CAM 70 Michaelmas 2013

Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 70 Michaelmas 2013

In this issue:

Insect hunters How China works The borrowers Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life

CAM/70

Contents

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 70 Michaelmas Term 2013

Jonathan Gregson

10

Christoffer Rudquist

20 14

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

Secret Cambridge

Extracurricular University matters My Cambridge Reading list Cambridge soundtrack 10 A sporting life 11 Prize crossword 12

41 42 44

02 03 04 08

45 47 48

Features How China works

14

Labour relations in China have been transformed over the last twenty years. Professor William Brown explains why power is with the people.

Insect hunters

20

All collectors are obsessive; but some entomologists are prepared to go to greater lengths, as Lucy Jolin discovers.

Lest we forget

24

Edward Burtynsky

Britain’s war memorials, at home and abroad, have significantly shaped the way we remember the Great War says Professor David Reynolds.

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 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 yellowbutton.co.uk Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design and art direction Paul Oldman smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar Publisher The University of Cambridge Development and Alumni Relations 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288 Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk alumni.cam.ac.uk facebook.com/ cambridgealumni @CARO1209 #cammag

Diffuse interests Dr Geoff Moggridge says that understanding how substances mix together can be life-changing.

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.

Cover photograph

by Alun Callender Copyright © 2013 The University of Cambridge.

28

Award Winner 2013

The borrowers

32

In 1946, ex-RAF officer and fresher Bill Howell had an idea: a student lending library for contemporary art.

Penelope Rance takes up the story.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Your letters

Line of enquiry Welcome to the Michaelmas edition of CAM. It is often said that, at its heart, Cambridge is a self-governing community of scholars – a university free to determine its own future, with a structure that underpins academic intellectual freedom. For the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, this has profound implications for the way in which Cambridge considers the challenges of the 21st century. Read an extract from his annual October speech on page 41.

For me, intellectual freedom at Cambridge is about the freedom to follow your nose, to see where a line of enquiry takes you – an approach reflected in this issue of CAM. On page 20, we find out what it is about beetles that drives entomologists to the furthest reaches of the jungle; and on page 14, economist Professor William Brown examines the rise of Chinese labour and what it means for worker relations.

Elsewhere, on page 28, Dr Geoff Moggridge discusses the chemical power of diffusion. And on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the start of the first world war, Professor David Reynolds examines how Britain’s memorials have shaped the way we remember the Great War. Read his fascinating account on page 24.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

enormously frustrating – not least because we pay for much of it through our taxes! The concept that research results should be freely available to all has taken root in recent years, and this is an important milestone in the journey to that goal. I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to all those who have worked to make this possible – by far the most stimulating and potentially productive of all the alumni benefits.

Peter Lapinskas (Caius 1971)

Crush

Matters of substance

For many years, in his lectures on crowd psychology, a University colleague showed news footage of teenage girls screaming as the Beatles arrived at the local airport.

One year, for the first time, some students were suppressing giggles. When he asked why, they explained that they had recognised their mothers.

Roger Robinson (Queens’ 1958)

I read with interest (CAM 69) that the universe is composed of matter 5%, dark matter 26% and dark energy 68%. The “universe” cereal box states that it is “suitable for dogs” and “may contain nuts”. Does this mean that not all the holes in the theory are black?

Kenneth Barnsley (Trinity 1970)

When Beatlemania was at its height, my mother (born 1919) remarked how she and her friend had gone to see Frank Sinatra, just before the war I think. They were very disappointed that they had not fainted with all the other girls, as they had been led to believe [they would]!

John Gowland (Trinity 1964)

Papers, online I was delighted to read in CAM 69 that alumni now have online access to a large range of published research through the JSTOR archive. For those of us who do not have a current academic or corporate affiliation, and who live away from Cambridge, the lack of access to current research can be 02 CAM 70

I feel I must thank you for the best and most spontaneous roar of laughter I have enjoyed for many years.

At my advanced age, the most I can usually hope for is a wry smirk or the occasional giggle.

However, the illustrations

by Rian Hughes to Katherine Sanderson’s “Matters of substance” – a pleasure to read in itself – brought me up short with the magnificent joke about the BEST BEFORE date.

I cannot work out how pleased Bishop Ussher would have been to be to have his laboriously-calculated date for the beginning of the world so wittily commemorated, but personally I loved it. Please convey my thanks to the artist.

Bridget Rees Hains (Newnham 1954)

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to: cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Don’s diary

Write to us at: CAM, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘for publication’.

You can read more CAM letters at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.

Letters may be edited for length.

My room your room With reference to the interview with Michael Portillo (CAM 69), I believe that Noah’s Ark was so called because all the sets were shared (the animals went in two by two).

Richard Fleet (Peterhouse 1972)

Sporting times In your article on ultimate frisbee (CAM 69), a current member of the University team, Strange Blue, confessed to being unsure of the origin of the team name. I suspect it is probably a pun on Strange Brew, a song by 1960s heavy rockers Cream.

Strange Brew still gets a certain amount of radio play to this day, but I suppose it just goes to show that today’s amusing cultural reference is tomorrow’s source of bewilderment.

James Mobbs (Christ's 1994)

Pleasing puzzles Please congratulate Schadenfreude on a wonderful instruction – the symmetrical placing of the Jewish month was especially impressive – and a crossword that was great fun to solve. Recognising ‘Tammuz’ was the key to understanding how the grid worked, the mysterious title confirming. Excellent stuff.

Teyrnon Powell (Caius 1968) This was a very tough puzzle, the hardest ever in CAM, I think.

Thanks to Schadenfruede for, once again, devising something as elegant and enjoyable!

Robert Eastwood (Trinity 1967)

David Tong is Professor of Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Trinity.

Most graduates have pretty vivid memories of exam term in Cambridge. In fact, many graduates have pretty vivid nightmares about exam term.

It’s an intense time.

For me, it’s a time when I’m forced to put aside much of what I enjoy most about teaching in this place. With exams just around the corner, there’s little appetite for intellectual exploration.

Supervisions no longer have the spontaneity of previous terms. There are no random digressions built on random digressions, no curveball questions from smart students that I struggle to answer. In short, there’s no fun. It’s all replaced by hard work and rigour. It’s probably for the best, but I miss the fun.

In College, I’ve taken a group of first year mathematicians under my wing. Most of them nailed the basics weeks ago. Now it’s all about honing, polishing, perfecting. It’s about repetition.

Serious repetition. I feel like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid: I’ve got them all waxing on and waxing off. I’m training an army of calculus-based ninja warriors.

Meanwhile, there’s little fun to be had back in the department either. Sitting on the other side of the fence, I’m part of a team writing the final exams for the third years. It’s a gruelling process. One person comes up with a question and two others solve it before we enter a hellish round of checking that lasts for months. Long after we’re sure there are no actual mistakes, we fret about possible ambiguities. We rephrase questions and squabble over commas before rewriting them yet again.

In our desperate search for typos, we resort to reading the questions out loud: equations, Greek letters and all. It’s a comic scene: me standing in the middle of the room, half Euclid, half Homer Simpson, intoning: “Arr-mu-nu minus one-half arr gee-mu-nu equals eight pi tee-mu-nu.” In front of me, a row of distinguished professors follow along, their fingers tracing the symbols on the page like five-year-olds learning to read.

By the end we have a maths exam to be proud of.

In terms of its breadth, depth and difficulty, it’s probably unrivalled in the world. A set of about 120 questions, each designed to take a smart student 30 minutes to solve. On a good day, I could probably get through about 20% of them.

If you’re ever feeling nostalgic, you can download

our masterpiece from the internet and relive those cold sweats you felt when you heard the words: “You may now turn the page.”

The exams themselves go by in a flash, for students and faculty alike. Within two weeks the marking is done and the team of examiners is sitting in an airless room, drinking stale coffee and making our final decisions. What level is needed for a First?

What about a Third? Only after everything is finalised are the anonymous candidate numbers replaced with names and we pore over the list to see how the chips have fallen. Then it becomes real. Among the names are students that I interviewed as nervous 17-year-olds and many more that I’ve since supervised, lectured and mentored.

Among the names are people I care about.

There’s one thing that surprises me afresh each year when I see the exam results: how very fair they are. The idea that students should spend three years studying, only to be tested on a single week of exams is surely medieval (OK, it’s actually Georgian). Yet I’ve never seen an egregious miscarriage of justice. The students nearly always get what they deserve. The high fliers are sitting there at the top as expected; those who had better things to do than study are further down the list.

Having checked that there are no shocks, my eyes go to the borderlines where the outcome is less certain. I’m looking for the names of two of my favourite students (of course we have favourites).

After two years of near misses, I’m willing them to be among the Firsts. When I see their names, I give a little fist pump of joy. I don’t know if any blood went into their results, but I’m pretty sure there was a whole lot of sweat and tears. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for them. There may not be much fun in exam term in Cambridge, but it still carries its own rewards.

Professor Tong is a 2013 Pilkington Prize winner. damtp.cam.ac.uk

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UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM CUER

1 OCTOBER SPEECH

Vice-Chancellor addresses the University

I

n his annual address on 1 October, the ViceChancellor celebrated the University’s capacity to determine its own future and spelled out some of the choices that will be crucial to Cambridge’s continued prosperity and pre-eminence.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said that as a “self-governing community of scholars” Cambridge enjoyed more freedom than almost any other university, but that exercising such choice involved great responsibility “to society, to each other, and to the University that supports us”.

He identified three key questions to be addressed in the coming years. “How we grow without losing our distinctiveness, how we educate increasing numbers of students, especially graduate students, and how we engage with those who choose to support us, will shape what the University looks and feels like in 20 years’ time,” he explained.

The Vice-Chancellor closed his speech with a challenge to the University community to contribute to the debate. “Maintaining our freedom is hard and needs watchfulness,” he said. “The right to choose has been hard earned – let us embrace it.”

To read the speech in full, visit cam.ac.uk/annualaddress2013

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SOCIETIES

Cambridge student solar team crash out of competition The Cambridge student eco racing team, the UK’s leading team, has crashed out of the 2013 World Solar Challenge, a gruelling 3,000 km solar car marathon across the Australian desert.

The Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER) team was test-driving Resolution, a car the team believed to be game-changing and able to manage an average of 80 km/h in one of the world’s harshest environments.

The bullet-shaped car weighed only 120kg, and carried the world’s most efficient terrestrial solar array embedded within a unique aft facing sun-tracking plate – an innovation that provides a 20 per cent gain in power.

The racing team, led by Keno MarioGhae, represents a 60-strong student society that has been leading the UK’s solar vehicle development since 2007.

The team had been predicted to do

exceptionally well this year but an accident in pre-race testing put Resolution off the road (the team escaped unharmed).

“Our car had an accident during which it rolled onto its side. Over the following days, repairs were made to its structure to restore the safety cage around the driver,” Mario-Ghae explained. “Further tests revealed new dynamic instabilities, which we were not able to fix in the time we had left before the race.”

Despite these setbacks, however, the team remain upbeat. Mario-Ghae said: “The team will continue investigating the performance of Resolution in the UK and use what we’ve learnt [in Australia] to build a race-winning vehicle in two years’ time. cuer.co.uk

Alumni Festival big hit Graduates from around the world returned to Cambridge in September to take part in the annual Alumni Festival. The human condition was a key theme, with huge numbers turning up to hear Professor Simon Baron-Cohen speak on empathy, Professor Barbara Sahakian on smart drugs and Professor Nicola Clayton on captured thought. The annual Festival forms the ‘at home’ leg of the Global Cambridge lecture series. The 2014 Festival will take place 26-28 September. alumni.cam.ac.uk/festival13

CAM roams free Go digital and enjoy CAM on the move with free apps for iOS and Android devices.

To download visit: alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

Anna Betts

DIGITISATION

Board of Longitude online of Science. “It is a spectacular example of expert disagreement and public participation. As well as attracting the greatest scientific minds of the day, the Board enticed people who belong to one of the most important traditions in British society: the extreme eccentric.”

The archive preserves detailed minutes, ranging from the first recorded meeting to the Board’s dissolution in 1828. It also contains Captain Cook’s logbooks, accounts of the naming of Australia, and a letter from Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty, writing to apologise for the loss of a timekeeper after his ship was “pirated from my command”. cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude

National Maritime Museum

It was the conundrum that baffled some of the greatest and most eccentric experts of the 18th century and captivated the British public. The “longitude problem” – or how to establish a ship’s position east and west from a fixed meridian line – and the many attempts to solve it are contained in the archive of the Board of Longitude, which is now available online via the Cambridge Digital Library.

In July 1714, an act of parliament established prizes of up to £20,000 each (worth about £1.5 million today) for determining longitude at sea.

“Think The X Factor, only much more money and much more important,” said Professor Simon Schaffer of the Department of History and Philosophy

Letter sent by Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty

FACULTY

Shark named after museum director The director of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Ken McNamara, has had a newlydiscovered genus of shark named after him.

The Kenolamna, a possible ancestor of the great white, is thought to have prowled the Earth’s oceans 100 million year ago. The new genus was discovered through the study of fossilised shark teeth that date back to between 80 and 100 million years ago.

The fossil material, from Western Australia, reveals that the otodontid sharks were one of the most diverse and successful groups of sharks during the later stages of the Cretaceous period 65 to 100 million years ago, unravelling previous assumptions that they were only ever represented by one species of shark at any given time.

The finds, which have revolutionised the early history of megatooth sharks, were named after McNamara to honour his 30 years as palaeontology curator at the Western Australian Museum.

Dr McNamara, who has been director of the Museum for two years, said he was “thrilled” that the genus would boast his name. “A load of ancient fossils have been named after me … is that a compliment? But in all seriousness, it is quite cool to have a fossil shark named after me!” sedgwickmuseum.org

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UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

Alumni meet-ups Wherever you are in the world, local alumni groups offer the chance to network, socialise and make new friends. Among the newest additions are the Cambridge Society of Ukraine – contact Alina Sviderska (St Edmund’s 2011) at as2218@cantab.net – and the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Flanders – contact Peter Anthonissen (Magdalene 1982) at peter@anthonissen.be.

d Irelan n io tio Collec

New interest group A new shared-interest group has also been created: the Cambridge Real Estate Finance Alumni Society in Asia. Contact Liqiang (Austin) Xu (Hughes Hall 2011) at liqiang.xu@cantab.net for more information.

For a full list of groups please visit our website.

Gesta

+

David Semple

Open access to journals for alumni Alumni now have access to a huge range of academic work online and free of charge.

Access is via JSTOR, a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive of scholarship that includes leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, as well as primary sources.

There are currently over 1,000 e-journals available, with collections including Arts & Sciences I-VIII, Life Sciences, the Ireland Collection and 19th Century British Pamphlets, as well as a number of individual journal titles.

Over the coming months more academic works will be added. alumni.cam.ac.uk/jstor

Global network Cambridge has a wider network of alumni groups than any other university in the world.

If you are one of the more than 55,000 alumni living outside the UK, you can find out more about activities near you in the latest edition of the Alumni Groups Directory, enclosed with this issue of CAM, or available to download online. alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups

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We are delighted to be able to offer an exclusive range of gifts and merchandise this Christmas. From embossed rings and cufflinks from Eva London to engraved pens from Onoto and alumni ties, there is something to tickle the fancy of every graduate.

For something extra special, The Cambridge Satchel Company has created a unique University range – the perfect gift for a new graduate or for a fellow alumnus or alumna. Alumni can receive a 10% discount on this range by entering CAMALUM at the checkout.

Orders must be placed by 3 December to ensure delivery before Christmas.

Overseas deadlines and prices may vary. alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/ merchandise

10% DISCOUNT The Cambridge Satchel Company

Steve Bond

A Cambridge Christmas

E: contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

DIARY MICHAELMAS TERM

Global Cambridge

Toronto 7 December 2013, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada

Images courtesy Studio Daniel Liebskind/Elliot Lewis Photography/Sam Ravanrouh/Royal Ontario Museum/Tony Tremblay/Dave Yoder/iStock

alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

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Our Global Cambridge series brings a slice of Cambridge academic life to alumni around the world, giving those living abroad the chance to take part in big-picture discussions with the leading experts in their field and network with other alumni.

This December, Global Cambridge will take place in Toronto. Held at the Royal Ontario Museum, the events will include a lunch with Alison Traub, the recently appointed executive director of

development and alumni relations, a thoughtprovoking programme of lectures, and an evening drinks reception. Among the speakers will be Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project, Bill Harris, Professor of Anatomy (and head coach of the University’s Ice Hockey Club), and Janet Carding (King’s 1983), director of the museum.

Whether you are from Toronto or across the

border, or just visiting, we hope you will join us.

Booking closes on 2 December.

Tickets cost C$125/£75.

DIARY MICHAELMAS TERM

Alumni events: E: events@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

In brief Lara Harwood/Heart

Other events Varsity Rugby 12 December, Twickenham The Varsity Match in December has been the focus of Oxford and Cambridge rivalry since 1872. With 61 wins to 56 overall, the Light Blues hold the bragging rights, but with three wins in a row, do Oxford have the momentum right now? Take your place in the stands for the 132nd edition of this epic annual battle on Thursday, 12 December at Twickenham Stadium. thevarsitymatch.com

Festive alumni networking drinks 1 12 December, National Gallery, London Network at this festive drinks and canapés reception at the National Café. Hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, and open to all alumni, students and their guests, this event offers a fabulous opportunity to mingle with up to 250 other alumni and senior University staff. Tickets cost £39 (£35 for students, postdocs and Varsity Rugby match attendees). alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Edmund de Waal: On White Porcelain stories from the Fitzwilliam 29 November 2013 – 23 February 2014 Bo Lundberg

1

2

Edmund de Waal takes over three galleries of the Museum to present objects from his residency in China last summer, pieces from the Museum’s permanent collection, poetry, photographs and letters. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

How to network: Lessons from the movies 28 January, Cambridge 29 January, London Making small talk with strangers is not everyone’s favourite pastime, but being able to network is an increasingly important skill. Nathalie Walker, Director of External Affairs at Cambridge Judge Business School, provides practical skills to improve your effectiveness. alumni.cam.ac.uk/ howtonetwork

Cambridge Science Festival

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10-23 March 2014 Explore and discuss issues of scientific interest and concern with leading Cambridge scientists and fellow alumni at the Cambridge Science Festival. cam.ac.uk/science-festival

Kettle’s Yard Concert Season Winter 2014, Cambridge 30 January: Fauré Piano Quartet – Bridge, Strauss and Brahms 6 February: Kathryn Stott, Piano – Bach, Grieg, Rachmaninov, Shoshtakovich and Ravel 13 February: Heath String Quartet – Mozart, Tippett and Mendelssohn Tickets from £15 kettlesyard.co.uk

Save the date!

Hay Festival 22 May – 1 June 2014 CAM 70 09

MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM ROOM N13, TRINITY HALL

Words Becky Allen Photograph Christoffer Rudquist Edmund de Waal (Trinity Hall 1983) is a renowned potter and also the author of The Hare With Amber Eyes, which has sold over a million copies. He says that access to a stove and cook books at Cambridge allowed him to make “cheap and terrible meals”, including rabbit stew of “unparalleled horribleness”.

10 CAM 70

Emily Evans is a second-year economist who says that one of the best things about not having a cooker is that it challenges you to find other ways to cook as cheaply as you can. Emily says she gets by with just a microwave, kettle and toaster. “We’ve managed to bake cakes and have dinner parties!”

“

I

think it’s the best view in Cambridge – incomparable,” says Edmund de Waal as he looks over the College gardens and the Backs from the window of N13. It’s a view unchanged in the 30 years since he arrived at Cambridge and one which the room’s current occupant, Emily Evans, loves too. “I woke up one morning last winter to find it had snowed really heavily overnight. I looked out and there was snow on everything. It was so beautiful.”

A good view usually demands a stiff climb, and while both appreciate the vista, neither De Waal nor Evans enjoy the stairs. “It was getting the books in on the first day,” says De Waal. “I remember carrying boxes up here. Up and down.” Evans agrees: “That’s the bad thing. The first time I got here I genuinely couldn’t make it up the stairs without an uurrrggh!” she gasps theatrically.

But while the view and the stairs are the same in N13, De Waal says the room itself is very different.

“It could have been the 1950s,” he recalls. “It was

I had a little row of bowls from Japan on my windowsill. It was staggeringly pretentious

The best...venue in Cambridge Conrad Landin is reading English at Christ’s “Art meets life,” proclaims the strapline on the website of Cambridge Junction, one of the city’s most modern performance spaces.

Art meets much else here too, including the Clifton Road Industrial Estate, Nando’s and Cineworld.

It’s not, like the Corpus Playroom, a simple dash down a narrow passage opposite King’s. Nor is it, like the ADC, adjacent to the lofty rhetoric of the Cambridge Union or the warmth of the Friends Meeting House. On the contrary, coming from town will probably involve an extensive cycle or a trek up the interminable Hills Road.

So far, so not very Cambridge.

But this is the main appeal of the Junction: it is one of the few places outside the bubble where a student would typically venture. Whether for a spoken word night or to see American indie band Passion Pit, a diverse audience greets every Junction act. Students at a gig may well sit bemused as hecklers demand to know a comic’s opinion of Arbury. The quaint intimacy of

student shows in town is nowhere to be found — dark and functional is the order of the day.

A spacious bar and waiting area leads to three flexible performance spaces that host theatre, music, comedy and dance. A recent one-man show at the venue saw comedian Mark Steel observe: “It’s a bit like a prison, this place, isn’t it?

I feel a bit Johnny Cash here.” Yet blocks of concrete and drab interiors have done wonders for the National Theatre and the Barbican Centre.

Postmodern minimalism in an auditorium allows the performer to make the space their own, at the performance spaces at the Junction and at the English Faculty alike.

In many cities a building that could be anywhere is not exactly something to die for. Yet in Cambridge, where so many are plunged into a town centre that seems unreal in its beauty, perhaps it’s exactly what we need. A trip to the Junction is like an acceptance letter all over again – when you’re told you can live, as well as study, in the city.

Marcus Ginns

a lot colder, but there was a gas fire, which was really nice for toasting crumpets. It was very spartan, peeling walls, and I loved that very austere quality.”

He was saved from complete blandness by Kettle’s Yard, which used to loan out pictures from its store at the start of term. “I borrowed some Alfred Wallis pictures and a Ben Nicholson print, so I had a little grouping of pictures up here. You used to pay £1 a term. It was really lovely.”

Arriving in Cambridge after an apprenticeship in Japan, De Waal also brought his pots: “I was full of my travels and my apprenticeship. I was reading English but I used to teach pottery in Cambridge – there used to be a kiln in the basement of the Cambridge Union – so I used to make pots there and teach people. I had a little row of bowls from Japan on my windowsill … it was staggeringly pretentious.”

The china Evans keeps in N13 is more colourful and utilitarian – floral crockery and her favourite mug (a present from her brother) with Brains from Thunderbirds on it. “When I was little my dream job was to be a Thunderbird, until my Mum told me they didn’t exist!” she says. She admits her plates aren’t very interesting either, but De Waal is less judgemental: “If people aren’t eating off plastic plates, I’m thrilled.

China is china.”

Comparing notes on favourite places to study, they find a shared passion for the nooks and crannies of the University Library. “Economics is right at the top in the South Wing. I gather up all the books I need and spend all day up there,” Evans explains. “I like the feeling that no one is going to stumble across me.”

De Waal attributes his passion for archives – which have inspired both his writing and his pottery – to the library: “The lovely thing I found was just the serendipity, the open shelving. It’s incredible and no one who hasn’t experienced it will ever know how wonderful it is. My obsession, my archive-loving life, really began there I think, where you just simply get lost by finding one thing and then leading to another.”

Asked what she’d bequeath N13’s next occupant, Evans is clear. “I’d leave my food hamper – it’s wonderful. All my friends keep their food in cupboards, but I insist on keeping everything in my hamper. My mum fills it up. So I’d leave them my hamper and tell them to get their mum to fill it up.”

De Waal would leave a book. “I had a book with a red cover, which I’d leave leaning against the window pane when going out, because people got so fed up of getting all the way up here and discovering there was no one in.” But, he admits, he also used it to shut out the world every now and then. “I’d leave this book leaning against the window to say there was no one here, and then I could be completely by myself.”

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SECRET CAMB RI DG E

FULL STEAM AHEAD Words Becky Allen Photographs Marcus Ginns

B

eside the River Cam, off Newmarket Road, the Victorian pumping station served Cambridge for more than 70 years and had a profound impact on the city’s residents. Before the pumping station, the city was far from blissful. William Ranger’s 1849 report on public health in Cambridge painted a grim picture of the poorest parts of town. He wrote of bone yards and boiling houses, slaughter houses and scavengers, of decomposing animals littering Jesus Ditch, and a River Cam that was little more than an open sewer.

With filth came disease: cholera, typhus, smallpox and malaria. “The sanitary condition of numerous courts and places is so wretched as to be a disgrace to humanity, and still more to civilisation; and I believe it next to an impossibility for their inhabitants to be healthy, cleanly, or even moral,” Ranger wrote.

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Working one week on, one week off, 24 hours a day, the engines were kept in steam by a trio of boilers and six furnaces

The solution to the twin problems of sewage and rubbish was a shining example of Victorian ingenuity, explains Cambridge Blue Badge guide Allan Brigham.

“The great thing about the pumping station is that you had to fuel it with the first refuse service,” says Brigham, also a former Cambridge street sweeper. “It burned the rubbish to pump the sewage and that ended up in the sewage works at Milton, and then on local fields that grew the city’s food.”

Built in 1894, the buff brick pumping station housed two pillar-box red Hathorn Davey steam engines.

Working one week on, one week off, 24 hours a day, the engines were kept in steam by a trio of boilers and six furnaces or “destructors”, which between them consumed 22 tons of rubbish a day.

With some modifications – the addition of two gas engines in 1909 and an electric pump in 1937 to boost capacity – the Cheddars Lane pumping station kept Cambridge clean until 1968, when a new all-electric station opened just downstream.

For those who love machines that clank, news of the council’s decision to demolish the old pumping station was horrifying. But thanks to engineers from the Cambridge Instrument Company and three research students from the University’s Department of Engineering, the pumping station was saved and reborn as the Cambridge Museum of Technology.

Today, it’s a place of bliss not only for connoisseurs of smells, but for lovers of Victorian civic splendour.

From its octagonal chimney and ornate red-brick decoration to its blue, cream and olive-green tiling, the engine shed is a thing of beauty. Wheels, pistons, pipes, gauges, taps and tubes; brass, copper, cast iron and wood – the place is gleaming, burnished, and treasured by its part-time curatorial adviser Pam Halls and her team of 70 volunteers.

“They come because they love the collection, the engines, the history,” she says. “And I love the people.

I love that raw enthusiasm, that people are here because they want to be here. That carries me when we’ve had a funding bid rejected.”

Currently fundraising for a new boiler, a backup source of steam and new museum space, success would allow the museum to run in steam more often, and share more of its collection of Cambridge’s industrial heritage with visitors. “We believe things at technology museums should work,” says Halls. “You only understand a machine when it’s moving. We hope to attract more visitors and make it more family friendly. Lots of people find science and technology frightening, we want to prove to them it’s not – and that it’s relevant.”

“Cambridge’s industrial history and technology inspires me. Sadly it’s often overlooked, but it’s the history of ordinary people, dirty and hard,” she says.

“Cambridge is full of people working in technology industries and we can show them they are part of a continuing link stretching back hundreds of years here, it gives them a place in the history of Cambridge.”

museumoftechnology.com

How China works Labour relations in China have been transformed over the last twenty years.

Professor William Brown explains how power is shifting to the people.

Photographs Edward Burtynsky

Right: Manufacturing #18 Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005. Š Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers, London.

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n just a couple of decades, China has moved from a centrally planned system to a booming market economy. The average real earnings of its 700 million workers have increased around five-fold. How can the accompanying surge in aspirations be managed in a country where power remains highly centralised?

The outside world may be vaguely aware of the growing number of industrial disputes associated with this unprecedented change. But of much greater significance for the future of all of us will be China’s success in building new institutions to accommodate the needs of its increasingly self-confident workers. It is only in the past five years that the shape of these institutions has started to emerge.

To understand how working people’s lives are changing, we need to go back to the 1990s, as the system of total state ownership was being dismantled.

The dislocation of workers’ lives was massive. Ten million people a year flooded into the cities from the countryside, yet social security provision was minimal.

Rapid-growth capitalism often proved as ruthless towards Chinese workers as it had been to their 19thcentury European predecessors, yet the only legally permitted channel for worker discontent was a monolithic state-controlled trade union – an organisation designed for top-down communication and defined by a race for growth.

By the start of the new millennium, government was beginning to become seriously concerned about growing discontent among both an older generation of displaced state employees and a younger generation of rural immigrants. And alongside these practical concerns was something more profound: an uncertainty about how unconstrained growth might impact on income distribution. Inequality was increasing rapidly, posing a growing threat for social stability. Unless workers could somehow obtain a share of the profits being reaped by their employers, inequalities would deepen.

As a result, tentative steps were taken to give workers a greater voice. Unions were encouraged to form local branches, able to work with employers and government at whatever level was appropriate. Union recruitment in the new private sector was encouraged, as was the development of what was described as “collective bargaining” between these union organisations and employers.

Initial responses were largely token. Many workers did not know they had been made union members, and many collective agreements were top-down packages adopted by the employers. The big change came in 2008. First, experience of the financial crisis warned China off undue reliance on export-led growth, resulting in a radical effort to rebalance the economy by raising domestic consumption, primarily through raising incomes. Second, the government was ready with a raft of labour legislation to provide workers with unprecedented rights. Most significant of these – because so much can be built on it – was the right to have a written contract of employment. With an accompanying system of mediation and courts, employment contracts gave workers sanctions against employers who, for example, failed to pay them. They gave rights to rural migrant workers. They gave employees the right to be consulted by employers on matters of mutual concern. This provoked substantial public debate.

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Those raised aspirations may have contributed to the strike wave that occurred in 2010, mainly focused on western companies. Strikes are not illegal in China, but the law provides none of the protections for strike organisers that western workers take for granted.

Mass use of mobile phones has made the covert organisation of strikes relatively simple. But the resolution of a grievance needs more than this: it needs someone to be put forward whom the workers trust to negotiate a settlement. A feature of the 2010 strike wave was the pragmatic way in which union and government officials enabled representatives of the striking workers to emerge to argue their case in the knowledge that they would not be victimised. Indeed, for all its hierarchical nature, in some parts of China the governmental and union structure has demonstrated considerable mediatory skills, all the more impressive for the absence of a culture of compromise in the brash new market economy.

And that is why I believe that it is the pragmatism of the Chinese that deserves our attention. This vast and varied country has at least six distinct layers of government, and considerable discretion is allowed to lower levels to experiment, so long as they do not transgress broad guidelines from Beijing. Indeed, officials in Beijing pay great attention to such experiments, monitoring them diligently to see what works and what does not. As a result, central policy can evolve remarkably rapidly, as indeed it has and continues to do with regard to labour.

For example, one consequence of the law protecting employment contracts has been a rapid growth in the use of employment agencies by firms trying to procure cheaper labour. As a result, a year ago restrictions on the ratio of agency to regular workers who could be employed were introduced. Now the government is concerned that the same cheap labour objective is being pursued by firms outsourcing to less than reputable sub-contract firms. Policy-makers elsewhere will smile wryly, because the same problem and similar legal action, and similar reaction, have been issues in both the European Union and Japan in the past five years. Where markets rule, legislators seeking to protect workers’ rights always face a moving target.

Another aspect of the efforts of the Beijing government to reduce income inequalities is its use of statutory minimum wages. First introduced in 1994, and at different levels in different provinces and cities, these have been raised annually, apart from during the economic crisis year of 2008. But so rapid has been the growth of the economy that until recently minimum wage rates were still falling relative to average earnings.

Now, a strategic policy change means that they have started to improve in relative terms, and while statutory minimum wages in the developing world are often more ignored than observed, it is notable that in China their percentage spread between provinces has been narrowing. Doubtless, despite intensive lobbying from lowerpaying western provinces seeking to attract foreign investment, central government seems determined to combat increasing inequality.

Meanwhile, experimentation with collective bargaining continues, within annual guidelines for pay rises set by the central planners. Included in the experimentation are different forms of worker representation, often partial, often with management

A feature of the 2010 strike wave was the pragmatic way in which union and government officials enabled representatives of the striking workers to argue their case

Above: Manufacturing #2 Shift Change, Yuyuan Shoe Factory, Gaobu Town, Guangdong Province, China, 2004

Right: Manufacturing #17 Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005

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centrally involved, but with serious votes and stories of elected representatives pressured to stand-down by dissatisfied constituents. Perhaps most interesting is the evidence that these processes are modifying management actions. For example, worker representatives are reported on occasion to have achieved better pay rises for their less skilled colleagues than the employers initially proposed. What is significant is not so much whether such behaviour is typical – it is probably not – but that it is permitted and, indeed, that union officials are increasingly acting as mediators to achieve agreement.

As one interested in the history as well as the economics of labour, I find the echoes of past industrialisation fascinating. When nineteenth century western European employers in the same region and industrial sector – say manufacturing garments, or ceramics – found themselves competing for scarce labour, they tried to bring order to chaotic and unsettling bidding and counter-bidding by forming employer associations and agreeing a scale of pay rates among themselves.

From there it was a short step, and one often guided by government, to negotiate with a trade union committee representing workers at the companies affected.

Faced with similar circumstances, in a seminal policy statement in 2009, the Chinese trade union organisation decreed that local sectoral wage bargaining was central to its strategy. In terms of pay bargaining institutions, this is of fundamental importance. Developed economies in the west generally started collective bargaining in this way, but met a fork in the road.

Some – for example the United States and Britain – have increasingly let individual firms go their own way, closing down their employers’ associations and either dealing with unions separately or, ignoring them altogether. But other countries – including most in western Europe – maintained sectoral bargaining, partly as a way of sustaining robust training arrangements and sectoral minimum wages, and they did so with substantial legislative support. This is not to suggest that China is heading towards some version of Scandinavian industrial social partnership. But the Chinese government does seem to be committed to a legally-backed form of local, sector-based industrial governance with representative worker involvement.

The implications are fascinating.

China’s workers have some interesting challenges ahead. Partly as a result of the single-child policy, the working age population of China will peak in 2015.

Migration from the countryside is dwindling. Labour is going to become more scarce. On the other hand, Chinese entrepreneurs are beginning to respond to rising wages at home by outsourcing work to Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia and elsewhere. A workforce which, in international terms, will be both highly educated and increasingly well-paid will want to be involved in the government of its working life. Remarkably rapidly, and in a spirit of experimentation and consensus, China is working out how this might be done. The only certainty? That the solution will be uniquely Chinese.

China’s workers have some interesting challenges ahead.

Chinese entrepreneurs are responding to rising wages by outsourcing work to Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia

Above: Manufacturing #11 Youngor Textiles, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005

Below: Urban Renewal #6 Apartment Complex, JiangjunAo, Hong Kong, 2004

The photographs shown are from the book China by Edward Burtynsky in which he documents the remnant and newly established zones of Chinese industrialization.

Professor William Brown lectured at the 2013 Alumni Festival.

He is Emeritus Master of Darwin College and Honorary Professor at Renmin University of China.

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All collectors are obsessive; but some entomologists are prepared to go to greater lengths than most, as Lucy Jolin discovers.

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ntomologist Dr Henry Disney was collecting insects in the British Honduras (now Belize) rainforest when the jumping ferde-lance snake reared up. “It just missed me,” he remembers.

“I knew that I mustn’t take my eyes off it, otherwise it would vanish.

So I stood there swearing and gazing at it. I said to my assistant: ‘I want the mid-rib of a cohune palm, stripped of its leaflets, please’.

It’s very long and very flexible, you see. So with that I whacked the snake, cut off its head with a machete and skinned it.”

Disney was attempting to find the insect carrier for Leishmania mexicana, a parasite that causes leishmaniasis, an unpleasant disease characterised by skin sores and fever. It took several years and an encounter with a puma, but he eventually found his vector – a species of tiny sandfly. Entomologists, may, as Disney says, need nine lives, but they are rarely bored.

The rainforest seems a long way from the University Museum of Zoology, where Dr Disney is senior research associate and where more than a thousand of his specimens – gathered over a career spanning more than 50 years – are stored. A faint smell of naphthalene (mothballs, now consigned to history by health and safety regulations) still hangs around the neat racks of mahogany cabinets, each containing hundreds of specimens, dried, pinned and neatly labelled. The place is a testament to the zeal of those who scour tropical swamps, rainforests and marshes in search of their prey – from the giant stick insects of South America to the tiny ruby-tailed wasps of southern Britain.

Left: Grasshopper

Right: Praying mantis

Insect hunters Photographs Jonathan Gregson

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Insect collecting was once merely a fashionable pursuit for Victorian gentleman. But there has always been a gulf between those who simply collected, and those who sought out – and continue to seek out – new species of insects for scientific purposes. Renowned biologist EO Wilson calls insects “the little things that run the world”. It’s true, says Dr Ed Turner, affiliated researcher in the Insect Ecology Group at the Museum. “Insects play an important role in many of the world’s major ecosystem functions, such as pollination, which in turn is responsible for more than 30 per cent of the world’s food production.

They break up and help to decompose natural organic matter. They are food for a lot of bigger animals – swallow chicks have to eat tens of thousands of insects before they fledge. They carry malaria and a whole host of other human and animal diseases.” In other words, they underpin everything.

Charles Darwin began as a collector and ended up as a scientist.

But he found that even in Cambridgeshire, beetle hunting was not without its challenges. In a letter to his friend Leonard Jenyns in 1846, he related how a beetle defended itself against his marauding collector’s hand. “Under a piece of bark I found two carabi (I forget which) & caught one in each hand, when lo & behold I saw a sacred Panagæus crux major; I could not bear to give up either of my Carabi, & to lose Panagæus was out of the question, so that in despair I gently seized one of the carabi between my teeth, when to my unspeakable disgust & pain the little inconsiderate beast squirted his acid down my throat & I lost both Carabi & Panagus!”

Nonetheless, Darwin remembered this time fondly. “But when he looked back, he didn’t think that highly of it as a scientific activity,” says Dr Alison Pearn, associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project. “He thought collecting was box ticking, without any sense of trying to understand the material.” Context, as well as observation and arrangement, should be vital.

“In what’s called an autobiographical fragment – written primarily for his family, though opinions differ as to whether he thought it would be published – he actually said: ‘But no procedure at Cambridge has ever given me so much pleasure as collecting beetles ... it was the mere

passion for collecting. I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters and published descriptions’,” Pearn explains.

“So he saw collecting for the sake of collecting as a dead end. It wasn’t a truly scientific activity. As a mature scientist, it is observation and arrangement that’s really important.”

Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace lost four years’ worth of insects carefully collected in the Amazonian rainforest when the brig Helen, carrying him home in July 1852, caught fire. Wallace spent 10 days adrift in a boat before finally being picked up by another ship bound for Cuba. (He made up for it, going on to collect more than 80,000 beetles in the Malay Archipelago. Some of his specimens, with their characteristic round labels, are also in the Museum.)

Today’s entomologists have better transport, and consequently worry less about starving, or shark attacks. But in many respects, insect collectors of the modern age face the same challenges as Wallace – primarily, how do you find and catch the things? “You have to think a bit differently,” says Disney. “Go off down different avenues.”

First, choose your bait. On his Beagle voyage, Darwin took advantage of natural baits including dung, carrion, fungi and the contents of spiders’ webs. Disney used humans. Previous work seeking the leishmaniasis vector had used humans sitting still as bait, but had failed to demonstrate that the main man-biting species was transmitting the parasite. However, Disney recorded the number of the species biting people engaged in activity in the forest. One species, caught in small numbers on static humans, was more frequently caught on active humans. Further experiments by Disney’s colleague, Paul Williams, involved human bait walking around while an assistant with a stick stirred the leaves on the forest floor. The sandfly lived under those leaves; when disturbed, it bit. And that in turn is why leishmaniasis is a disease of forest workers such as mahogany hunters and chicleros, workers who collect the chicle sap from sapodilla trees used to make chewing gum.

Turner, who has collected in both the rainforests of Malaysia (where he discovered a new species of stick insect, Orthomeria turnerii) and the chalk grasslands of Bedfordshire, says that collecting in the UK is, Left: Dragonfly

Right: Stag beetle

The Museum of Zoology will reopen, after extensive refurbishment, in 2016. museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk

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Far right: Digger wasp

unsurprisingly, easier – and that methods have barely changed since the heyday of the Victorian gentleman collector. “It’s like a holiday,” he says. “You rarely have to collect butterflies on grasslands at all, or use bait. You just net them. I worked on a project looking at how insects respond to changes in temperature. I just had to take their temperature with a tiny thermometer that you touch on their thoraxes and measure them. We didn’t have to hurt or kill them, because they are so easy to identify.”

But in general, once you have trapped your specimens, they must be killed. “It seems a bit harsh,” says Dr William Foster, curator of insects at the Museum. “But you need specimens. Insects are not like birds.

You can’t always rely on observation of the living animal to identify them. You may have to look at them in more detail – and for this it is sometimes necessary to kill them.”

Hard-bodied insects are put in the “killing jar”, a glass jar with a seal. A killing agent is added – such as ethyl acetate – the lid is placed on, and then it’s just a matter of waiting. Soft-bodied insects are kept in jars of alcohol. The Museum keeps several fine specimens of termites, still in their original jars from 1897.

The biggest problem an insect collector is likely to encounter, however, is other insects. Particularly in the rainforest, any dead insect will instantly attract other hungry predators. Foster recalls a colleague who left his dragonfly specimens out on a table in the Sumatran rainforest and lost them all to foraging ants. Tick larvae, says Disney, are extremely irritating. “I’d get home, strip off my clothes, then my wife would extract them from my skin with forceps and dump them in some kerosene. The locals used to swab themselves with kerosene all over. I preferred the first method.”

But the hazards from fellow insects do not stop there. Most hardbodied specimens are dried, pinned, and then placed in display cabinets. Very small insects are kept between glass slides. But the tiny museum beetle Anthrenus museorum attacks dried materials, including insects, stuffed birds and mammals. Beetles like it are endemic in museums. Using pesticide to kill the beetle is now banned, so collections must instead be frozen for three days at -28 degrees in order

to kill any larvae. (“I was a great fan of these yellow chemical oblongs we used to hang up, Vapona, they were called,” Foster says wistfully.

“Sadly, they weren’t very good for people.”)

Sometimes it is necessary to study live insects. These are as good at escaping, as the museum beetle is at getting into places. Foster remembers a particularly tortuous process securing the permits necessary to bring a species of bamboo-dwelling aphid over from West Malaysia. An official visited his office to check that all was well. “She noticed that my desk was crawling with tiny baby aphids.

That didn’t go down very well.”

Insects are, by their very nature, ephemeral. Not for them the hundred-year lifespan of Darwin’s tortoises. The mayfly, famously, is born, mates and dies within the space of a day. Entomologists seek to capture these most fleeting of lives, these billions of births and deaths that are going on around us every day, untold, unseen.

It’s perhaps telling that one of the most valuable collections at the Museum, says Foster, does not contain the flashy butterflies beloved of so many Victorian collectors, nor enormous wasps nests, but distinctly unspectacular ladybirds. They are tiny things, perfectly preserved.

Look closely and you will see miniscule differences – fewer spots or variations in colour. But most of them look exactly the same to the untrained eye. These are primary type specimens, all collected in the mid-19th century by entomologist George Robert Crotch who died of tuberculosis aged just 32. Any proposed new species must be compared against these types. Some are rare, some are easily found, but all are important.

“For a museum insect collection, the common things – somewhat paradoxically – can be more interesting than a lot of rare butterflies from the same site,” says Foster. “Common things often tell you more about the world. If it’s something incredibly rare, you tend to get the same kind of beetles from the one place they are known to occur.

You don’t really find much out. Whereas because the common things are everywhere, when their patterns change it tells you a lot about the ecology or climate change. Eighty to 90 per cent of animals are insects.

You’re always going to come across them. It’s what zoology is.”

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Imperial War Museum

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est we forget: three little words murmured every Remembrance Sunday. A century on from the outbreak of the Great War, there seems little danger of forgetting. The government is planning a large programme of commemorative events and a veritable barrage of books and films will target every possible centenary between now and 2018. We have no chance of forgetting, but what chance we understand?

Away from the rhetoric of remembrance, the Great War is being reinterpreted in challenging new ways. As part of a modern thirty years’ war that redrew the map of Europe. As the trigger for a succession of anti-colonial revolts, from Egypt to China, that began the rollback of centuries of Europe’s global hegemony. As the start of a process of women’s empowerment that was one of the great historical novelties of the 20th century. And so on.

Yet British remembrance of the Great War seems stuck in the trenches – literally and metaphorically. The period between 1914-18 evokes images of mud and blood, of young men sent to their deaths for no purpose by boneheaded, upper-class generals: the interpreters of this war experience are not historians but a few soldier poets, supremely Wilfred Owen.

There are, of course, many ways to interpret a war, and none is intrinsically right. What’s interesting is why the gulf between popular stereotypes and academic perceptions of 1914-18 has become so vast.

A simple answer to the question of why the British image of the war remains stuck in the trenches might be the death toll. More than 720,000 British soldiers were killed in 1914-18 – making it the most devastating war in British military history. But around 250,000 British people died from influenza in 1918-19; the global death toll of that pandemic was somewhere between 50 and 100 million – far more than the estimated 10 million war deaths.

A better explanation may be the names of dead soldiers that are inscribed for posterity on war memorials in towns and villages across Britain and along the old Western Front in France and Belgium.

This naming was novel. Most of the soldiers who died at Waterloo in 1815, like those at Agincourt in 1415, were dumped anonymously in mass graves. Only a few officers were brought home by wealthy families for decorous, personalised burial. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, corpses were treated “as beseems their worth”.

This changed in the Great War. From almost the start of the conflict, bodies were collected, identified and recorded. The novelty of identity discs made this possible for the first time, but the project would not have been undertaken without the vision and drive of a now little-known journalist and educator called Fabian Ware.

Too old to serve, Ware volunteered as an ambulance driver in France, where he was appalled at the random carnage and began a one-man crusade to register and tend the soldiers’ graves. His legacy was the Imperial War Graves Commission, established in 1917.

All of the belligerent countries faced unprecedented challenges in dealing with mass death in the age of industrialised warfare, but the philosophy of Ware and his Commission was distinctive.

They insisted that the bodies should not be brought home, mainly on grounds of cost, and they stuck to this policy even if families could afford to pay because they realised such special treatment would be deeply resented. Interestingly, the French government took a similar line but popular outcry forced it to relent and eventually nearly a third of France’s identified war dead were reinterred in family graves.

Most of the remainder, who had died defending their homeland, were buried on French soil.

By contrast, British Tommies were laid to rest in foreign fields, despite vociferous protest from relatives. “Many thousands of

LEST WE FORGET Britain’s war memorials, at home and abroad, have significantly shaped the way we remember the Great War, says Professor David Reynolds.

Left: To the Unknown British Soldier in France

by Sir William Orpen

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Ware’s project of war commemoration was, I think, Mothers and Wives are slowly dying for want of Each soldier was an extension of these new wartime attitudes to democthe Grave of their loved ones to visit and tend themto have his own racy. Equality in death, as in life, required having selves,” one petition informed the Queen, “and grave, designed a name. Hence the immense efforts undertaken to record we feel deeply hurt that the right granted to other countries is denied us.” in a standardised even the names of the missing, as on the great Somme memorial at Thiepval designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Although statist, Ware’s approach was also way, and no architect of the Cenotaph. fundamentally democratic. Each soldier was to have distinction was This massive state project to give nobility and his own grave, designed in a standardised way even meaning to industrialised carnage resulted in if the family could afford something grander, and made between nearly a thousand architect-designed cemeteries and no distinction was made between a general and a general memorials, running like a ribbon through Belgium and a private. The Commission insisted on a plain and and a private France. The total bill was £8.15m, about twice the cost uniform headstone rather than a Christian cross. of a single day’s shelling in the last weeks of the war – This suited the Empire’s religious diversity and burying was much cheaper than killing. But, measured would be more durable against the elements, while against the different fiscal arithmetic of peacetime, also allowing extra room for name, rank, regiment the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission and date of death. Next of kin were allowed constituted one of the biggest government construction to supply a short inscription but the wording projects of the 1920s, eclipsing the modern stations was checked to avoid allowing “free scope for the of the London Underground or the programme of new effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental telephone exchanges. versifier, or the crank”.

And so, on the graves in Belgium and France and on war meThe apparent “tyranny” of the War Graves Commission aroused morials all across Britain, not to mention the walls of College chapels, a storm of protest. The sculptor Eric Gill called standardised these names stand out. But who were these men? What kind of headstones a “Prussian imposition”. In parliament, Lord Robert people were they? Sometimes clues can be gleaned from letters home, Cecil observed that during peacetime those “closest to the deceased” still preserved in a family attic, or among army personnel records were left to decide on the form of memorialisation, so why in the National Archives at Kew, but much is left tantalisingly should it be any different in wartime? “Right through the Graves to the imagination. Hence the popular appeal of war novels such as Commission,” Cecil fumed, “is the conception of a national Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, monument” adding that this was an “entirely novel idea”. Never which try to bring the dead to life. It is perhaps the enduring presence before had the state claimed “a right to turn the individual memorials of the names, combined with their fundamental anonymity, that to individual persons into a national memorial against the will and makes them so arresting. So near, yet so far, and so many. against the desire of their relatives”.

Despite all the hopes, the war of 1914-18 did not prove the war But Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, supported the to end war. After 1945, new graves were constructed in the old way Commission in seeking to give the dead soldiers “memorials on new battlefields, at home more names were added to local war which will last for hundreds of years”. It would console relatives, memorials, almost as a postscript. But this time victory was clear-cut he declared, to know that even “the humblest soldier” would be and gained at roughly half the cost in British lives. This cast a different remembered by name “through periods so remote that probably all light on the conflict that had previously been known as the Great the other memorials of this time will have faded and vanished away”.

War: it became the first world war, an inconclusive precursor to the This was an enduring memory of a sort previously possible only for second, which was celebrated as Britain’s “finest hour”. monarchs and aristocrats.

Perhaps it is natural that problematic wars are memorialised in Even where the body parts could not be identified, the remains terms of cost rather than achievement. For instance, American were given dignity. Anonymous French graves bore crosses with the monuments to the second world war – which transformed the United stark word “Inconnu”, whereas the British headstones included States into a superpower — are generally heroic: a classic example what details could be gleaned about rank, regiment and date of death, is the memorial outside Washington DC, with US marines raising plus the words “Known unto God”. This phrase was proposed the stars and stripes on top of hard-won Iwo Jima. But the official

by Rudyard Kipling, who also suggested the quotation “Their Name memorial to the Vietnam war – which ripped cold war America apart Liveth for Evermore”, from Ecclesiasticus, for the Stone of and remains hard to justify or even explain – is simply a list of some Remembrance in each cemetery.

58,000 American dead, etched into highly reflective black stone, Kipling worked indefatigably for the Commission, perhaps in so that the visitor sees his or her face when tracing the name of expiation for his conduct during the patriotic fervour of 1914 when a buddy or relative. The memorial is at once intensely abstract and he pulled strings to get a commission for his acutely short-sighted son. yet deeply personal, the encounter of the living with the dead through Jack Kipling was last seen, half his face blown off, stumbling in agony the mystery of names. It is, I think, no accident that the inspiration on the battlefield of Loos. Like Fabian Ware, Rudyard Kipling was for Maya Lin, its young Chinese-American architect, was Lutyens’ an old man chastened by what war had done to a younger generation, Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. many of whom were volunteer soldiers. The continental states Vietnam is still a recent scar for Americans, fifty years young, operated from the start with conscript armies, but Britain did not whereas all the wartime Tommies have now passed away. The soldiers impose conscription until 1916. Some 2.5 million British men of 1914 are, in fact, now as remote in time to us as they were to volunteered to fight, 43 per cent of those who served in the British the Redcoats who fought Napoleon at Waterloo. The centenary of the Army in 1914-18.

The fact that millions had freely chosen to fight – including many Great War in 2014-18 is a chance to move out of the long shadows of those who died on the Somme – left a profound impression. cast by those names and see the conflict in broader terms. It is time It certainly changed the terms of political debate, making it almost not only to remember, but also to understand. impossible by 1918 to resist demands for universal male suffrage, even for property-less workers. “What property would any man have in this country if it were not for the soldiers and sailors who are David Reynolds is Professor of International History and a Fellow of Christ’s. fighting our battles,” declared Sir Edward Carson. “If a man is good His new book, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century, enough to fight for you, he is good enough to vote for you.” is published by Simon & Schuster on 7 November.

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CV 1988 BA in Natural Sciences, King’s

1997 Secondment to ICI plc

1992 PhD in Chemistry, King's

2001/2 George T. Piercy Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota

1992 Research Fellowship, King's 1993 European Human Capital and Mobility Fellowship, held at ILL, Grenoble and LURE, Paris

2011 Readership, Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology

1995 Lectureship, Department of Chemical Engineering; Fellow of King's

Diffuse interests Dr Geoff Moggridge is using his fascination with how substances mix together in diverse and potentially life-changing ways.

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t’s like being five years old again, as my questions spill out: “Why is the sky blue?” “What happens when Ribena goes into water?” “Doesn’t all chocolate melt in your mouth?”

The answers are: (i) Because the sky contains fluctuating pockets of different densities of gas – the denser pockets, which best scatter the light, tend to be small and so scatter shorter-wavelength light, which is blue; (ii) Clumps of water molecules will sit alongside clumps of Ribena molecules down to a scale of 50 micrometres, and then on a much tinier scale the two liquids diffuse into each other; and (iii) No. Cocoa butter possesses six crystalline forms and only one of them, Form V, is optimal for melting in a human mouth.

Good-humouredly fielding these questions is Dr Geoff Moggridge, Reader in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Tying all his answers together, and running like a thread through Moggridge’s work, is his fascination with understanding how – at a molecular level – substances mix.

The result is a remarkably diverse career, encompassing analysis of the flow properties of Marmite (the spread is “complex and non-Newtonian”) and the x-raying of chocolate bars, as well as the development of artificial heart valves potentially superior to any now on the market. But currently occupying Moggridge’s attention, when he’s not engaged with such hands-on projects, is his attempt to solve a puzzle that has intrigued Words Victoria James Photograph Marcus Ginns

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researchers since Victorian times and which Einstein himself explored a century ago: the mysteries of the process of diffusion.

Quite apart from its pedigree – other scientists to have studied diffusion include Robert Boyle and James Clerk Maxwell – the phenomenon lies at the very heart of Moggridge’s discipline. “If you were to ask what defines chemical engineering,” he says, “I’d say heat transfer, mass transfer and thermodynamics. Mass transfer is such a fundamental part of chemical engineering that it must be valuable to fully understand diffusion, which is part of it.”

Diffusion can be characterised in two ways: bulk diffusion, which is the overall movement of molecules of two substances into one another; and self diffusion, which is the movement of any given individual molecule.

Moggridge is interested in relating these processes, as they occur in so-called “non-ideal” liquids. In an “ideal” liquid – say a mixture of A and B – the bonds between the molecules of each component liquid (A+A and B+B) are of equal strength to those between molecules of the mixed liquid (A+B). Diffusion in these circumstances has been explored and robustly theorised. But in non-ideal liquids – either those in which A and B will barely bond at all, or much rarer substances in which A and B bond to each other more strongly than to their own kind – the process remains enigmatic.

Moggridge’s interest was piqued when – as he disarmingly puts it – “I realised that what I’d been teaching my students was wrong.” More accurately, he realised that various concepts core to chemical engineering are really only approximations for the particular process he was interested in. You don’t need to understand the chemical terminology to recognise this pursuit of the specific hidden behind the general as he explains it: “I’d been teaching my students about concentration gradients, but [in the diffusion of non-ideal liquids], the concentration gradient is just an approximation for the chemical potential gradient. Then you suddenly realise even that is only an approximation of what’s happening near the critical point – and that seemed very interesting indeed.”

The puzzle of how non-ideal liquids diffuse is so interesting, in fact, that Moggridge admits it occupies his thoughts “even when gardening or in the shower. Sometimes I’m drawing pictures, other times writing, doing spreadsheets, or collecting ancient data”.

Much of the primary data used for his calculations comes from the lab of Professor Lynn Gladden, the University’s Pro-ViceChancellor for Research and, he says enthusiastically, “the top person using nuclear magnetic resonance in chemical engineering in Britain, probably the world”.

But another rich source of the very precise datasets his investigations need are experiments performed decades ago. “There was a rash of enthusiasm for looking at this in the 1950s and 1960s, so I do a lot of trawling through libraries, really obscure ones.” Draw-

Drawing pictures and poring over dusty texts in hidden libraries – it’s all a long way from how most of us imagine chemical engineers work

ing pictures, and poring over dusty texts in hidden libraries like some Dan Brown hero – it’s all a long way from how most of us imagine chemical engineers work.

If he cracks the puzzle of how non-ideal liquids diffuse, Moggridge says he’ll be deeply satisfied to have solved a mystery that lies at the heart of his discipline. And yet he cheerfully admits that should he succeed, “the number of people in the world who’ll care will be tiny. You won’t switch on the TV and hear about it”.

B

ut Moggridge has another project on the go that you may well hear about on the TV, perhaps within the next couple of years. He heads a team aiming to develop an artificial heart valve that promises to drastically improve patient quality of life. This project is also driven by a fascination with how substances mix, and how they can be made to mix more effectively.

At present, two types of artificial valves are available. There are rigid, inorganic ones made from pyrolytic carbon, which are very durable but also tough on the blood, which leads to a risk of clotting and means patients are required to take blood-thinning drugs. Or there are more natural and effective organic valves fashioned from the pericardium of pigs or cows and shaped on a metal stent – but these are dead tissue, chemically preserved, and have a limited lifespan necessitating replacement after 15 years.

Could there, wondered Moggridge, be a way of creating a valve with the best qualities of both? It took him back to non-ideal mixtures – in this case, mixtures of polymers (any molecule formed of monomer subunits, examples being synthetic plastics and DNA) – to produce “block copolymers”. “You stick molecules together with chemical bonds so they can’t separate, so you get chains of molecules that sit in structures: little chains, tubes or lamelli [flat plane shapes]. If you choose the right polymers you can have one that is hard and long and thin, and one that is

springy and rubbery in a matrix, and put them together.” Such a combination would deliver both the flexible efficiency of an organic valve and the durability of an inorganic one.

It’s an idea that has attracted media attention, brought about a collaboration with a lab in Milan that has modelled the stress distribution in the valves, and secured a three-year grant from the British Heart Foundation. The second half of 2014 should see the first live trials of the team’s block copolymeric valves in a test group of pigs.

Moggridge is plainly fascinated by the intricacies of design, fetching his laptop to show me the stress analysis modelling. The 3D image of a valve rotates on the computer screen; the aorta is circular in cross section, but the valve has three lobes, like some exotic carnivorous plant. As a result, there are areas of pressure near the corners of the lobe-flaps, where the blood must push hardest to get through. “You see,” he says eagerly, pointing at the screen, “you need an anisotropic physical property. That’s something that’s more stretchy in one direction than the other,” he adds, seeing my bewilderment.

After the pigs, the next stage is human patients. “That’s not close enough yet to be scary,” he says, “but if the pig trials go really well then I’ll probably be thinking: ‘Oh my god, they’re actually going to be putting this into somebody.’”

“I really like having the two projects,” says Moggridge, explaining that these very different investigations have a shared root in his fascination with how things mix. “There’s one where I can read papers from 1912 about diffusion and that’s fun, and it’s pure, but if I did only that I’d sit there wondering what on earth is my point in life. So it’s great to have a balancing project that is completely the opposite, which is entirely driven by the challenge to make a product that’s better than all the existing ones and which if it worked would really make a difference to people’s lives.”

There’s another project of Moggridge’s that also reveals his interest in structure and design – a new-build house that is the culmination of a decade of planning by its proud owner. It stands tall next to the bridge across from Midsummer Common, deep in college boathouse territory. It’s a striking building that, while occupying a relatively modest footprint, opens up room after room of airy space. “I’d lived in the Gibbs Building in [King’s] College before,” he explains. “[It has] very high ceilings, so you become accustomed to a sense of space.”

The house was created by Cambridge architects Freeland Rees Roberts, with Moggridge closely involved in the design process. The use of split levels means it looks almost like two towers, bonded together.

It’s beautifully proportioned – which is more than a little ironic for the home of a scholar dedicated to understanding non-ideal structures.

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Theborrowers In 1946, ex-RAF officer and fresher Bill Howell had an idea: a student lending library for contemporary art.

S

Words Penelope Rance Photographs Alun Callender

Henk Snoek / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

William Howell pictured in 1961.

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Opposite page: Professor Martin Daunton, Master of Trinity Hall, and Dr Claire Daunton Chestnut Forest

by Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) This painting was acquired from the artist in 1952 and was presented to the Fitzwilliam Museum when the Trust ended.

Professor Daunton says: “Just before we moved into the Lodge we were at an exhibition of Hitchens’ paintings in Sussex.

We also went to the Pallant House gallery in Chichester, where there were many on display. We both said it would be excellent to have one in the Lodge – and when we went to the store at the Fitzwilliam, there it was! I like his ‘romantic modern’ representation of the English countryside, which brings back memories of walks in the country in the autumn.”

earch the internet for the Cambridge Contemporary Art Trust (CCAT) and your screen will quickly fill with links to Kettle’s Yard and the many smaller galleries and local artists specialising in contemporary art in Cambridge. Although somewhat buried in the online record, the CCAT laid the foundation for them all, and without it, the history of modern art in the city would be very different.

Late-1940s Cambridge was a place of change in a world of austerity. A flood of ex-servicemen made for a worldly student body, keen to get on with their lives after the hiatus of the second world war, and term dates were staggered to accommodate them. In 1947 the Ministry of Education expanded the number of scholarships and local authority awards became more generous, making university education accessible to a generation eager to embrace it.

University societies were revived, and interest in the arts – particularly literary and theatrical – blossomed. The Fine Arts Society was well established, but the preference there was for old masters; there was no place at Cambridge for contemporary art.

Then in 1946, ex-RAF officer Bill (WG) Howell arrived at Caius to read architecture, bringing with him a passion for modern British art. He conceived a lending scheme, the first of its kind in Cambridge, in which subscribers would be entitled to borrow an original artwork for a term. At the end of this period, they would return the piece and select another.

Throughout 1947, Howell and his colleagues established a collection for the CCAT. Howell himself contributed half a dozen works, which remain in his family, including pictures by Charles Ginner and William Scott. Other pieces were borrowed or bought from artists. Howell wrote to the painter John Piper and said:

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Top left: Simon Hilton Still Life

by Tony Bartl (1912-1998) Czech Tony Bartl’s work was exhibited by The Hilton Gallery, an early champion of contemporary art in Cambridge and a supporter of the CCAT. This is one of two of Bartl paintings the Hilton Gallery lent to the Trust. They appear in the exhibition catalogue for January 1948. “It’s a painting I grew up with and which was always part of a relaxing environment and hopefully still is,” says Hilton.

Left: James Howell (Fitzwilliam 1979) Deputy Director of Development at Caius Cranmer Hall, Croydon

by Barbara Jones (1912-1978)

“Barbara Jones was my godmother and a great family friend. One of the things I love about this picture is the idea of Barbara discovering the hall, and her excitement to paint it before it fell down.

I’m now at Caius where my father studied and it¹s amusing to think that in 1948 he eyed up a picture for the collection that is now on my wall.”

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Above: Professor Koen Steemers (Darwin 1987) Head of the Department of Architecture Head in Hand

by Henry Moore 1898-1986) The CCAT ended in 1962 with a selling exhibition.

With the proceeds from this sale, the Trust’s last President, Robin Spence (Queens’ 1959), went to visit Henry Moore to acquire something by which the Trust could be remembered. Moore suggested this bronze maquette called Head in Hand. Spence designed a small tubular stand, made

by McKays of Cambridge, so that the piece could be displayed in the School of Architecture.

“I want to see this scheme as an outright effort at group patronage ... at first we will buy modestly, always direct from artists … youngsters of talent who can produce pictures which will effect some response from their contemporaries … I feel our crying need is to get some decent modern pictures in Cambridge where they will be seen.”

Howell arranged loans from renowned collectors, including the director of the National Gallery Sir Kenneth Clark and Winston Churchill’s private secretary Sir Edward Marsh. He sent Clark a leaflet outlining the scheme. In it, he noted: “The undergraduates have responded with great interest and enthusiasm.” The leaflet stated that: “In return for a modest subscription, any person living in Cambridge, whether in the town or University, will be able to have an original piece on his own wall; and thus will have an ideal opportunity to enjoy and appreciate works by our contemporary artists.” The cost of a subscription was £2.

The ambition of the CCAT for acquiring quality art was remarkable. “It was a whole generation of sparky undergraduates who’d been through the war, survived, and wanted to build a brave new world,” says Charles Howell, Bill’s eldest son. “They contacted the great and the good, and upcoming artists, brazenly asking to borrow their paintings. In that period the art world was smaller – you could just ask people to help.”

Initial patrons included Anthony Blunt, famed as an art historian before being outed as a spy, Henry Moore, and Professor of Archaeology AW Lawrence, brother of TE Lawrence and an expert on classical sculpture. In November 1947, Varsity reported that “the CCAT now has 50 pictures”, along with the news an exhibition was to taken place the following term. The trust had built a membership among students and younger dons, and had subscriptions from the University Press, School of Agriculture and several junior combination rooms. In January 1948, the first exhibition was held in Trinity Junior Parlour, the “least likely place for an exhibition”, says Sam Phillips, Howell’s daughter-in-law. About 80 pictures were crammed in, among them work by Lucian Freud, John Craxton, Ronald Searle, Kenneth Rowntree and Mary Kessell.

In December 1948, Howell wrote to Clark again, and this time said: “The Trust is flourishing. We now have over 70 pictures, 35 of which have been lent, like your own, by collectors and friends of the Trust. We have bought 30, and the rest have been presented by artists or friends … we have sold three pictures so far, and will now buy new pictures from the same artists.”

Howell related his experience of visiting Oxford, where Pembroke College had set up its own lending scheme: “Lucky Oxford to be able to get official sanction and even support for such a scheme. I am persuading the Cambridge boys to keep at their college authorities to try and emulate Pembroke’s example.” He finished with: “Without your advice and support we probably never would have had the nerve to think we could succeed.”

Their nerve was matched only by their determination. Serban Cantacuzino, 1948/9 president, recalls how “Bill Howell did wonders getting hold of pictures. I remember going to the Tate with Eddie Marsh to choose some paintings. I don’t think we thought of it in terms of hard work. It was just a sort of enthusiasm, a love of art and a feeling that contemporary art was very important.”

Sir Alan Bowness, 1952/3 president and later director of the Tate Gallery, expanded the collection: “I wanted to run CCAT because it gave me the opportunity to meet with artists I admired and buy or borrow their work. I bought half a dozen more ‘popular’ pictures.

“In 1952 I went to see Ivon Hitchens with Martin Richardson [president 1951/2]. He was painting landscapes, so we chose Chestnut Forest, and he let us have it for, I think, £30, half the price he would have got from a dealer. He let us have it because it was going to Cambridge for undergraduates.”

By 1958, the Trust owned 48 original works, having recently added Wyn Casbolt’s Quayside and a lithograph of Clare by Michael Rothenstein, part of a number commissioned by the CCAT. Bowness

says: “There was a scheme to have a set of Cambridge lithographs, started by Serban Cantacuzino. John Piper, Kenneth Rowntree and Rothenstein had been asked – I suggested John Minton and Prunella Clough.”

In 1959, the Trust hosted an exhibition by Magda Cordell, Eduardo Paolozzi and John McHale. It was organised by president Robert Freeman, who would become famous for shooting Beatles album covers, including Help and Rubber Soul. “He must have had great contacts in the art world,” says Phillips. “The exhibition was very ‘of the moment’, and considered controversial at the time.”

But by 1962, the CCAT had become unwieldy. Administration was difficult, with membership across the University and the need to find exhibition space each term. “I designed posters, got them printed, arranged the exhibition,” says 1961/2 president, Robin Spence. “It didn’t seem like that much work at the time, but thinking back, it was a lot.”

Senior Treasurer Michael Jaffé, Cambridge’s first History of Art lecturer and later Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, decided to wind up the Trust. A Varsity article reported that: “The Trust preceded the picture loan schemes which most colleges now run themselves. And it now feels its function has been taken on by these. Mr A M Jaffé, the Senior Treasurer, said: ‘The time has come to hand over the task.’ One of its finest possessions, an oil by Ivon Hitchens, will go to the Fitzwilliam Museum in commemoration of the work of the Trust during the past 15 years.”

Howell’s ambition for college schemes was realised – Christ’s and Jesus still run theirs. His broader legacy is that contemporary art has become ingrained in the culture of the University. “Post-war, as far as art, music, culture was concerned, it was tremendously philistine,” says Cantacuzino. “There was no appreciation of modern art. You could say the Trust helped stop England being a philistine nation. I remember people saying how wonderful it was to have a Graham Sutherland hanging on their walls. They came back to exchange and said they were sorry to lose it.”

“There’s nothing like the direct contact between the work of art and the owner or borrower,” says Bowness. “It gave people the opportunity to own something, or at least look at it. The culture in Cambridge in the early fifties was very literary, not very visual. We were a lone voice.”

By the 1960s, attitudes had changed, in part due to Jim Ede opening up Kettle’s Yard as a gallery in 1958. Robin Spence says of that time: “Modern art was part of the culture at Cambridge. The CCAT made good modern art accessible to anybody at a reasonable price.”

But what of the pictures? Hitchens’s Chestnut Forest remains in the Fitzwilliam’s collection; Spence has a Georges Braque lithograph; and the Howell family still owns Bill’s collection. An internet search throws up a sole example – Keith Vaughan’s Still Life with Greengages and Yellow Cup was auctioned by Bonham’s in 2011 for £42,000.

Those pieces owned by the CCAT were sold, realising £750. Spence recalls: “Michael Jaffé asked me to [use that money to] commission a work of art as a record of the CCAT, a lasting piece the University could benefit from. I approached Henry Moore and explained my mission.

He came up with a bronze maquette of a face and hands, and said he’d let me have it for £750, although it was worth more.

“I was delighted. I arranged for it to be displayed in the School of Architecture, because I was a student there. I designed a bracket which cantilevered from the wall under the roof lights by the Head of School’s room. It looked brilliant, but it’s in storage now.”

As an architect, Bill Howell is best remembered for the Young Vic, the Cambridge Graduate Centre and St Anne’s in Oxford. He returned to Cambridge in 1973 as professor of architecture, but died in a car accident in 1974. While at the Architecture School, he would have walked past the Moore maquette on a regular basis – perhaps unaware that it was a permanent reminder of a revolution he had sparked almost three decades before.

Charles Howell and Sam Phillips plan to tell the story of the CCAT through an exhibition and a publication. If you have recollections or pictures, please contact Ms Phillips at phillips.sam@btconnect.com

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Jill Calder

University matters My Cambridge Reading list Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life Prize crossword

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Extracurricular CAM 70 39

Extracurricular

University matters Taking the long view

Jim Spencer

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz is the Vice-Chancellor

ndrew Perne served as Vice-Chancellor of the University five times between 1551 and 1580, a lively period in England’s history. To be an academic leader at Cambridge in those days was to be a religious leader too, and it was a hazardous time. Perne thrived, though his strategy earned him some ridicule. Protestant under Edward VI, Catholic under Queen Mary and Anglican under Elizabeth, he has been wryly described by modern writers as having demonstrated “ambidexterity” and “ecumenical latitude”. Some contemporaries more pointedly dubbed him “Old Andrew Turncoat”, but he was also one of the fiercest promoters and defenders of this University.

We are fortunate to live in more stable times than Perne: times that separate the function of academia from the functions of religion and national politics. Our choices are no longer about life and death, or about saving our own necks. But we still need to make choices, both as individuals and as an institution.

In this University we enjoy more power over our own choices than almost any other university in the world. We are, it is often said, a self-governing community of scholars. And our institutional autonomy underpins our intellectual freedom, which is the real prize. When we make our own choices, the education and research we produce are at their best.

So to what purpose do we put our valued freedoms of organisation and thought? The answer is simple: they allow us to take the long view. Universities are almost the only institutions with a purpose that requires a long-term perspective. Very few companies have the will and the ability to look decades into the future. Governments may take a long view as stewards of the nation’s interest, but this is tempered by shorter-term political cycles.

We take the long view too in the decisions we make about our own organisation.

So what now are the choices before us?

What do we want our University to look like

A

What do we want our University to look like in 10 or 20 years’ time?

There are three questions we must address in the coming years

in 10 or 20 years’ time? Here, I offer three questions that we must address in the coming years.

The first set of decisions before us concerns our physical growth. The decision to proceed with the construction of North West Cambridge has already been taken, but there will be plenty more choices to make as we develop those plans. The Biomedical Campus around Addenbrooke’s Hospital will soon house the global headquarters of AstraZeneca, and Papworth Hospital is planning a move to the same site.

These developments are a tremendous validation of the global importance of the Cambridge cluster of high-tech industries.

They are complemented by growth more directly initiated by the University. We continue to develop West Cambridge, with a new Sports Centre and a £41 million home for the Department of Materials Science and

Metallurgy. The central sites continue to be developed, notably the Cambridge Conservation Campus.

This growth is good, and is a vote of confidence in Cambridge. And yet we rightly prize Cambridge’s human scale – the unplanned conversations, the coming together of a rich diversity of knowledge and experience, the spark that comes from a collision of ideas from different sorts of minds. The first choice facing us, then, is this: how can we preserve that distinctiveness as we grow?

The second question relates to growth in the Cambridge community. We have made the choice to increase numbers – particularly graduate student numbers – and with that choice comes responsibility. We should take stock of what it implies for teaching quality and assure ourselves that we can provide the same quality of teaching that is the hallmark of our undergraduate provision.

The third question I invite you to consider is how we build our partnership with our benefactors. Without philanthropy, our resources are insufficient; research funding must be complemented by benefaction.

When it comes to creating long-lasting infrastructure, the partnership between academic leaders, donors and the Development Office will create an exceptional opportunity.

Our answers to these three questions – how we grow without losing our distinctiveness, how we educate increasing numbers of students and how we engage with those who choose to support us – will shape what the University looks and feels like in the future. These choices are critical and our responsibility is great. Alumni are encouraged to contribute to these debates.

The wider community trusts us to choose how best we contribute to the world.

Such trust requires a measure of courage, but our record in making good decisions is evidence of our reliability. Our libraries show how Cambridge contributed to national life through the turbulent reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth and emerged strong and with the nation’s confidence. Cambridge shows leadership in national and international society by the active, bold and constant exercise of choice. It is a responsibility we welcome.

The Vice-Chancellor addresses the University every year on 1 October. To read his speech in full please visit www.cam.ac.uk/annualaddress2013.

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Extracurricular

My Cambridge This year marks the 25th anniversary of STIMULUS, the Science, Technology, Informatics and Mathematics Undergraduate Links between University and Schools programme. Three volunteers tell their story.

Interviews Becky Allen Portraits Paddy Mills

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I volunteered for STIMULUS in my second and third years at Cambridge, working at Netherhall School. I was pretty sure I wanted to teach as I had experience working with kids in South America, so I wanted to find out what teaching was like in the UK. You take a lot of things for granted at Cambridge, which is full of very bright people. STIMULUS requires you to shift your expectations – I hadn’t thought how difficult it might be to look at things from the point of view Rob Percival of a year 10 student who isn’t that (Trinity Hall 1999) keen on maths.

But it was very rewarding too.

The kids were always polite, and having a young adult in the class intrigued them. They were interested in what the University was like and it gave them a different perspective, meeting someone who enjoyed studying maths. I don’t know if I changed anyone’s life, but I felt like I was doing something useful.

I've taught maths at Perse Girls for 10 years, and for the past two years I’ve also been the STIMULUS co-ordinator. It’s my type of job – I get to meet lots of young, keen, interesting people, and I can use my IT skills for the admin. I want to attract volunteers from beyond maths and science. We get some history and English students volunteering, but I'd like more. Your average Cambridge historian is good enough to explain maths to a year 7 student.

The best thing for the STIMULUS volunteers is the opportunity to get out of the Cambridge bubble. You can spend three years here without speaking to people outside the University, so going into local schools and helping kids who are struggling with maths is a great opportunity to give something back.

Rob Percival read Mathematics. He now teaches at the Stephen Perse Senior School and is the STIMULUS co-ordinator.

Philipp Legner (St John’s 2009)

My Director of Studies recommended STIMULUS to me.

I thought it sounded fun and I really enjoyed it, so I just kept going.

I starting volunteering during my second term at Cambridge, taking a break during my finals, first at Newnham Croft Primary and then at Sancton Wood, a secondary school.

You can do more interesting, advanced maths at secondary school, but I enjoyed primary more.

Younger children are so much more excited about everything they learn.

And I was impressed by how many difficult mathematical concepts even small children can understand when they’re taught in an enjoyable

and accessible way.

Usually I was able to choose the topics myself. We worked on Maths Olympiad puzzles and fun bits of maths that aren’t part of the curriculum, like Pascal’s triangle and graph theory, which are particularly visual and flexible.

Being a STIMULUS volunteer has taught me to think carefully about even simple maths problems, as well as how kids think about

maths. And it gave me lots of new ideas. It’s very rewarding too, seeing kids not understand something in the morning and then getting it in the afternoon, and being really proud and happy as a result.

My most memorable experience was with a year 8 group.

We did some combinatorics, rolling dice and working out the probability of winning the lottery. I was worried that they didn't understand it, but when I returned the following week the group had produced a huge poster of the work we’d done, with examples from the internet. It was really impressive and I was really pleased.

Philipp Legner read Mathematics. He is doing an MA in Mathematics Education and runs Mathigon – an online collection of educational resources. www.mathigon.org

When I was at school, I liked maths from the beginning, but I saw really gifted people drop out because they weren’t stimulated.

Convincing people that maths isn’t as hard as it seems is really challenging, and I like that. That’s why STIMULUS works so well, because volunteers explain things to students who don’t get it as fast as the rest of the class.

I’ve volunteered at Perse Girls and the Manor School. In private schools it’s more a matter of showing them some of the maths I Carina Negreanu do at university, things that stretch (Queens’ 2010) them. In community schools, it’s more about spotting good students and giving them a push.

One of the students I worked with was clearly extremely bright but not focused. We worked together for several weeks, doing questions in different ways, and maths started to become interesting. GCSEs weren’t a problem anymore and going to university became an option.

I’d like to go into teaching, so STIMULUS is good for me too.

It helps refresh my memory on maths I haven’t used for five years.

I’m doing applied maths, so doing more pure maths through STIMULUS is useful.

STIMULUS has so many good volunteers, really dedicated people who do it year after year. But volunteering has to be about more than your CV. You really have to want to make a difference, it makes me feel like I’m giving something back.

Carina Negreanu is reading Astrophysics, is on the STIMULUS steering committee and has plans to do a PhD.

For more information visit stimulus.maths.org

CAM 70 43

Extracurricular

Readinglist Stephen Pax Leonard

Interview Lucy Jolin Steve Bond

Stephen Pax Leonard Research Fellow, Trinity Hall

I

n 1971 Marie Herbert, her husband explorer Wally Herbert, and their 15-month-old daughter Kari, went to live with the Inugguit, a sub-group of the Inuit, in north-west Greenland. There were no luxuries. The family ate what the Inugguit ate and slept in one of their houses.

It was a tough life. Yet out of this harsh environment came Marie’s book, The Snow People, a gentle, wonderfully observant memoir of an exceptional community – and an exceptional family.

Unlike standard polar exploration yarns, it’s not about personal achievement or grandstanding. Rather, the book focuses on celebrating the Inugguit culture, traditions and community. That’s why anthropological linguist and Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Dr Stephen Pax Leonard, likes it so much – and why, almost 40 years after the book was written, he was inspired to follow in Herbert’s footsteps.

“My father gave me a book about Scott when I was 11 and I became interested in polar exploration throughout my teens,” he says. “Eight years later I was browsing in Baggins, a secondhand bookshop in Rochester. I came upon The Snow People there. It had a huge impact on me.

“It was about an area of the world that I was already interested in. I always preferred the Arctic to Antarctica. I liked the fact that people lived up there in this very hostile climate and the fact that they had their own indigenous culture and way of living.

But it wasn’t like the other books I’d read on polar exploration. It wasn’t macho. On the contrary, it was very much about the community and their interaction with it.

And it was beautifully written.”

From August 2010 to September 2011, Leonard lived in the same settlement that Herbert had written about, even encountering some of the people mentioned in the book. His mission was to document as many of the fast-disappearing customs as possible, such as the drum dances and the storytelling that make up

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People had very fond memories of the Herbert family – not true of the average polar explorer, who tends to turn up unexpectedly, hunt inefficiently and then depart, taking the odd sacred artefact with him

the oral history of the community.

Herbert’s book painted a picture of a people still wedded to the old ways.

Hunters still killed narwhals from kayaks with harpoons, travelled by dog sledge and spoke a language of sighs and groans, with words up to 50 letters long.

But when Leonard arrived at the settlement, he found a conflict between tradition and modernity. The Inugguit still hunted with harpoons. But now their children wandered around the settlement

CAMCard discount at Heffers The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discount is 15%. Shop in person with your CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at: alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/ camcard/bookshops.

Extracurricular

Cambridgesoundtrack Kimberley Rew

Interview Caroline Roberts

Dr Pax Leonard recently read: “I have a volume of TS Eliot’s poetry by my bed. I also have a stack of National Geographics, of course.”

Charlie Troman

with mobile phones, and DVDs of Hollywood films had taken the place of traditional storytelling.

“I felt a sense of guilt of the western mind, because that was often the only aspect that they had of western civilisation, and it isn’t the best thing that we could export,” he says. “You go into people’s homes with no running water and they’re sitting there eating a bowl of seal soup watching Terminator 3. That was jarring.

I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting more of the traditional life to still be present.

I felt like I was desperately trying to eke it out myself.”

Yet the old traditions still endured among the older generation, particularly those who appeared in Herbert’s book, such as Paulina Christiansen – “a great storyteller”, says Leonard. She is the granddaughter of Robert Peary, who is believed by some to have been the first person to make it to the North Pole in 1909. He lived in that community and would never have made it to the North Pole without the help of the Inugguit.

The people had, he says, very fond memories of the Herbert family. This is often not true of the average polar explorer, who tends to turn up unexpectedly, hunt inefficiently, then depart, taking the odd sacred artefact with him.

“Nobody had a bad word to say about the Herberts,” he recalls. “I found just having read The Snow People and knowing something about the Herbert family ended up opening some doors for me because they were so highly regarded. This is not normally the case. There is a lot of negative prejudice against the white man – the outsider.”

“I worked with one man, Aijakko Miteq, a lot. He was a very good storyteller and we became friends. He very sadly passed away about three months ago. I had no idea he had cancer – nobody ever told me and I’m not even sure whether he shared it with other people. I documented as many of his stories as I could. But I reckon he had far, far more to tell.”

Kimberley Rew (Jesus 1974)

The Velvet Underground: Beginning to See the Light This was the band’s third album, from 1969.

I borrowed it from the Jesus library of LP records – some enlightened soul had started stocking pop records, which was unheard of at the time. It’s a nice introduction to an outfit that kept pop alive into the heavy rock era.

A typical teenager of the time, I followed the murky trail of the heavy bands, then I heard this and thought “I don't have to be a guitar virtuoso, tall and handsome with flowing locks – I can just be myself, write songs and mumble.”

Neil Young: Out on the Weekend This is the opening track from Harvest, which followed the acclaimed After the Gold Rush.

The album slightly disappointed me at the time. With hindsight, I’d say it was by a man starting to find his way in life and music with some adventurous exploration, whereas I wanted more of what he had done before.

It was the early days of hi-fi and I had a turntable plugged into an ancient guitar amplifier, which must have sounded terrible.

The habit was to invite your friends back for coffee and put your latest purchase on the turntable. When I put Harvest on, they’d usually wander off during the doldrums of side two – somewhere near the introspective A Man Needs a Maid.

Slade: Cum on Feel the Noize Jesus had a TV room that was always full for Top of the Pops, even though we were terrible snobs and sneered at the performers. Most of them sported glam fashions with glittery clothes and blue eye shadow for men, while College style was regulation hippie. Slade’s drummer Don Powell habitually wore a vacant expression and when it was time for his close-up everyone chortled and snickered. But week after week we turned up to watch. Pop was about to collapse into the desperate middlebrow sludge of the mid-1970s but Slade have stood the test of time.

Global Village Trucking Company: Smiling Revolution My girlfriend and I “adopted” the Globs, as we called them, after paying our 10p entrance fee to hear them at Fisher Hall. We were in awe as this was a “proper” band – they had a van, proper equipment and lived in a commune. We would follow the Globs around free festivals in East Anglia in a Commer van, bought for £80, with a deer’s skull attached to its radiator. They had some splendidly memorable songs but I don't think they got as far as achieving the coveted recording contract, so good luck tracking them down.

Kimberley Rew is a singer-songwriter and composer of the song Walking on Sunshine and the Eurovision Song Contest-winning Love Shine a Light.

He currently plays with Cambridge band Jack.

CAM 70 45

Marcus Ginns

Extracurricular

A sporting life Women’s football

Interview Becky Allen

B

ritain might be the birthplace of the beautiful game, and Cambridge where its modern rules were codified, but it’s in the US that women like Marielle Brown have really taken the idea of playing football to their hearts.

“In the US, it’s rare to meet a girl who hasn’t played soccer at some point in her life,” says Brown, now in the second year of her PhD in Biological Anthropology.

“Although I have to be careful to call it football and not soccer, here.”

The 2013 Varsity Match was an epic game: freezing cold, snowing and lasting over three hours from start to finish. It was probably the most stressful game I’ve ever played

A lifelong football fan – she supports Manchester United and Grimsby Town, her father’s home town – she started playing in her local Pee Wee league when she was just five. “They’re full of all these five- and sixyear-old girls running around in T-shirts that are down to their knees!”

Today, she says it is the framework football brings to her academic life at Corpus that keeps her playing. “It’s a huge time commitment, but a PhD is inherently unstructured and playing football fives gives structure to my days. I get more done in the football season than out of it, because if I have training at night to look forward to then I work harder during the day.”

This season sees Brown take over as women’s football captain at Cambridge, and she hopes her captaincy will be marked by greater recognition for the women’s game at Cambridge – as well as better weather.

Last season the team went into the Christmas break as joint leaders of their division, but the long, hard winter took its toll. “The fields were covered in snow for weeks at the beginning of Lent Term, so we had a hard time finding places to train,” she recalls. “It also meant we had games every few days at the end of the season, so we had a lot of injuries and we ended up getting relegated.”

Despite the atrocious conditions, Brown’s team overcame both Oxford and the snow to win the 2013 Varsity Match 4-2 on penalties.

“It was an epic game. It was freezing cold, it was snowing, and it lasted over three hours from start to finish. It was probably the most stressful game I’ve ever played. We had a couple of hundred people at Fenner’s watching us and there’s so much hype going into it, so you’re just praying you don’t make a mistake or miss a penalty,” she says.

“It was nice to be on the winning side of penalties for once, because it always seems like the team I’m supporting loses. I did feel bad for Oxford, it’s an awful way to lose – but don’t tell them that.”

As well as performing well on the pitch this season, Brown wants to try and bring a bit of America’s passion for women’s football to Cambridge. “The men’s sport gets much more press and recognition, and although things are getting better, it’s slow,” she says.

“One of the things that bothers me is that for the Varsity game the men play at premier league stadiums. This year they played at Crystal Palace so I’m going to try and see if we can play on the same day [next time].”

A more personal goal is to play at Parker’s Piece, where the first games under the modern rules were played in 1848. “I didn’t realise about Parker’s Piece until halfway through last year so it was nice to know that.

I haven’t actually played football there but I should probably do that before I leave as a symbolic thing.”

www.cuafc.org

CAM 70 47

Extracurricular

✄

CAM 70 Prize Crossword

Family

by Schadenfreude

All entries to be received by 10 January 2014 Send completed crosswords: • by post to CAM 70 Prize Crossword, University of Cambridge, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB • by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk • or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam The first correct entry drawn will receive a copy of Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years (Third Milliennium, £40) by Professor Haroon Ahmed (King’s 1959). This volume celebrates the achievements of the Cambridge Computer Lab over the past 75 years. Two runners up will also receive £35 to spend on CUP publications.

ACROSS 1 Sailor leading barmy member of ruling party on board declines to vote (8) 6 Peel left by son in this local gutter (5) 10 A new hanging fruit like a melon (6) 13 American clam following retreating fish (4) 15 I seek acceptable representation (4) 17 Did cutter once advance before engineers deserted? (4) 18 Palate penetrated by back of shark fin (4) 19 A religion mother and I found amongst exotic palms (7) 21 Sweat is spoiling a daytime shut-eye (6) 22 Pipe missing from boat on hire worried Edna perhaps (6) 23 Space laid outside church covered with a network (7) 26 An oven as installed in fort facing west (4) 27 Court is outside so fear turn of fortune (4) 29 Very ugly person, therefore turning overt (4) 33 Henry angry when chopped (4) 35 Ed's solvers waste seconds absorbing nothing (6) 36 "Hello" introduces final gig (6) 37 A feeble person from Dumfries alas wintered badly (11) 38 The old lock assets up (5) DOWN 1 Loose piece of skin starting to grow inside can trouble (6) 2 Book that game (4)

3 A natural swimmer finally ascends a lot of stairs (5) 4 Spasmodically face wagging tails (6, 2 words) 5 Prying person in speech recognises fright (5) 6 Impostor gets Clough for hard old game (4) 7 Her grammar school provides some work (4) 8 Brood once accompanied by neat bird overturned a holemaker (9) 9 See round anterior canine flake (6) 11 Fixed safe loans available only in spring perhaps (8) 12 Pale green section in sort of grassy area (6) 14 One told to go by leading journalist showed ill feeling (8) 16 Drivel from McGonagall: "Doctor a French novelist's cheese" (9) 20 Big dogs, a young cat and old Colin (6) 22 Scots owe Germany and the French a great deal (6) 24 Most humble for a monarch I win bewildered (6) 25 Shakespeare's bowing baronet's bolstering act (6) 28 Jewish girl, square dancer (5) 30 Kind senior officer with good following (5) 31 Wren’s first to leave black bird’s bunches of twigs in Skye (4) 32 Second pair of riders note ancient valley (4) 34 Drip drop (4)

Solution to CAM 69 Crossword Eccles by Schadenfreude

Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 71 and posted online at alumni.cam/.ac.uk/cam on 17 January 2014.

INSTRUCTIONS Solvers must complete the grid to reveal 10 family members, each comprising two words, one such word being shared by each member, but appearing only once in the grid. To achieve this nine letters in clued answers must be altered, creating eight new words.

Single letters to be omitted from each clue before solving (never 48 CAM 70

leaving a non-word) give four more members, only one of which shares the common word. The Chambers Dictionary (2011) is the primary reference.

OED confirms two thematic associations.

Winner: Piers Ruff (St John’s 1966) Runners up: Roger Cohen (Peterhouse 1970) and Reverend David Thomson (Selwyn 1978) Special mention: Paul Stanyon (Downing 2009) for being the newest alumni solver (with a bit of help from his father).

Clashes in symmetrically disposed cells give the months of the Jewish year.

These were to be replaced by numbers corresponding to the Eccles(iastical) (not Civil) system: STAMMERS/UZBEG (4), SPIRITIST/RILED (7), STEVEN/SOCIETAL (10), WATERSHED/DINGBAT (11), PAGANISM/ANGERLY(1), TAEL/OBSIGN (5), FRESHEST/LEVANT (8), CADENCE/ALCAZAR (12), BIYEARLY/YARDMEN (2), SCELERAT/ EXULS (6), ARACHIS/ELEVENSES (9), EMESIS/ATIVAN (3).