes was alerting Cantabrigians to their proximity to the Urals – are still relied on by the Met Office.

The real expert, according to the Botanic Garden’s director, Professor John Parker, is John Kapor, Supervisor of the Systematics Section. Kapor takes measurements of rainfall and temperature daily and has, in Parker’s words, “a compendious memory of weather lore”.

Parker isn’t wrong. “Cambridge is in the driest region of Britain with a more continental climate than most of the rest of the country,” says Kapor. The 30-year average rainfall from 1970 to 2000 was only 557mm CAM 61 19

(compare that with Kew, whose average over the same period was 629mm, or Oxford at 646mm). Who’d want to go to soggy old Oxford with its 89 extra millimetres of rain every year?

Although Cambridge’s rainfall tends to be evenly distributed through the year, it rains slightly more from June to August than from January to April, says Kapor. In other words, it rains on tourists rather than on students.

And in the winter, it really is cold. Temperatures tend to rise from a minimum of between –5 and –8 degrees Celsius in January to a maximum of about 30 degrees Celsius in July or August.

So does this apparently unique weather pattern have the direct connection with the Ural Mountains to thank for its weather?

Does it even have this direct connection with the Russian mountain range at all?

Since it was the then Woodwardian Professor of Geology who first raised the issue, who better to ask than the current Woodwardian Professor of Geology?

“Sadly,” says David Hodell, the 15th incumbent of the Professorship, “I’m afraid it appears as though the legend advanced by Professor Hughes is incorrect.” Hodell cites the late Chris Lightfoot’s investigation into the subject. Lightfoot started as an undergraduate at Clare College in 1996 and subsequently took up a doctoral place in the Department of Earth Sciences. Working with Professor Dan McKenzie, Lightfoot began studying the processes involved in melt extraction from the Earth’s mantle.

But, in the words of his obituary in The Times (he died tragically early in 2007), “Like many polymaths, Lightfoot found it impossible to focus his attention on one activity.”

In 2006, among his many other activities, Lightfoot turned to NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to establish, once and for all, the topographic profile of a straight line drawn between Cambridge and the Urals.

The shuttle radar generated what NASA says is the most complete high-resolution digital topographic database of earth. The data were collected on an 11-day mission in 2000, by a specially modified radar system that flew onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

It was money well spent. Lightfoot was able to show, conclusively, that there is plenty of land higher than the Gogs between Cambridge and the Urals. Before you even get across Germany there are hills almost four times the height of anything in Cambridgeshire – and the Urals lie another couple of thousand kilometres or so east from there.

In Thomas McKenny Hughes’s defence, he doesn’t appear to have linked his erroneous Urals/Cambridge note to the weather in Cambridge. That was a conclusion drawn decades later by generations of chilly Cambridge students. In fact, Hughes’s point was that Cambridge’s weather (and the UK’s overall) is surprisingly warm considering how

‘In 2006, Lightfoot turned to NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to establish, once and for all, the profile of a straight line drawn between Cambridge and the Urals.’

far north we are. And he ascribed the specific weather patterns, as do scientists today, to the wind – the flow of air from areas of high atmospheric pressure to areas of low atmospheric pressure. Atmospheric pressure in Europe increases from south to north, and this difference is greatest in the winter.

“We should expect from its latitude that the mean winter temperature in Shetland would be 3 [degrees Fahrenheit] and that of Cambridge 17 [degrees Fahrenheit], whereas in consequence of the warm currents of air and ocean, the mean winter temperature of Shetland is 39 and that of Cambridge 37,” wrote Hughes in 1909.

Its winters may be colder than Shetland’s, but, in 2010, the Met Office says that overall, East Anglia has one of the driest and warmest climates in the UK. Averages taken between 1971 and 2000 show that the region is the 12th warmest in England, with an annual mean temperature of 9.9 degrees Celsius, and the driest with 605.8mm annual precipitation.

This is all thanks to its location in the east of England. Our prevailing winds come from the west and bring weather systems across the country; western areas therefore get most of the rain first, leaving less for the eastern side of the country.

Being on the eastern side of the country also has an effect on the temperature: in summer, southerly winds can bring hot air from the continent, while in winter East Anglia is the first area to be affected by cold east winds from Russia.

Which is not quite the same, alas, as saying

we’re directly in line with the Urals, says Met Office spokeswoman Helen Chivers.

“Our prevailing wind in the UK is southwesterly, giving us our temperate climate, but the UK lies at a ‘crossroads’ for weather systems. To the south and east of us is the land mass of Europe, while to the west the world’s second largest ocean provides a vast supply of moisture as winds blown in from the Atlantic,” she says.

“This leaves East Anglia and Cambridge as one of the first areas to be affected by cold, continental weather should the wind come from the east in the winter. So it’s not so much that East Anglia is a relatively flat region topographically, more that it is one of the closest regions to mainland Europe.”

But surely there must be something really different about Cambridge weather? Such an abundance of folklore can’t be wrong.

“I don’t think there is anything here that is particularly interesting really,” says Chivers, clearly oblivious of the proud heritage she’s trampling all over, “although the long-term averages show that autumn is actually the wettest season in Cambridgeshire, with winter being the driest!”

Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that Cambridge’s climatologists are investigating the weather just about everywhere but Cambridge. There is a splendid array of meteorological sensors on the roof of the Computer Laboratory Digital Technology Group just off the Madingley Road, but it’s all left over from some PhD projects that were completed ages ago. The system is being maintained (visit www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ research/dtg/weather, for a live update on everything from air pressure and rainfall to wind speed and temperature), but that’s about all.

“You might like to try contacting Iceni Weather, based in Royston. They certainly have more reliable records than we do,” suggests Brian Jones, who has kept the system running in the absence of the long-departed PhD students. But Royston (Iceni) Weather Station deals another blow to Cambridge’s fast fading hopes for a unique position in the meteorological–topographical hierarchy.

So the city no longer appears to be directly in the shadow of the Urals, and its climate isn’t particularly remarkable. But surely it’s unique in comparison with the surrounding countryside?

Sadly for the city, the Iceni website places the local claim to topographical fame elsewhere. “Some 5 km to the south of Royston the land rises to over 150 metres and it is an interesting fact that following the Greenwich Meridian (0° Longitude) due northwards there is no higher ground between [this point] and the North Pole, a distance of 4,233 km!”

Though before Royston gets too excited, perhaps we’d better ask NASA to send up another space shuttle. Just to be sure.

CAM 61 21

RIOTAT THE GARDEN HOUSE

When a 1970 student protest got out of hand at the Garden House Hotel, reverberations were felt across the University and the country.

Here six of the protestors recall their part in the event and its aftermath.

Words William Ham Bevan Illustrations Chris Arran

22 CAM 61

F

OR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, the Garden House riot of February 1970 has been part of Cambridge folklore. The bare facts are straightforward enough. A dinner to promote Greek tourism at the Garden House Hotel was disrupted by a student demonstration against the country’s ruling military junta. The protest turned violent, the hotel was damaged, and both police and students were bloodied. Eight members of the University received short custodial sentences for their part in the disturbance.

The consequences of the riot were wide-ranging, in Cambridge and beyond. Perhaps no episode of student protest in post-war Britain attracted so much media attention, or provoked greater public debate.

Some regarded the case as a timely reminder that students should expect no special privilege before the law; others saw in it worrying evidence of a crackdown on political dissent in higher education.

Necessarily, it had a great effect on the lives of those caught up in it.

CAM 61 23

The Garden House dinner was the culmination of ‘Greek Week’, an initiative held in the city to raise Greece’s profile as a holiday destination. The idea was always likely to provoke a response in the University. The previous year, a trip to a conference in Greece by the Master of Jesus College had drawn such heated condemnation from the Shilling Paper – the newspaper of the student Left – that the Proctors had convened to consider action against its editors.

Rod Caird, then reading Oriental Languages at Queens’ and part of the circle that produced the Shilling Paper, says: “It was incredibly stupid to organise a Greek Week in a university town full of hairy radicals, at the height of the dictatorship in Greece. We were bound to protest against it, because we protested against everything.”

Action against the first Greek Week events was strident but mostly peaceful. The letter Z – symbol of the resistance against the junta – was daubed overnight on University buildings, travel agents’ windows and the Garden House itself. There were hints of trouble at a picket of a local travel agency, when students burned promotional leaflets in the street outside.

Much of the Shilling Paper of Friday 13 February was a call to action for the evening’s protest. The front page stated: “Tonight, the lickspittles of Cambridge gather to celebrate the ‘success’ of Greek Week in Cambridge … Whether or not they will succeed in passing their evening pleasantly at the Garden House Hotel is up to us.” The back page was given over to a cut-out poster – a red Z overlaid with “Greek fascists hold propaganda party – all invited!”

Among those to accept the invitation was Peter Household, a 21-year-old History undergraduate at St John’s. He says: “It was the first demonstration I’d been on – I was pretty useless. But I had struck up a friendship with Gottfried Ensslin, probably the only left-wing student in St John’s, and he made it his mission to tutor me in the ways of righteousness. This demo came up and he said we should go.”

Then studying on a British Council scholarship, the 24-year-old Ensslin was a veteran of student activism in West Germany.

Today, he is amused at Household’s tribute. “I take that as a great compliment,” he says. “But yes, I had taken part in many actions, many demonstrations. I had been at Heidelberg, which was at the centre of the protest movement in Germany.”

Shortly after seven o’clock, a large crowd of protestors had assembled at the front of the hotel. The Proctors, who arrived soon afterwards, estimated it at 300, later swelling to 500; other accounts double this number. Initially, just a handful of policemen faced them.

The protestors were encouraged by slogans, speeches and recorded music by dissident Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis from a speaker system in an overlooking room at Peterhouse, made available by a sympathetic don. The hotel had requested that diners arrive early, and many were safely inside; but latecomers found their route blocked as the protestors began to jostle with police.

Present at the outset was Stephen Amiel, a medical student at King’s and chairman of the Socialist Society and Communist Party, both of which had played an organisational role. He says: “Our objective was to try and stop people getting in – by force of numbers and by creating a din. We didn’t intend to intimidate the guests. People did go with fireworks or eggs filled with red paint, so our intentions were not entirely those of silent protest.”

Nick Emley, then in his first year of a Modern Languages degree at Clare College, agrees. “We were going to block the entrance so that these worthy burghers from the town could not turn up and have their nice little Greek tourist board week. We certainly didn’t go thinking ‘right, we’re up for a ruck’.”

When the loudspeaker was silenced, and a promised speech from an exiled Greek politician proved not to be forthcoming, the crowd became restless. Bob Rowthorn, then a young Economics lecturer and fellow of King’s, says: “I distinctly remember how it got out of hand. I can picture someone saying: ‘You can get round the back – there aren’t any police there.’ People moved round the rear of the hotel, and that’s when it degenerated.”

From this point, accounts become more confused; but most agree 24 CAM 61

that tension escalated after demonstrators began hammering on the windows, and a member of hotel staff turned a firehose on them from a first-floor window. The lights in the garden failed, and the police found themselves under a hail of stones. Tempers were frayed, windows broken, and truncheons drawn.

Before reinforcements with dogs arrived, several protestors broke through to the dining-room, or were pushed in by the bottleneck of bodies on the thin terrace. Some of them were set upon by guests – including Nick Emley, who was whacked about the head with a soup ladle. Tables were upended, and crockery and bottles shattered on the floor.

By the time the police managed to clear the demonstrators, more than £2000 of damage had been done. Two policemen had been injured by missiles, as had a Proctor, and six students were facing criminal charges.

Peter Household had been arrested early in the evening. He says: “I started out at the back, ended up at the front, and wasn’t sure how I got there. I nudged a policeman with my shoulder, and got done for obstruction.”

For throwing a mole fuse – a small smoke bomb used in pest control – Rod Caird faced a charge of wilful damage. Nick Emley was charged with assault on the police, after an incident at the front of the crush which he insists was accidental. “We were being pushed from behind,” he says. “My right shoulder went forward and my fist clattered into this copper’s face, which I hadn’t intended.”

In the immediate aftermath, few who had attended the protest had any idea of its significance or consequence. The next day’s Cambridge Evening News supplied the first suggestion that the assembly at the Garden House had constituted a riot – a term that would, before too long, gain legal substantiation. Early editions carried the simple headline “Riot in Cambridge”; later ones substituted “Extremists get blame for riot”, and mistakenly stated that Dr Elias Bredsdorff’s Greek Appeal Committee had backed the protest. Over the weekend, the story went national, even sparking an enraged leader column in John Junor’s Sunday Express.

As the dust settled, the rights and wrongs of the Garden House protest were played out in the pages of the Evening News. The mayor called for the culprits’ expulsion from the University, and for the Colleges to start enforcing gate hours again. When a Socialist Society bulletin hailed the protest as a success, rejecting charges that its members had gone too far, the News devoted its front page to the pamphlet.

On the letters page, an academic whose wife had hurt her foot in the crush wrote: “I am deeply ashamed to be a member of a University that has so cruel a minority amongst its members”, blaming a prominent member of the University Communist Party; he, in turn, sent in a riposte expressing surprise that “collaborators with fascism have the impudence to complain at all”. Peter Household wrote in to assert that “our anger outside the hotel was more justified than the complacency of the diners” but regretting that police had been hurt.

Meanwhile, the Proctors had been asked to identify to the police those they had recognised at the Garden House, and provided a list of more than 60 – soon whittled down to 15, many of whom were well-known activists. A pamphlet written by an anonymous, soi-disant “group of Left-wing students” entitled The Cambridge Greek Affair later alleged that most of these “could be called prominent members of the Socialist Society”.

On the basis of the information given to the police, 13 members of the University were eventually charged with unlawful assembly, an offence seldom invoked since World War II. The Proctors’ actions caused great unease throughout the University, in junior and senior combination rooms alike, and even within the proctorial ranks. Almost exactly a month after the protest, a group of dons invited several of the Proctors to a tea party to express their concerns.

Bob Rowthorn – the only senior member to be charged over the protest – takes a different view. “Some people were very unhappy about the role of the Proctors, but I think the University was reasonable to cooperate with the police,” he says. “I’ve never been of the school of

thought that if you take part in demonstrations, and shout at the police and throw things at them, you can then expect to be treated with kid gloves.”

Stephen Amiel abruptly discovered that he was of interest to the investigation while at the Gardenia kebab house. “Some people came to the restaurant to tell me that the police were raiding my room,” he says. “A crowd of plain-clothes policemen were going through it.

They confiscated my sugar and record-cleaning fluid to analyse them for drugs.

“It was ridiculous – they were on a fishing expedition. But this was the first time the police had raided a student room without asking permission of the College, and that caused a stir. The fellows of King’s were outraged. Edmund Leach, the Provost, sent me a bottle of brandy from his personal cellar, which I treasured for many years.”

Gottfried Ensslin recalls CID officers turning up at his rooms unannounced to question him, on the basis of information from the Proctors. Ostensibly, his links to the Left in West Germany made his selection likely: his sister, Gudrun, was on the run from German police, and would later gain notoriety as a leader of the Baader-Meinhof group. “Some Modern Languages dons did read German newspapers, so I think the connection was known,” he says.

Nevertheless, Ensslin suspects he was picked out on the more prosaic grounds of having cheeked a Proctor at the demonstration. He recalls: “This man had approached me and said, ‘Who are you?’ I said to him, ‘Who are you?’ because he was in plain clothes. He said, ‘I’m a Proctor, tell me your name and college.’ I said that I didn’t give my name to just anybody, and told him to come back in his gown.”

Bob Rowthorn believes that the police were fairly successful in pulling in those who had a hand in organising the protest. He says: “I think they identified people who played a central role, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they played a role in the illegality.

They had organised something legal, and then it had got out of hand.”

B

y the time the case came before Hertford Assizes, the number of defendants was down to 15. Four, including Rowthorn, had been cleared at the committal hearing in May. However, charges on those who remained had escalated. Unlawful assembly had been

upgraded to riotous assembly, Peter Household’s obstruction charge had become assault, and Rod Caird faced four new charges, including actual bodily harm.

The defendants comprised three groups: the six arrested at the demonstration; a further six, Amiel and Ensslin among them, who had been seen only shouting slogans; and three who were alleged to have been in the midst of the assembly, pushing forward. Four Proctors were subpoenaed by the prosecution; another decided voluntarily to appear as a witness for the defence.

On 24 June, the trial began before Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, a judge described by The Guardian as the severest on the criminal bench.

It had not escaped the defendants’ notice that his Sussex house was called ‘Truncheons’, and Barry Amiel – the father of Stephen, and solicitor to some of the group – had warned them that they could expect a difficult ride.

The students had decided on a majority decision (with Ensslin among the dissenters) to abstain from political grandstanding in court. The 15 cut their hair, dressed conservatively, and behaved in a respectful fashion throughout. All to little avail: they considered the judge to have been contemptuous and dismissive of their witnesses, including seven senior members of the University, and disingenuous in his claim that the case had nothing to do with politics, while allowing Socialist Society material to be produced as prosecution evidence.

“Melford Stevenson was unbelievably hostile throughout the trial,” says Caird. “But his hostility was expressed in ways that don’t surface in the transcript. He communicated most of his opinions to the jury with body language, tone and looks.”

On the penultimate day, bail was unexpectedly withdrawn for all the defendants. Stephen Amiel says: “I think it was clear by then that he wasn’t going to get convictions on those of us who hadn’t been arrested on the night. Purely out of spite, I think, he remanded us all in custody to teach us a lesson.”

Peter Household says: “I think that’s when it dawned on me that things were actually getting serious. I don’t think it had occurred that any of us were going to prison until that time.”

All those who had been arrested during the demonstration itself were found guilty on at least one charge. Every one of the ‘shouters’ was acquitted. Of the group seen pushing, one was cleared and two convicted.

The next day, the eight found guilty were handed down immediate terms of custody. Emley and one other, being under the age of 21, were sent to borstal. The others were sentenced to between 18 and nine months in prison, with Caird receiving the former and Household the latter. Two protestors who were foreign students, a South African and a Brazilian, were recommended for deportation.

For all Melford Stevenson’s stern reputation, the sentences came as a shock – both in Cambridge and nationally. The leader column in the next day’s Times was typical of broadsheet reaction, querying the need for such lengthy gaol terms: “An exemplary sentence should be no more severe than is necessary to set an example … While the judge was right to take a serious view of a deplorable affair, he has been very severe.”

Melford Stevenson’s comments on passing sentence provoked as much controversy as the prison terms themselves. He had told the court: “The sentences … would have been heavier had I not been satisfied that you have been exposed to the evil influence of some senior members of the University, one or two of whom I have seen as witnesses for the defence.”

The six academics who had gone in to the witness box wrote to The Times to disassociate themselves from the judge’s comments, as did the Junior Proctor who had appeared for the defence. Today, Nick Emley reserves a choice expletive for Melford Stevenson’s behaviour, adding: “That ridiculous man. The influence of senior members – it just didn’t exist. It was an invention.”

The Senior Proctor’s criticism, in his report to the Senate Council, was more measured. “This comment sprang from justifiable judicial irritation at a large amount of rather repetitive and inconclusive evidence,” he wrote. “I think he disbelieved [the dons’] evidence and CAM 61 25

thought that they had in some way encouraged the crowd to misbehave. I do not think that the evidence supports this assumption.”

Appeals were heard on 18 August, and ended any assumptions that the harsh sentences were an aberration, and wholly down to one particularly severe member of the bench.

Only one conviction was overturned – that of the South African student found with a mole fuse in his pocket – and the other deportation recommendation was quashed.

If the newspapers’ letters pages are an accurate gauge of public opinion, then many approved of the punishments meted out to the protestors. But there was widespread criticism of Melford Stevenson’s handling of the trial, with the Law Guardian branding it “just not good enough”. There was also concern at the dusting off of the riotous and unlawful assembly laws.

As arguments continued on the outside, the eight began their sentences. Wormwood Scrubs was the initial destination, where Peter Household found himself sharing a cell with Rod Caird and the South African; he was encouraged to read Marx, Engels and Lenin.

He says: “I knew there were people on the outside laughing at me. They were saying, that stupid Peter, he didn’t know why he was there that night. I had two choices: I could either say ‘Yes, this was a terrible accident’ or I could come out with a reason as to why I was there.

So although I had no strong political views when I went in, by the time I came out I was a hardened lefty – and remained so for the rest of my life.”

On completing his degree, Household began an association with the trade union movement that would last most of his working life. “Other than for the Garden House protest, I would probably have had a brief dalliance with Leftwing politics and then forgotten all about it, as most people in those days did,” he says.

After Wormwood Scrubs, Rod Caird was sent to Coldingley, then a pioneering training prison in Surrey. His writings about the penal system would steer him into a career in print journalism and television, and form the basis of a book, A Good and Useful Life, published in 1974. But he admits: “There was a bit of bravado involved. In retrospect, it was an incredibly big life change. It had a huge impact on my parents, which I never talked through properly with them – something I enormously regret.”

Facing at least six months at borstal, Nick Emley first harboured fantasies of escaping. (“I thought, I’ll get off to France or Germany to continue the revolution there.”) Before long, however, he slotted into the routine. “I have to say, I didn’t find it such a horrendous thing,” he says. “It wasn’t that different from my prep school, which I went to aged eight.”

It proved a pivotal experience. “Afterwards, I taught for five years in a big state school in Peckham, and I was undoubtedly a much better teacher for having spent seven months in borstal. I was aware of the alienation, disaffection and hopelessness that a lot of those kids had.”

In Cambridge, the relationship between city and University had sunk to a nadir, and the traditional town–gown amnesty of Rag Week was

badly disrupted. Students rattling cans from house to house found doors slammed in their faces. The firm supplying the floats for the Rag parade pulled out, stating that “until students learn to behave themselves, we will maintain this course of action”.

Within the University, the Garden House affair had far-reaching effects. Reform of the proctorial system became a matter of urgency, and working papers suggested that the Proctors be phased out altogether. In the event, it was decided that they should no longer attend demonstrations off University property. But the most significant consequence of the protest was as a catalyst in the crystallisation of the nascent Student Representative Council into Cambridge Students’ Union.

T

‘Forty years on, there’s resentment at the way we behaved, and I assume at our political attitudes, which I regard as reasonable and decent.’

he place of the Garden House riot in the wider history of British student protest remains a matter for debate – particularly on the question of whether the sentences were responsible for quelling further violent demonstration. Melford Stevenson continued to think so, up to his death in 1987. In retirement, he told a reporter that the Garden House protest was “undoubtedly a case for deterrent sentences, and that is what I passed. The significant thing is that since then, no major incident of such student violence has happened.”

An opposing view was taken by Owen Chadwick, Vice-Chancellor at the time of the events. “That is wrong,” he told the Cambridge Evening News in 1980. “It stopped because people in the University themselves did not want it ever to happen again. They realised they had gone too far.”

Of those approached for this article, none admits to any regret over their involvement in the demonstration. Stephen Amiel says: “I don’t know what the people who went to prison would say, but those of us who didn’t had no regrets. The fact that it created so much negative publicity for the Greek regime was fantastic.”

Rod Caird, who would end up serving 12 months, broadly agrees; but believes that the deterrent effect on protest should not be underestimated. “We certainly publicised the protest movement about the dictatorship in Greece very effectively. But it brought people up with a start to realise that if they were going to get involved in demonstrations, it could have

a really bad outcome.”

Nick Emley likewise professes “no regret at all about what happened” and is dismayed at the responses sent to the Cambridge News after he was recently interviewed about the events. “Forty years on, there’s resentment at the way we behaved, and I assume at our political attitudes, which I regard as reasonable and decent – hardly what you’d think of as hardline Marxist stuff.”

The most pragmatic view of the Garden House affair is taken

by Bob Rowthorn – now Emeritus Professor of Economics, and a life fellow of King’s College. “The truth of the matter was that it was a rather small event that got out of hand,” he says. “Well-organised demonstrations typically don’t have clashes or violence.

“So if someone said, ‘If you had planned to do something like that, could you justify it?’, I’d say no. But it wasn’t planned as a riot.

The trouble is, demonstrations do get out of hand.”

CAM 61 27

28 CAM 61

L

AWRENCE SHERMAN thinks punishment is overrated. It doesn’t reduce crime. It isn’t what victims want. And, most importantly, we simply can’t afford it. Indeed, as far as the Wolfson Professor of Criminology is concerned, when it comes to justice, and particularly prisons, the British and US justice systems, and the citizens they serve, need to wise up. Effective justice, Sherman says, should be about reducing harm, not meting out punishment.

To this end, Sherman is developing a general theory of crime, harm and criminal justice – a theory of how to use the criminal justice system to reduce total harm in society. Employing a ‘crime–harm index’ (CHI), the theory seeks to focus justice not on ‘how to punish criminals’ but on producing less harm to society at large. In practice, that means sending to prison only those most likely to cause greatest harm, rather than building more prisons and incarcerating all those convicted of a crime.

It is a radical proposition – but one which he says the current economic climate might just make acceptable. “To have the government say that we want the police to put fewer people into prosecution is a dramatic change,” he says. “But in an era of deficit cuts, what could be more relevant? You can say with Kant that it is our duty to punish everybody for everything, but in reality we can’t afford it, at least not with prison. People understand that you can’t spend unlimited amounts on the NHS, but when it comes to justice we’re in a state of denial.”

Listening to Sherman hold forth from behind a desk entirely obscured by paper and books, his every answer peppered with statistics and evidence, the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking this a theory for academic debate only, created by someone far removed from the demands of daily policing. The truth could not be more surprising.

As an experimental criminologist, Sherman spends his time working with police forces to conduct experiments on issues as diverse as domestic violence, gun reduction, police corruption, drug networks and restorative justice. Currently working with the Greater Manchester Police, he has conducted research with police agencies around the world and, though based in the US for most of his career, has been working with UK police forces since 1999.

So when Sherman says that locking up fewer people is cost-effective and socially effective, politicians tend to listen. After all, he has form. His work on hot spots (he discovered that over half of all reported crime and disorder in major cities occurs at just 3% of addresses) has changed policing from New York to Manchester.

But that doesn’t make it an easy sell. Sherman’s general theory might sound like an appeal to the left, but in fact, he is criticised by social justice reformers as much as he is by ‘prison works’ right-wingers. In part, this is due to the way in which ‘harm’ is calculated.

Take murder, for example. Sherman’s recent research, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, suggests that the best predictor of

WHAT PRICE JUSTICE? Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Lawrence Sherman, says it is time to re-evaluate the cost, and the purpose, of prison.

Words Leigh Brauman Photographs David Yeo CAM 61 29

‘Social justice reformers don’t like this approach because they are ideologydriven, and one of their ideologies is that numbers are bad. But that’s not my problem.’

CV 1970 BA in Political Science, Denison University 1970-72 New York City Mayor’s Office and Police Department 1973 Diploma in Criminology, Cambridge 1976 PhD in Sociology, Yale University 1984 ‘First Randomized Experiment with Arrests’, published in American Sociological Review 1999 Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, University of Pennsylvania 2000 Director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania 2007 Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Cambridge

whether someone will commit a second murder after release from prison is the age of the offender, followed by how young the offender was when first convicted of a violent crime.

“Someone who is convicted of violent robbery or rape at 12 has a lifetime risk of killing somebody that is far in excess of somebody who is not charged with a serious crime until 18 or 19,” Sherman explains.

“We are using 49 variables – but the thing to remember is that this isn’t a checklist. You need very large datasets and the calculation has to be done by an advanced computer model, like the kind used in advanced weather forecasting, so that you can go through tens of thousands of cases to look at all the possible combinations and variables.”

In other words, if the model suggests that the risk of re-offending is high, the offender should be given the highest possible sentence – in some cases life without parole. Conversely, if the risk is low, the harm they are likely to cause in the future is probably less than the cost of locking them up.

Sherman is entirely unrepentant about putting statistics before instinct, pointing out that in his model fewer people overall end up behind bars.

“At the moment we use statutory requirements and sentencing guidelines – but these are not systematic assessments. Judges have no tools, framework or guidance on how they make a decision on dangerousness and yet it is an inherently statistical decision about the forecasting of rare events,” he says. “Social justice reformers don’t like this approach because they are ideology-driven, and one of their ideologies is that numbers are bad. But that’s not my problem.

My problem is accepting the world as it is and trying to figure out how to make it better – through science.”

S

herman wasn’t always a criminal justice insider.

“When I was growing up my daily experience was dominated by the civil rights movement. My parents were part of the March on Washington; I helped to organise black voters in Chicago,” he says. “In college I read a lot about the police and thought my job was to get them under control by political force – it was very much a case of us against them and the police were the enemy.”

So what changed? After racing through a four-year undergraduate degree in just two years, Sherman came up in front of the Vietnam draft board and – true to his principles – turned conscientious objector. Rather than spend a few years in pointless ‘alternative service’ Sherman lobbied to be allowed to do a research fellowship with the New York Police Department. “I saw myself as one of these white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant reformers who was against the bad practices of urban government,” he says, “but the more I learned about the police the more complicated I realised it all was.

“After two years studying police innovations and interventions in New York City, I began to realise how rare it was for people in government to get the kind of profit-and-loss statements that are standard in the business community,” he says. “It was a huge gap – if you better understood the consequences of what you were

doing you could change the world.”

But, having stressed the importance of putting research and evidence before ideology, does he consider himself to be ideology free? “I wouldn’t say I am free of ideology. I have bedrock principles about things you should never do, like torture, like the death penalty,” he says.

“And I would say it’s fine to have a motivating set of values for why you do the work you do.

But ultimately you have to check them at the door when you come into your office.”

That office, at the Institute of Criminology on the Sidgwick site, is something of a return for Sherman, who did a year’s study at Cambridge (a Diploma in Criminology) in 1973. Now a fellow at Darwin, Sherman says that he has enjoyed returning to a college environment.

“Darwin is very science-focused and we benefit from fantastic multidisciplinary discussions,” he says.

“On Friday night I dined with one of the best young neuroscientists in the University, who is interested in studying empathy. We’ve been studying empathy in order to do experiments in restorative justice; he’s studying it in relation to the development of autism – now we need to figure out how we can put those two things together.”

Indeed, Sherman says Cambridge is an ideal place to study crime, despite it not being a heaving metropolis – not least because of the history of the Wolfson chair’s creation.

“The chair I hold was instigated in 1959 by then Home Secretary Rab Butler to help government find more effective policies for dealing with crime. I take that obligation very seriously, and I want to do it justice, not just ‘with the numbers’ but with the full weight of the scientific method, the logic of causal inference and especially experimentation,” he says.

And true to his scientific principles, Sherman advances his theory of harm not as an opinion but as a thesis that will be tested in 10 UK police forces. Built around what happens when a person is first arrested, Sherman’s study will randomly assign people to one of two groups.

The first group will be processed in the normal way – or, as Sherman puts it “the usual full prosecution of ‘everyone for everything’ strategy that New Labour introduced. Maximum criminalisation of the population.”

However, the second group will be processed using an actuarial calculation of risk, based on a desktop tool being developed by the University’s Statslab. “Each defendant will be given a red, yellow or green light, with the lowest risk people released under a variety of supervision programmes,” he says. “So in four years we’ll know if the general theory of harm succeeds.”

It’s not hard to hear the excitement in Sherman’s words. It really is the experimental nature of criminology – the possibility of reaching an empirical truth – that drives the man, as he freely admits.

“I am the first experimental criminologist to hold this chair and I feel quite obliged to push the experimental method as far as possible in answering key questions about the consequences of different crime prevention methods and policies.”

CAM 61 31

32 CAM 61

James Balog/Getty Images

Humanity.

Homo sapiens.

Mortals.

Humans like to believe they’re special. But just how special are we really?

H

umanity. Homo sapiens. Mortals. More than 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, society continues to turn to biology to separate man from beast because humans like to believe they’re special. But just how special are we really?

When human DNA was sequenced around a decade ago, many thought it would finally close the question of what makes us human: our uniqueness would be written in four-letter code. At the time, no one knew how many genes humans had, with some scientists estimating the number to be upward of 150,000 genes, reasoning such a complex species would need more genes than simpler organisms.

As the data was published, it quickly became clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Humans have only around 20,000 genes that code for proteins; C. elegans, a species of roundworm, has 18,500 protein-coding genes. Furthermore, these genes aren’t significantly different from those of man’s closest animal relatives. Today, it’s a pop science truism that around 98% of human DNA is shared with chimps.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS A MAN? Words Vivienne Raper CAM 61 33

There were other humbling surprises too. Humans may delight in completely eradicating smallpox – one of the deadliest viruses known to man. But in fact, around 8–9% of our DNA is made up of bits of fossilised viruses, copied into our ancestors’ genetic code. A further 34% is made up of other virus-like entities. And this viral DNA isn’t genetic garbage either. It’s fundamental to some of mankind’s most profound experiences: childbirth and chocolate among others.

As Dr Jonathan Stoye (Magdalene 1970), head of the virology division at the National Institute for Medical Research, explains, there’s clear-cut evidence that fossil viruses called endogenous retroviruses are crucial to pregnancy – and to taste. “I think the most remarkable finding about the role of these endogenous retroviruses is in the formation of the placenta,” he says. “If you think about mother–child relationships, there’s this physical link between the two.

We don’t come from eggs; we’re not marsupials; we have a placenta.

I’m not saying we wouldn’t have a placenta if it wasn’t for these viruses being co-opted, but it would have been very different.”

Less certain, but still an interesting possibility, according to Stoye, is that the human sweet tooth is owed to ancient viruses. They may have allowed an enzyme called amylase to work in saliva and therefore, affect taste. “So the importance of starch-rich food to the human diet and culture may have been affected by the ability of the human salivary amylase to digest starch,” Stoye says. However, although endogenous retroviruses explain some important facts about people, they aren’t what make us uniquely human. “Most of the [viral] elements present in the human genome were inserted a long time ago and before the split from chimpanzee,” he says.

S

o if DNA is less a blueprint for building a human and more a bestselling book for life shared by many species, where does it leave the human quest for uniqueness? What is responsible for the profound differences between viruses, chimps, roundworms and humans?

Science is now beginning to understand that DNA may be just the musical notes in nature’s symphony – and it is epigenetics that contains the genetic forte and piano that turn notes into a finished performance.

In part this is because although the genome is fixed at conception, the epigenome changes with our life experience – and some of these changes can be passed on to our children.

“Identical twins come from the same egg; they’re genetically identical. But the older they get, the more different they become because of the epigenetic processes that are occurring,” says Professor Barry Keverne from the Department of Zoology.

So what is it? Epigenetics describes the biochemical processes that switch genes on and off, causing enduring changes in an organism’s appearance and behaviour. These alterations – epigenetic marks – aren’t written into the genetic code but are picked up as the foetus develops in the womb and then subsequently, as the child matures to adulthood.

“Most of our brain develops post-natally. It develops for 21 years.

And it’s doing its development in a social environment,” Keverne says.

“If you look at mothers and infants – how much attention does a mother give an infant to get it to sit up, to stand, to walk, and how many months does it take to happen? It’s a huge environmental impact that puts an epigenetic mark on the genes in the cells developing at that time. And once you’ve learned to walk you don’t forget it. It’s not a memory in the way we would normally understand it.”

This effect can be seen when examining the impact of modern society on reproduction. “Puberty – the age of reproduction – is getting earlier. But the age of reason isn’t getting earlier,” Keverne says.

“Girls come into puberty when they’ve got enough fat reserves to take them through pregnancy and lactation. Today, they have those fat reserves available at 9, 10 and 11 and so come into puberty then.

But the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that determines future planning and organisation and regulates emotions, isn’t in place.

Brain development that was fixed to coincide with puberty aged about 17 doesn’t any longer.”

34 CAM 61

If Keverne is proved right, humanity will have unprecedented control over our biological future. After all, there’s the potential for some epigenetic marks to pass from parent to child. Wolf Reik, Cambridge’s first Professor of Epigenetics, and his team recently found around 7% of one type of epigenetic mark – DNA methylation – is passed between generations.

Humans may be the first species with sufficient control over our children’s environment to be able to, perhaps, choose how the epigenome develops. In the 1990s, David Barker, a professor of epidemiology from the University of Southampton published a now widely accepted theory that, if a mother is malnourished during pregnancy, her offspring’s health can be affected.

Using data from the Dutch famine at the end of World War II, he found that children whose mothers experienced their third trimester of pregnancy during the famine had higher rates of heart disease during adulthood. Barker’s argument was they were born ‘expecting’ an impoverished environment.

“In a number of species, including humans, it may be the case that early environmental experience – and early means pre-natal – will strongly influence adult health, and this in turn can have reproductive consequences into the next generation,” says Robert Foley, Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution.

A flurry of recent studies appears to agree. Among them is a US study showing that grandmother rats fed a diet containing 43% fat increased the risk of their grandchildren developing breast cancer.

Nevertheless, Wolf Reik stresses that a great deal is still unknown about epigenetic inheritance between parents and children. But, he says, “I think we’re getting the first glimpses of the mechanisms so this is an exciting area – there is no doubt.”

Epigenetics may be beginning to explain human uniqueness, but Tim Lewens from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science says what’s really different about humans is that we have a large body of inherited culture, as well.

“Humans are a species in which large amounts of inheritance are driven by culture. Much of what we pass on to our offspring is not genetic, it’s linguistic, it’s scientific and we do this partly because we’re an extraordinarily collaborative species,” he says “So it’s not just that I tell my kids some useful things; it’s that communities in the species as a whole construct legal institutions, libraries, schools, hospitals and things like that.”

Humans create complex social institutions, in part, because of high intelligence and this is one of the factors Professor Robert Foley mentions as important in explaining the difference between humans and other species.

“To my mind, underlying any answer is that we have a unique cognitive capacity, but this is dependent upon a unique pattern of growth and development. We grow rather slowly and have a long period of offspring dependence. This, in turn, requires a unique pattern of ecology, which depends on a high level of nutritional input and, lying behind that, are anatomical things to do with bipedalism and language.”

B

ut is this intelligence really unique? Scientists studying animal intelligence and behaviour are increasingly eroding the boundaries between us and other species, as Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition explains. “Many of the things that were thought to be uniquely human are, but in degree, not in kind,” she says. “And because some of the most convincing evidence comes, not from our closest relatives – the chimpanzees and bonobos – but from members of the crow family, this suggests these abilities have evolved independently and more than once.”

Among Clayton’s triumphs is demonstrating that jays have a theory of mind – the ability to understand the world from another jay’s point of view. Jays hide (cache) food and, in 2001, Clayton and her team showed jays would re-hide food if another jay had seen them hide it – something they never did when they had cached in private.

Not only did the birds know exactly which jay had seen them cache;

Department of Experimental Psychology

‘In 2001, Clayton and her team demonstrated that jays re-cache food if they know another jay has seen them hide it, clearly indicating that these birds have a theory of mind – the ability to see the world from another’s point of view.’

jays that re-hid food were birds that had themselves been thieves in the past.“In other words, it takes a thief to know one,” she says.

“That’s probably the most convincing evidence of a theory of mind in an animal because it shows the ability to project social experiences, to put oneself into another’s shoes, so to speak.”

So what things can humans do that animals definitely can’t?

“The obvious ways humans differ are language and culture. No other animal reads and writes,” Clayton says. “So I can show that the birds can remember what happened where and how long ago. But does that mean, in thinking about that event, the bird reminisces and reexperiences it? Well, of course, I’ve got no idea because, in the absence of language, how would you do standard tests to ask them about their experiences?”

Although species like apes and gorillas produce rhythmic streams of sound, only in humans is this used in a complex, abstract language

system, says Usha Goswami, Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. Goswami studies how children learn language to understand what goes wrong in dyslexia.

“You don’t have in any other species the combinatorial ability humans have where you have a section of sound-like syllables, for example, ‘an-i-mal’ or ‘cat’ that shares no sensory features with a cat or with animals,” she says. “You can also have reference for things that aren’t in the here and now, and you can have abstract concepts like truth and beauty, the past and the future and other possible worlds – something animals don’t necessarily seem to do.”

Goswami’s research suggests some other reasons why human children are fundamentally different from animals. “My view would be that animals have a theory of mind that’s limited to food,” she says. “A baby will have a richer theory of mind because of all our communicative social tuning – there’s a shared social element of human communication. For example, if a baby is learning through copying someone else’s actions, and the person starts copying back, a baby will notice that.

“Animals can do bits of the things babies can do, but no one species does enough of them to come anywhere close,” Goswami says. Or, as Lewens puts it: “Nobody thinks you can play chess with a crow and stand a decent chance of losing.” But what about the non-biological world? Although homo sapiens is the only species existing at the moment that can be described as ‘human’ there’s no guarantee that this will be true forever. Two staples of science fiction are intelligent robots and intelligent aliens. If and when we meet these creatures, should we treat them like humans or not?

Sean Holden, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, says the robots already walk among us: “You have AI systems controlling automatic gearboxes in cars, scheduling tens of thousands of engineers to visit people’s homes, you have computers that can infer your emotional state by looking in your face and so on. I can see no reason to say there are things humans can do that computers can’t.” But might there be thinking machines in the future and will they challenge how we think about ourselves?

“If we know anything about human history, it’s incredibly dangerous to speculate on what science might be doing in 50 years time, never mind 500,” Holden says. “But the field seems to be progressing quite nicely and I think it will most likely seep into people’s consciousness over a period of time so it won’t seem unusual.

“Put yourself back 20 years and imagine someone told you you’d have a tiny little phone in your pocket, which would allow you to message anyone in the world, look up pretty much any information you wanted, and could recognise your voice. You’d have thought they were having a laugh.”

As for alien life, “My own prediction is it will be eerily like our own,” says Professor Simon Conway Morris from the Department of Earth Sciences, who is currently writing a book about evolutionary convergence – the idea that there are only so many evolutionary solutions to the problems organisms face.

If evolution, once started, has only a few destinations, and if there are billions of planets suitable for life, then, Conway Morris argues, the galaxy should be “humming with life”. There is nothing in the fossil record to suggest Earth has had visitors in the past and we haven’t had any UFOs on the White House lawn. Yet there are planetary systems four billion years older than ours, giving plenty of time for intelligent life to blast into space. It’s a bit of a paradox.

“For some completely inexplicable reason, we don’t seem to have had any visitors at all,” Conway Morris says. “I think we are completely alone.” Perhaps humanity will remain more uncommon than we ever imagined.

CAM 61 35

W

hat should we be teaching business people in the 21st century? Joelle du Lac, Cambridge Judge Business School’s Director of External Affairs, believes the future has to be about managing greater complexity – whether that complexity comes in the form of access to huge amounts of information, a banking catastrophe or an intricate legal framework.

“There has to be a question about the abilities of business schools to face up to the more complex concepts and systems that people in business have to deal with,” she says. “At the same time, business schools are really just incubators for cultivating business talent – it’s not so much what is taught but the learning environment they can provide.

Clearly, a multidisciplinary, diverse approach is critical to both these issues.”

Nowhere is the inter-disciplinary approach more apparent than in the Cambridge MBA. Students customise their degree with a wide choice of electives, bringing them into contact with a cross-section of Cambridge talent and local and global companies. Colin Lizeri, Grosvenor Professor of Real Estate Finance, explains: “This year, I contributed a case study looking at the dynamics of the City of London office market to the Real Estate Finance elective.”

With the ethics of the corporate world under heightened scrutiny, the Philosophy in Business elective has flourished, and is taught

by Hallvard Lillehammer and Alex Oliver of the Philosophy Faculty.

“I don’t think there could have been a better time for us to start this course,” says Dr Lillehammer. “We cover a range of areas that connect work to traditional philosophy: issues that come up in the business world, which we hope that students will have thought about in their own lives before they started the MBA.” The elective tackles corporate social responsibility and ethics, trust, truthfulness

AN EDUCATION INCOMPLEXITY At Cambridge Judge Business School, scientists and engineers, philosophers and politicians are helping to shape business education.

Words William Ham Bevan Photographs Charlie Troman

36 CAM 61

Above Joelle du Lac Right Dr Hallvard Lillehammer Far right Professor Colin Lizeri

© Neil Grant, Alamy

and the generation of demand. All are taught using a ‘bottom-up’ approach, beginning with a practical problem pertinent to business, and identifying the philosophical tools that may be used to address it.

Dr Lillehammer says: “On truth, for example, we might identify a number of conceptions of truthfulness: what their implications are, and how they would apply in certain business scenarios. The students often bring us wonderful anecdotes from their own experience.”

The Services Innovation course, run jointly by faculty from Cambridge and executives from IBM, offers an even more hands-on experience, as vice-president Kevin Bishop (Emmanuel 1981) explains. “As part of the course, we put together a kind of ‘Dragons’ Den’ initiative, where we invite the students to present their ideas for improvements to a service that doesn’t work for them.

I understand that with one of the ideas that came out of the course, the students are following it up and setting up a company to take it into practice.”

This interdisciplinary ethos is a guiding principle for the school – and, according to du Lac, essential if the School is to compete on the international stage. “The real competition for us is coming from new schools in the East and big, established schools in the West. We rank ourselves among the leading business schools in the world, but it’s very, very tough,” she says. “One of the issues we have is scale – we’re not as large as most of our competitors. And now three of the top business schools in China are starting to aggressively recruit in the US.” Collaboration does not take place just in formal tuition and research: connections can be made via more informal channels.

Among the current students on the Executive MBA programme is Michael Salama, Senior Tax Counsel and Vice President, Tax

Could education have a role in preventing the next major financial crisis? At Cambridge Judge Business School, bankers with around four years’ experience compete for places on the Cambridge Master of Finance, a one-year degree programme.

The course combines core financial theory with courses such as fixed income analysis, derivatives, mergers and acquisitions, and hedge funds. Students also examine the role of regulation and the broader role of finance outside the City. But perhaps most importantly, the City Speakers seminar series enables students to examine issues as they happen, and in the company of industry insiders.

However, for students following the Management Studies Tripos, the introduction to the realities of the business world begins before they finish their undergraduate studies.

Open to third and fourth year undergraduates, as well as providing a solid grounding in the fundamentals of management, the course enables students to develop an understanding of the responsibilities of managers in economic, social, and environmental contexts.

Administration, at the Walt Disney Company.

“The interdisciplinary benefits I’ve enjoyed while studying at Cambridge arise naturally from the structure of the EMBA programme,” he says. He cites a management science assignment, which his group were asked to tailor to their own industry experiences.

“That assignment gave me the opportunity to model a prime-time television network’s show selection as a portfolio. I examined various show line-up combinations, looking at the implications for risk and management.

The same weekend Lord Eatwell hosted a dinner for us at Queens’. An impromptu conversation about regional content and trends in funding for foreign film projects tied a lot of the study together and provided practical and local insight.”

T

he School’s Executive Education programme – short courses for senior managers – draws on the experience of the University’s most prominent figures.

On recent programmes, Sir Richard Dearlove, ex-chief of MI6 and Master of Pembroke, has spoken about geopolitics and business; former Cabinet Secretary Lord Wilson of Dinton, Master of Emmanuel, lectured on ‘Coping with the unforeseen: strategies for recovery’.

Building upon this, the new Advanced Leadership Programme accepts its first intake this term. The concentrated three-week programme, aimed at board-level senior managers, has enlisted the help of local enterprises, the University boat crew and the Britten Sinfonia. “Nevertheless, these programmes are very focused,” says Joelle du Lac. “We took the angle very early on that these were not luxury executive holidays: we wanted them to be relevant and rigorous.”

With competition from institutions in India and East Asia set to intensify over coming years, Joelle du Lac believes that the School’s integration with a world-class research university will increasingly be seen as a factor to differentiate it from its rivals.

She says: “A lot of business schools are very separate from their universities and in the past it was even seen as an advantage to be a stand-alone institution. But Cambridge academic excellence, across a range of disciplines, and applied to real business problems, is a very powerful proposition.

“I don’t know of any other major university engaged quite so intimately with its business school, to the extent that Cambridge is. It is the way of the future.”

To find out more about the work of Cambridge Judge Business School visit www.jbs.cam.ac.uk CAM 61 37

Review Our contributors

Andrew Pontzen is a research fellow at Emmanuel College and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.

Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College.

His first book, Mountains of the Mind, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Richard Wigmore is a distinguished musicologist, specialising in the Viennese Classical period and Lieder.

He writes regularly for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and the Daily Telegraph and is the author of The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn and Schubert: The Complete Song Texts.

38 CAM 61

University Matters Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University

39

Debate Cosmology’s not broken, argue Andrew Pontzen and Hiranya Peiris, so why try to fix it?

40

Books Robert Macfarlane discusses The Fight for Everest

by Lieutenant Colonel EF Norton

43

Music Richard Egarr

45

Sport Cambridge University Rugby Union Football Club

47

Prize crossword Title by Schadenfreude

48

UniversityMatters Meeting the challenges of a new decade Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz Vice-Chancellor of the University Patrick Morgan

B

y the time you read this I will have been installed as the 345th Vice-Chancellor.

I will have delivered my first annual address to the Regent House. I will have started to get my feet under the table. But, this is simply a beginning; there will be much to learn about Cambridge, not least from you, our remarkable community of alumni and alumnae.

I am acutely aware that I have inherited the mantle of an outstanding predecessor, Professor Dame Alison Richard, whose boundless energy and great leadership have hugely enhanced and enriched the University – and ensured that our mission ‘to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence’ continues to be fulfilled.

The University is in robust good health at a time when many great challenges loom: cuts in public spending; controversies about how much, and indeed how, students and their families should contribute to the costs of their education; and growing international competition in both education and research – to name just three.

In looking forward we will have to build on our strengths: our staff and students, the unique power of collegiate Cambridge and our international reputation. Nothing can be taken for granted. We need the resolution to adapt and evolve to meet rapidly changing conditions.

But what of the challenges? Education is the bedrock of the University and Colleges.

We must refuse to compromise on maintaining our renowned quality of educational provision.

This means maintaining excellence with equity, needs-blind opportunity, and support for our staff so that teaching is properly recognised and valued. This will be a problem if national solutions fail to recognise the true cost of providing our outstanding education.

Postgraduate education is also indispensable. Taught courses should be developed where appropriate. However, recruiting research students, across all disciplines, needs to remain at the heart of our postgraduate mission. Since postgraduate recruitment is global, the provision of infrastructure for all disciplines, financial support through globally competitive

‘The hard-won international reputation of our University is threatened by both international and domestic competitors.

Standing still is not an option.’

scholarships and world-class supervisory staff is vital.

Research excellence is central to the University too. Our international reputation enables recruitment and retention of the best staff and students and creates the virtuous circle on which Cambridge’s sustained contribution to society and knowledge is built.

Our staff must have the freedom to develop their individual interests, which is the essence of any world-beating research university.

However, we also need to accommodate largescale thematic research increasingly favoured by national and international funders. I hope

that my perspectives, on both sides of the fence, first as a research scientist and then as chief executive of a major research council, will help in finding Cambridge solutions to these bottom-up vs top-down tensions.

The hard-won international reputation of our University is threatened by both international and domestic competitors.

Standing still is not an option. International competitors have greater independent resources, which we must counter with philanthropic fundraising and influencing our national funders to support the importance of selectivity. I have had the opportunity to observe at first hand developments in China and North America. On a recent visit to India, with the Prime Minister’s delegation, I saw how government, the private sector and the academic community are working hand-inhand to invest in the future of universities.

Cambridge already has strong international academic and private sector partnerships, and on these we must build.

We cannot secure our future without philanthropic support. Alison Richard made it clear that the 800th Anniversary Campaign has to continue. I agree wholeheartedly. Generous benefactions allow us to take risks; to invest for the long term in infrastructure, staff and students; to maintain the supervision system; and to provide exemplary levels of financial support for students who need it.

As Vice-Chancellor, I will lead on identifying the internal opportunities for dealing with the many challenges we face. I will also focus on strengthening our external relations, in the UK and globally. We need to be proactive in communicating our values, our contribution and our priorities. We need to forge and then build on powerful new strategic collaborations internationally, not only with other academic institutions, but also with our alumni, philanthropists, funders, industry and policy makers. Cambridge needs broad-based support and diverse resources if we are to be the natural first choice for exceptional staff and students from around the world.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz is the Vice-Chancellor of the University. A physician and immunologist, he comes to Cambridge from the Medical Research Council, where he was Chief Executive.

CAM 61 39

Debate: Cosmology’s not broken so why try to fix it?

Words Andrew Pontzen and Hiranya Peiris Illustration Justin Metz

L

ook up at the night sky and you will see just one of a vast number of possible universes that might have existed. That’s a consequence of quantum mechanics, which was responsible for generating the initial ripples from which galaxies and stars later formed. Quantum mechanics describes reality in terms of probabilities rather than specifics.

This makes uncertainty an intrinsic ingredient in the standard model of cosmology – our best explanation of the origin and evolution of the universe.

For that reason, statistics is hugely important in cosmology. The standard model predicts the average properties of all possible universes, not the specific properties of our universe. If we see a discrepancy between our model and the real universe, this may be nothing more than a probabilistic fluke.

Over the past decade, cosmologists have measured in increasing detail the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) – the afterglow of the big bang. Its properties not only tell us about the history of the universe, but also give clues about physics at immensely high energies which experiments on Earth cannot conceivably test. So it is crucial that we interpret it correctly.

Vast numbers of scientists have pored over every detail of the CMB measurements. Some have found unexpected anomalies – the cold spot for instance, which has a much lower temperature than average, or the so-called axis of evil, which is an alignment of large-scale hot and cold patches.

According to the standard model, the chance of seeing such patterns is tiny. For example, the ‘correlation function anomaly’, which is related to the axis of evil, has odds of just 0.05%. With tiny probabilities like this floating about, some cosmologists have concluded that the standard model must be wrong and that all its predictions about the universe should be called into question.

Accepting this dramatic assessment would mean giving up the vital assumption of statistical isotropy – that the universe should, on large scales, appear the same in every direction.

In the face of such a radical revision of cherished principles, we need to be sure we are 40 CAM 61

The Bayesian method is named after the clergyman and logician Thomas Bayes (c. 1702–1761). Bayes investigated how one should infer theoretical probabilities from a series of experimental results; however, his reasoning was restricted to a fairly small class of situations. It was the mathematician PierreSimon Laplace (1749–1827) who wrote Bayes’s theorem in a version akin to the modern formulation. Few scientists adopted the BayesLaplace approach until the twentieth century; its revival was enormously aided by the remarkable polymath astronomer-geologist-mathematician Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989, fellow of St John’s).

The consequences of Bayes’s theorem are farreaching; it shows, for instance, that an experiment cannot prove or disprove a scientific theory, but only change the evidence for that theory relative to others. While this seems like common sense, it contradicts the notion that science is an objective process in which theories are on an even footing until disproved by experiment. The latter idea, popularised by the philosopher Karl Popper, has weaknesses which cosmology particularly highlights: the ‘experiment’ of the Big Bang can’t be repeated.

asking the right question of the data. All we’ve calculated so far is the chance of seeing the anomalies under our standard assumptions.

The question that needs to be asked is the opposite one – what is the chance of the standard assumptions being correct, given that these anomalies exist?

Asking the first question – what is the probability of seeing what we see? – is called the frequentist approach, and it can bamboozle. Imagine, for instance, tossing a coin five times and getting five heads.

The frequentist would ask: what is the probability of this happening with a normal, unweighted coin? The answer is about 3%, which makes it seem as if the coin must be biased.

But now ask the revised question: how likely is it that the coin is unweighted? Imagine yourself doing the experiment with a coin from your pocket and getting five heads.

What would be your reaction? Most likely you would reject the idea that the coin is weighted.

Intuitively, you know that most coins are not.

Chances are what you saw was just a fluke.

This kind of feeling is not unjustified.

You are using your prior knowledge of the world to inform your rational inferences.

And this highlights our unease with frequentist statistics: they just don’t seem flexible enough to tell us about the real world.

Ruling out hypotheses on the basis of a frequentist interpretation of results can lead to catastrophically wrong conclusions. Suppose, for instance, that aliens are collecting samples of Earth life for study. Remarkably, the first organism they beam up happens to be an airline pilot. The aliens know that only about 1 in 2000 of the human population are pilots.

Adopting frequentist reasoning, they would conclude that their subject cannot be human.

Luckily there is an alternative approach which eradicates the problem: Bayesian statistics. This takes into account both information from the experiment and, crucially, any relevant real-world information. If the aliens had applied Bayes’s theorem, they would have reached the correct answer: there is a 100% probability that the organism is human, because no other Earth creatures are capable of piloting planes. That piece of information is vital, but is totally ignored by the frequentist analysis.

In a recent paper, we have argued that ruling out the entire cosmological model on the basis of a 0.05% probability is similarly ill-advised.

In cosmology and elsewhere, Bayes tells us it is justifiable to be conservative in the face of statistical anomalies. That is not to say we are desperate to preserve the status quo. But, after decades of patient data-gathering, the standard model has an enormous base of support.

Bayesian statistics shows us that the anomalies in the data are insufficient on their own to motivate drastic revision. In the absence of a plausible new theory which explains all the data better, we simply can’t tell whether an anomaly is just a fluke.

Getting cosmology wrong has few realworld consequences. It is perhaps more worrying that statistical blunders of the kind made by some cosmologists seem ingrained in many other sciences. We are willing to bet that erroneous leaps of statistical faith are being made in other fields. Biology, medicine, economics and environmental science all rely on statistics to make sense of their models.

It’s time to make Bayesian reasoning part of the standard model of science.

Andrew Pontzen is a research fellow at Emmanuel College and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.

Hiranya Peiris is a lecturer in cosmology at University College London.

This piece first appeared in New Scientist, August 2010.

CAM 61 41

Books: Robert Macfarlane discusses The Fight for Everest Words Leigh Brauman Steve Bond

B

ound in dark green cloth and weighing three pounds, The Fight for Everest,

by Lieutenant Colonel EF Norton, does not seem the obvious choice for a sleepless 12year-old wandering around his grandfather’s Cairngorms house.

Yet there is something about this 1924 tome of a book that sparked – and then gripped – the young Robert Macfarlane’s imagination. Maybe it is the fold-out map that prompts a leap from reader to adventurer.

Maybe it is the inclusion of Mallory’s personal letters. Or maybe it is the evocation of a particular dark magic that can only be experienced at altitude. The result, however, is indisputable: a lifelong obsession and two much praised books: Mountains of the Mind (2003) and The Wild Places (2007).

“The Fight for Everest was a double discovery,” Macfarlane says. “My copy belonged to my grandfather – I read it by moonlight in his Highland house – and in discovering the book I discovered that entire late Victorian through early Georgian world of, at times, insane risk-taking in the name of exploration: highly honour-coded on the one hand, chaotically extreme on the other.

A kind of war-substitution. It enchanted – and troubled – me for over a decade.”

Norton’s epic tells the story of the Third British Everest Expedition which culminated in Mallory and Irvine’s much-disputed attempt to reach the summit. However, the book is not just concerned with honour and derringdo, as Macfarlane explains. “These people were like the astronauts of the 1960s and so the book covers geology, geography, anthropology. There’s a whole chapter on high altitude medicine, and the use of oxygen, which at the time was hugely controversial.

They wanted to see, and understand, everything in that upper world.”

The drama of the tale could not fail to captivate even the most dedicated flatlandloving fen dweller. But even for the mountainmad Macfarlane, it’s about more than the technical difficulties of bottled oxygen or even whether Mallory actually reached the summit (Macfarlane’s conviction is that the two men died on the way up). “The Fight sent me off into the landscape and into books,” he says.

“It set me off reading all the polar exploration narrative I could, but also sent me off on many

‘The Fight sent me off into the landscape and into books.

These two trails – reading and walking – have criss-crossed through the rest of my life.’

actual expeditions and journeys. These two trails – reading and walking – have crisscrossed throughout the rest of my life.”

The Fight for Everest also sparked a curiosity about exactly where and how mountain fever originated. “For two or three years in my late teens, I had the idea that death at altitude was, if not quite desirable, then certainly not something to be actively avoided,” he confesses. “As a postgraduate, however, I began to explore the origins of that feeling. For there is no durable historical precedent for mountaineering. Retreat even 300 years, to the early 1700s, and mountains exist only to be crossed out of necessity or ignored altogether. But by 1924, an entire nation is obsessed with whether a man will stand on the highest point on the globe.”

While he admits the “contour irony” of living in one of the flattest parts of Europe while writing about mountains, Macfarlane argues there is no contradiction between bookishness and adventurousness. “I tend to read my way up and into landscapes before I enter them physically,” he explains.

“Book-work and legwork have alternated and complemented one another – I wrote Mountains of the Mind alongside my PhD, working six months on one project and then six on the other. I had a very tolerant supervisor who turned a blind eye, so long as I stayed on schedule!”

Macfarlane also believes that, had it not been for The Fight, he might not have remained an academic. “That book began a fascination that eventually became a book of my own. I don’t think I would have stayed in academia if I hadn’t felt I could write alongside my research, and I’m not sure academia would have kept me if I hadn’t been writing,” he says.

Does the book still have the same power over him? “My grandfather gave me his copy a few years ago and it contains a lot of Mallory’s letters, so I’ve used it in my research,” he says. “But mostly, it’s something that I pick up and pat and occasionally open to feel the old fairy tale draw me in again.

It will always remind me of the power of a certain kind of storytelling about a certain kind of place – and that the powers and dangers of that kind of storytelling can be very exciting. And slightly alarming.”

CAM 61 43

Richard Egarr: a CD shortlist Handel Trio Sonatas (with AAM) Op. 2 and 5 HMU 907 467 Handel Organ Concertos Op. 4 (with AAM) HMU 807 446 Bach Brandenburg Concertos (with AAM) HMU 806 461 Mozart Violin Sonatas (with Andrew Manze) Harmonia Mundi HMU 807 380

Music: Richard Egarr

CAMCard holders receive a 10% discount on all CD purchases at Heffers Sound in Trinity Street, Cambridge.

Words Richard Wigmore Marco Borggreve

W

ith Cliff Richard and The Shadows a potent early influence and David Munrow, Leopold Stokowski and Leonard Bernstein among his heroes, Richard Egarr (Clare 1982) was unlikely to follow the orthodox career path from organ scholar to cathedral organist.

“All my idols are great communicators with eclectic tastes and a certain flamboyance. As a 15-year-old at Chetham’s School, my epiphany was discovering a set of LPs entitled Music in the Gothic Era, the last recordings made by David Munrow,” he says. “I was stunned both by the music – I remember being blown away by the four-part organa of the twelfth-century Parisian composer Pérotin – and by David Munrow’s genius for communication, his mix of supreme skill and irrepressible enthusiasm.

That was the moment I really became aware of ‘early music’, and how thrilling and colourful it could be. And while I was never going to be a specialist in this amazing Gothic repertoire, I somehow sensed then that my life would be in early music.”

Yet from his student days Egarr avidly devoured a wide repertoire. “There were so many fantastic players in Cambridge then that I was in the privileged position of being able to try my hand at anything, from conducting the Clare choir in Tallis and Byrd to playing in Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps on the piano,” he says. “One of my most inspiring experiences was conducting the St Matthew Passion in King’s, with a fabulous cast headed

by Charles Daniels and Gerald Finley, and John Butt on the organ. I felt rather like a kid let loose in a sweetshop!

“One of my closest musical friendships was with violinist Andrew Manze, then a new convert to the Baroque; and with him, recorder player Robert Ehrlich and viola da gamba player Mark Levy, who introduced me to the seventeenth-century French composer Marin Marais. We formed The Cambridge Musick (spelt without the quaint final ‘e’!) to explore the rich Baroque duo and trio sonata repertoire. We continued to make recordings and give concerts on the early music circuit until the early 1990s.”

At Cambridge, Egarr had already received coaching on the harpsichord from the Dutch early music guru Gustav Leonhardt and his violinist wife Marie. Then, after a year

‘Egarr describes his instrument as “the Monty Python machine in a hospital that goes ping.

It’s the most unmusical instrument on the planet.”’

at the Guildhall in London, he decamped to Amsterdam for intensive studies with Leonhardt. Without quite echoing Sir Thomas Beecham, who once quipped that a harpsichord sounded “like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof”, Egarr describes his instrument as “the Monty Python machine in a hospital that goes ping. It’s the most unmusical instrument on the planet. And the whole art of playing it is smoke and mirrors – a massive confidence trick. Leonhardt made me really listen to what’s going on in the instrument, rather than venting my frustration on it!”

“The two things that Bach demanded of his students were close understanding of the character of a composition, and a true cantabile. And while cantabile might seem impossible on the harpsichord, Leonhardt taught me how to simulate it with what I’d call over-legato: you hold many more notes down for longer than you would on the piano, so that the instrument doesn’t sound dryly percussive. There’s no dynamic gradation possible on the harpsichord, of course.

It’s a huge challenge to make the instrument sing and “speak”. But there’s rather a lot of fantastic repertoire for the harpsichord, so Baroque harpsichordists must have met the challenge!”

Since 1990 Egarr has divided his life between Amsterdam (his Texan-born wife Mimi is a violinist in Ton Koopman’s Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) and London, originally as harpsichordist in London Baroque and now as director of the Academy of Ancient Music, in succession to Christopher Hogwood and Andrew Manze. In both chamber and orchestral repertoire he made an immediate impact on the AAM with his zest and flair for communication (not for nothing has he been dubbed by a US journal “the Bernstein of Early Music”), allied to scrupulous scholarship. During the 2009 anniversary jamboree, Handel was inevitably a prime focus, with acclaimed performances and recordings of choral works, concertos, and the trio sonatas Op. 2 and Op. 5.

“The sonatas are glorious, underrated music, spanning most of Handel’s career and embracing a huge range of expression. They sound fabulous if you have the right fiddle players. In the AAM we’re lucky to have two alpha males of the violin, Pavlo Beznosiuk and Rodolfo Richter, and their playing was like a great squash game, just as it should be!”

As anyone who has seen him play or conduct will confirm, Egarr’s watchwords in performance are ‘freedom’ and ‘risk-taking’.

“Rehearsing with the AAM Choir in works like Messiah and Haydn’s Nelson Mass, I ban pencils. We rehearse to explore possibilities,” he says. “In performance I like to alter dynamics and inflect the tempo in different places. Once you’ve fixed something, it dies... my aim is always to inspire that ‘don’t know quite what’s going to happen next’ feel!”

CAM 61 45

Sport: Rugby Union Football Club DanVickerman, lock Interview Sophie Pickford

C

ambridge is cold. So cold it chills you to the bone. So cold that pitches freeze over, making play heavy and calling for a faster, harder style of rugby where night-time games are a matter of endurance. For an Aussie, used to hotter climes, that’s a culture shock.

I started playing rugby at the age of seven and never really aimed towards a professional career. From school tournaments I progressed to professional provincial teams in South Africa and Australia, and finally to selection for the Australian National side, who I played for from 2002 to 2008.

Balancing sport and work is, of course, an important and ever-present issue. Michaelmas Term is particularly intense in the lead up to the Varsity Match and you just have to do what you need to do to get the job done, whether it be preparing for a supervision or attending a training session. In a way, having two focuses sharpens the mind. One provides relief for the other, making life a little easier.

There’s no doubt that amateur rugby has a different feel to professional rugby. As a professional, rugby was my day job. I made some of my closest friends while playing full time, and the bonds that professional teams have are quite unique, but on a daily basis my routine was to do what needed to be done to play and win. Cambridge rugby is so much more well-rounded, which is refreshing, and it’s a privilege to play with a group of guys from such diverse backgrounds. The culture of the Cambridge team goes much further than the field, it’s a family atmosphere, a great bunch of guys who develop lifelong friendships, and being part of that is really very special.

Whether amateur or professional, you’ve got to want to win. In the scrum you’re just in there pushing and pushing, you’re competing and you’ve got to want the victory. Inevitably the contest becomes personal but you’ve got to make sure that it doesn’t cloud your judgement or the common team goal. Keeping your composure is essential but sometimes hard to achieve. You’ve got to know where to draw the line in the sand: ultimately the game’s not about making yourself look good, it’s about the team.

Last year’s Varsity victory was especially rewarding because, as team captain, I had seen what the guys put in to make the season work.

Watching the team improve and gel together was very pleasing. After a season plagued by

Charlie Troman

“

injuries we came together when it really mattered, fielding our full side for the first time at Twickenham. We played as a team with the common goal of winning. The season’s predominantly about the journey, following the plan and executing it to the best of our abilities, but the win topped it all off.

Selection was, for me, the hardest process last year and I don’t envy the new captain, Jimmy Richards, the task this season. It’s amazing to see the joy and relief of players who make the cut. Others have played all season with total commitment and then aren’t chosen due to injury. The disappointment is unbearable. It’s part of the captain’s job, but my least favourite duty. Seeing the progress of the young guys was my favourite part. Watching them enjoy their rugby, make huge strides forward,

achieve their goals and play to win was extremely rewarding.

Being captain was a unique experience but I don’t feel any sadness in passing the baton on to Jimmy. The club is based on the principle that captaincy is one year long, you do your best, enjoy the experience, and then someone else has a go. To be honest, not being captain won’t change my role a lot: at the end of the day, I will play my best regardless, and I want to help make things go as well as possible. My hopes for the season are fairly straightforward.

We need to make sure we’re in a good position to face challenges, we need to prepare well, working hard on and off the field, we need to focus on the details and make sure everything flows functionally. When all of that is put in place, the big things look after themselves.”

CAM 61 47

This puzzle enacts a TITLE. One letter must be removed from each of 14 down answers (one per column) and the residue used to form a word for grid entry.

The removed letter is to be placed temporarily in the bottom row.

When all of the clue answers have been entered there will be 14 empty cells. The bottom row must then be vacated and the empty cells filled, creating new words. Chambers (2008) is recommended.

Title

by Schadenfreude CAM 61 Prize Crossword

Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 62 and posted online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam on 17 January 2011.

There are two runners-up prizes of £35 to spend on Cambridge University Press publications.*

Completed crosswords should be sent to: CAM 61 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge CB 5 8AB. Please remember to include your contact details.

Entries to be received by Monday 4 January 2011.

Solution and notes to CAM 60 crossword Half-back by Schadenfreude

✄

The first correct entrant drawn will win a copy of Nicholas Chrimes’s Cambridge: Treasure Island in the Fens (Hobsaerie Publications, £20) and £30 to spend on Cambridge University Press publications.*

ACROSS 1 Supplement covered by complicated clause I enclose in an envelope (9) 9 Acting part ready to learn (3) 13 A house in partial darkness miles away (5) 14 Samuel’s teacher has misrepresented a prophet (6) 15 First class unmixed backing accompanying English bands (7) 16 Gods still timeless? Yes (6) 17 Unflinchingly loyal brute, crippled by pestilence, abandoned by sons (8, hyphenated) 18 Diamonds are amongst her unopened treasure (4) 19 Ghostly body of water muffling echo (5) 20 Order gains advantage for European head? (6) 23 Old master accommodating old-fashioned dismal students of prosody (8) 24 Suspicious gazes counter detectives (8) 26 North and South China perhaps proceed to reduce somewhat (6) 29 More than one tree snake being adjacent (6) 31 Liberal once again following Conservative split (5) 34 Harrow buries those Scottish plants (8) 35 Surgical instrument about to penetrate wound (5) 36 Steamer carrying fifty average unpaid workers (6)

37 Returning east knight and baron jump on the stage at Covent Garden? (5) 38 Acting officer captured by retreating army (5) 39 Morag’s unproductive exploit (4) 40 The soprano tries on some slip-on tops (9, 2 words) DOWN 1 Urgent court order (6) 2 Some grumble at a generous right to graze (6) 3 Greenock’s vessel to convey cast metal (7, hyphenated) 4 One awful noise close to our air purifier (7) 5 American investing in capricious rental of a Roman basilica (7) 6 Poet’s to clarify title of respect included in sick note (6) 7 One facing a disruption of endless inactivity (8) 8 Foot complaint with the onset of itching? Replace part of the shoe (8, hyphenated) 10 Mining engineer in position behind special drills (7) 11 Prayer recital from memory, missing first fifth (8) 12 Judges take in obligations (5) 21 Detective to investigate the ultimate in police neglect (6) 22 Charlie admits consuming ninety units (8) 23 Old mediator that is a smallminded individual (6) 24 Did brave fellow serve God? (5) 25 Electronic box at the front not required (5) 26 Drawings by the Spanish society (7) 27 A girl has almost disturbed a large reptile (7) 28 Base missing from critical part (5) 30 End of this for associate in quiet existence (4) 32 Force nut to crack (4) 33 Difficulties raised by extremely tedious assessments in Perth (6)

Missing name: BOBBY ROBSON Corrected misprints and unjumbled 3 down give ENGLAND FOOTBALL MANAGER (the thematic position). Anagrammed pairs give ALF RAMSEY, DON REVIE, RON GREENWOOD, GRAHAM TAYLOR, TERRY VENABLES, GLENN HODDLE, KEVIN KEEGAN, SVEN- GORAN ERIKSSON, STEVE McCLAREN and FABIO CAPELLO. BOBBY ROBSON played at half-back for most of his international career.

CAM 60 crossword winners: Winner: Philip Mitchell (Churchill 1972) Runners-up: Richard Wells (Trinity 1961) Alan West (Downing 1957) * Excluding journals

48 CAM 61

Altered entries are: CARLOT, DANKNESS, GARMENT, MERYL, DOLIA, DIVA, GROAN, LOAF, DROLL, NEVE.