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Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 74 Lent 2015

In this issue:

Women on the Tideway Clean Bandit Poet’s field guide Rot stopped Beyond number

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Roger Coleman

Alun Callender

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 74 Lent Term 2015

Contents

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

Extracurricular 02 University 03 matters 04 My Cambridge 08 Reading list Cambridge 10 soundtrack 11 A sporting life Prize crossword

41 42 44 45 47 48

Features

Satoshi Hashimoto

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Pulling together

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This year, for the first time, the Women’s Boat Race will take place on the same course as the men’s, the culmination of an 88-year battle for equality.

Rot stopped

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Preserving history in the form of archaeological artefacts is a delicate balance of art and science.

Meet the people in whose skills we trust.

Border control

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As an authority on quarantine and immigration, Professor Alison Bashford admits her research has taken her on her own long-distance and fascinating journey.

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.

Editor Mira Katbamna ybm.co.uk

Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 332288 cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Executive Editor Morven Knowles

Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 332288 contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk alumni.cam.ac.uk facebook.com/ cambridgealumni @camalumni #cammag

Managing Editor Kate Morris Design and art direction Paul Oldman smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar

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.

Publisher The University of Cambridge Development and Alumni Relations 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288

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: Angus Greig/Smith Copyright © 2015 The University of Cambridge.

Beyond number

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As a concept, infinity is pretty hard to get your head around. Professor John Barrow is on hand to help, talking Aristotle to Einstein and all things beyond.

A poet’s field guide

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Do you know your donk from your rawky?

Dr Robert Macfarlane presents highlights from his dictionary of terms for nature and landscape in Britain.

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Editor’s letter

Welcome to the Lent edition of CAM. Next month, sporting history will be made when the University’s women rowers compete against Oxford on the Tideway for the first time. But the road to equality has not been a straightforward one – from rowers judged on style, rather than pace, to a lack of funding and facilities, CUWBC has faced many challenges. On page 12 we tell their story.

Discovering the wreck of the Mary Rose on the ocean floor must have been a heart-stopping moment.

But it was as nothing to the drama that came next.

Stopping the rot – literally preventing the artefacts you have disturbed from disintegrating in front of your eyes – is a scary, challenging process. And it doesn’t always work. On page 18 we talk to the archaeologists and chemists in charge.

Elsewhere, on page 28 Professor John Barrow ponders the nature of infinity and on page 32 Dr Robert Macfarlane shares the pleasures of his East Anglian lexicon for the natural world. And on page 24, Professor Alison Bashford discusses quarantine and immigration.

Finally, thank you for your many, many letters detailing student cookery disasters. To read how David Lester (St John’s 1961) ruined a kettle forever, how Gardner Cadwalader (St John’s 1972) terrified his landlady, or how to use a scout car to cook breakfast for an entire Tankies regiment – we were very impressed, David Page (Trinity Hall 1966) – please visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/magazine.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

Your letters

cine-camera in Penang and North Malaya in 1957-9] to the Penang Heritage Trust, the Penang State Museum and the Penang State Library, as well as the local Oxbridge Alumni Association.

Martin Knowles (Trinity 1953)

Gyp room gourmands

Exam Nightmares Exam nightmare or not, my fellow student, Freddy Fritz, wrote the following Lines on a Cambridge Tripos Paper in 1971: ‘Three hours to answer four questions / Three years to answer none.’ He is now a well-established poet in his native Germany. (Quoted with permission from Herr Fritz, Selwyn 1967.)

Patrick Ainley (Selwyn 1971)

Don’s Diary I believe there is a solution to Dr Mateja Jamnik’s domino question. Surely tipping a big enough pile of dominoes on to a board would cover it.

(No computer required.)

Julian Drewe (Magdalene 2005)

Alumni groups Thank you for news of new alumni groups from Armenia to Egypt. Last year, thanks to CAM, I made contact with Louise GossCustard, who runs the Oxbridge Society of Malaysia. She took my material [of Penang, shot on a

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My always hard-working French housemate Fred regularly returned from the Cavendish around midnight, starving, having toiled in the lab all day. This would invariably lead to culinary gems such as frozen pizza with an extra layer of ketchup, topped with chunks of cream cheese.

Maximum food throughput per time unit, so to speak. Those were the days!

Christian Kreibich (Hughes Hall 2002) I went [up] in 1944 when the country was in the grip of austerity. After the war, things got much worse. Nevertheless, some friends and I decided to put on a Christmas party in the Michaelmas term, 1946, to which each could invite a male friend.

It was to be held in my room in Peile (it was the largest) and in the afternoon.

I was to make the trifle.

As I had no saucepan, I bought one made of very thin tinplate at the Cambridge Market – all our aluminium ones had gone to make Spitfires. I mixed up the custard using custard powder, dried milk and saccharin – the only ingredients that weren’t rationed – and cooked it on the fierce gas ring, and then filled it with bits of a sponge cake from Fitzbillies.

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

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

Don’s diary Dr Carrie Vout is Reader in Classics and a Fellow of Christ’s

I cannot say the party was a success. None of the men knew each other; conversation was strained, the games we had thought up fell flat, but the worst was the food. I looked at all those grimacing faces eating my trifle, so took some myself – it was burnt!

The guests manfully downed their serves without comment and as soon as possible made a hasty retreat. After 70 years I can still recall the taste of that custard!

I learned a lot of useful things at Cambridge, and one of them was how not to give a party.

June McNicol (neé Taylor, Newnham 1944) In my final year at Robinson, I, and three like-minded young men, occupied the top floor of a Collegeowned house on Adams Road with our own kitchen. One of us was quite a talented cook, and the other three acted as grateful beneficiaries and dedicated dishwashers.

In early February, however, one of the latter group, struck by culinary invention and a desire for reciprocity, declared he would be cooking our Sunday meal. He produced the most disgusting, inedible casserole/stew/ mess we’d ever been served, and under pressure revealed that the main ingredient was Sainsbury’s vegetarian haggis – on special offer following Burns Night. His name for this dish was, presciently, Scottish Independence.

Brandon Green (Robinson 2005) Who needs Michelin stars?

Nothing can beat toast, made on a gas fire, with a bent coat hanger as a toasting fork. Sublime!

Andrew Stilton (Trinity Hall 1975)

Those of my colleagues on the sixth supervision of the day will curse me for saying this, but the early stages of research leave are a bit like the start of a teaching term – terrifying. I am ‘off’ for close to two years, you see, to put together a book called Classical Art: A Life History, and, linked to it, an exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Octagon Gallery, entitled Hercules’ Thirteenth Labour. I like to think that even superheroes feel the fear and do it anyway.

Luckily, in this case, there is a fine line between terror and exhilaration; and the people and resources here in Cambridge, not to mention the sheer beauty of the place, help wrestle the monsters. Yesterday was spent in the Fitzwilliam’s prints and drawings department, oohing and aahing over a particularly dreamy young Hercules by Italian draftsman Agostino Carracci (1557-1602), one of 30 or more objects that will join a colossal polystyrene Hercules to convey my story of classical art to a wider audience. Matthew Darbyshire’s polystyrene protagonist rescued me, after the plaster version of the same Farnese Hercules, one of the first examples of ancient sculpture acquired by the Fitzwilliam, was deemed too fragile to transport from his new home in the Classics Faculty’s Museum of Classical Archaeology, where he plays the friendly giant to visitors of all ages. The brilliance of his stand-in’s medium makes it a star: good results take planning; great ones serendipity.

Like lots of classicists, I find it impossible to confine my studies to ancient Greece and Rome: why would I, when to do so would be to deny that any study of antiquity is mediated through layer upon layer of encounter, many of these as joyous for their insight or error as the lost worlds they contemplate? Yesterday saw me submit an essay on Victorian essayist and art-critic Walter Pater, and also write a reference for an undergraduate who is applying for a place on a Renaissance Studies MA. My four PhD students too came back to life: leave doesn’t dispense with them, and they have a wonderful knack of simultaneous generation. Their engagement keeps me grounded yet on my toes; making leave’s highs and lows less rarefied.

Without my students, there would be no book.

The project comes out of a Part II course I taught last Michaelmas to nearly 40 undergraduates from Classics and other faculties. The trips to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and to the Sir John Soane’s Museum and the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery in London, proved as productive for them as learning how to do justice to two millennia of investment in Greek sculpture was for me. Hopefully now all of us have a more nuanced understanding of when statues like the Farnese Hercules became ‘classical art’ and why that story needs to start back in the fifth century BC. Until the final year of their Classics degree, our undergraduates have to fit their art, archaeology and classical reception studies around a packed programme of language learning and reading of ancient literature. Everyone manages this well enough, but provision could always be better … hence the decision for ‘Tripos reform’, something that would send even Hercules running for the mountains. My last term before leave had this additional burden: meeting after meeting of students and senior members designed to generate lively discussion about a revised syllabus, to expose and test wildly divergent opinions about what this should look like, find every conceivable fault with all of them, spawn several working parties, feed back, repeat the process, and gift-wrap in time for Christmas. But I’m pleased to say we got there.

Our course is now fitter than ever to meet the needs of applicants from diverse and changing backgrounds.

I can’t say I miss those marathons, but I still find myself attending seminars in the Faculty as well as conferences abroad to keep abreast of stuff beyond my specialism, and to see my mates, as well as doing schools talks so as to share my subject and the thrill of our new, improved three- and four-year degrees (the second for those yet to study the classical languages). I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my undergraduates, but, as I write, I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t having a ball. I just hope Zumba and Pilates help me build a bit of Herculean stamina!

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Smith

UPDATE LENT TERM NORTH WEST CAMBRIDGE

Laying down good foundations

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ffordable homes, a GP surgery and the University’s first primary school will be among the first buildings to be constructed on the North West Cambridge site.

The first phase of what is the largest single capital project the University has undertaken in its 800-year history is due to be completed in the spring of 2017, with the school set to open this autumn.

The plans include 700 affordable homes to rent for qualifying University and College staff, 400 homes for general sale, 325 rooms for graduate students, the school, a community centre, a supermarket and shops, a

Women on the Tideway The Women’s Boat Race crew will make history this April when they join the men on the Tideway for the first time. The Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club (CUWBC) crew will race first at 4.50pm, with the men’s race set to start an hour later over the 4 mile 374 yards (6.8 kilometre) course between Putney and Mortlake.

This year’s race on 11 April marks the 161st outing of the men’s event on the Thames and the fifth with Steve Trapmore as coach; Cambridge lead the series with 81 victories to Oxford’s 78, with one dead heat in 1877.

The women lead their series 40 to 29 and will this year be coached by Rob Baker.

All four Cambridge openweight crews – first and second boats for both men’s and women’s clubs – will this year be racing against their Oxford counterparts on the Thames in London.

CAM tells the story of CUWBC’s journey to the Tideway on p12. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

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Proposed designs for the new North West Cambridge development.

Hear from the head of the University of Cambridge Primary School in My Cambridge on p42.

Mecanoo

SPORT

GP surgery, an energy centre and open green space.

Eleven architectural teams have been working closely to create the new area (five of them are RIBA Stirling prizewinners). The local centre will be known as Eddington and will be the heart of the new community with its market square.

The investment in the development is a key part of the University’s longterm plan to remain one of the world’s leading universities.

UPDATE LENT TERM

Alan Turing honoured Cambridge is one of five universities that will lead the Alan Turing Institute, honouring the man who studied at King’s in the 1930s and is remembered for his pivotal work in cracking codes that helped Britain win the Second World War. Based at the British Library in London, the institute will promote the development and use of advanced mathematics, computer science, algorithms and ‘Big Data’ – the collection, analysis and interpretation of immense volumes of data – for human benefit.

Plans are being coordinated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which invests in research and postgraduate training across the UK. Lee Woodgate

COLLEGES

A group of students and fellows in 1970.

Half century at Lucy Cavendish

Cambridge Newspapers Ltd.

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t all began with lunch. In 1950, three academics – zoologist Anna Bidder (Newnham 1922), philosopher Margaret Braithwaite (Newnham 1929) and medieval historian Kathleen WoodLegh (Newnham 1926) – were dining in Tony’s restaurant, now the Cambridge Chop House, on King’s Parade, discussing their frustration at the lack of opportunity for female academics. Lunch became a dining club that eventually turned into a vision for a new College, built around a community of female academics. The new College would provide a home for research students working for higher degrees, and crucially for “women not necessarily so engaged, who wish to re-equip themselves for professional careers”.

These aims became reality in 1965, when the Lucy Cavendish Collegiate

Society became an Approved Society of the University of Cambridge with a oneroomed office at 20 Silver Street.

By 1970, the nascent college had moved to its current site on Lady Margaret Road, becoming a selfgoverning College within the University and granted full status and a Royal Charter in 1997.

Fifty years later, Lucy Cavendish boasts more than 350 students from 60 countries, and is a thriving community true to its founders’ original vision.

Celebrations in 2015 include a lecture series – Outstanding Women of Achievement – led by outgoing College president Professor Janet Todd, with further events planned for October when the College’s new president, Jackie Ashley, arrives. lucy-cav.cam.ac.uk/50th

New Heads of House appointed Pembroke College has elected Lord Smith of Finsbury as Master. He will take office in October and succeeds Sir Richard Dearlove.

Jackie Ashley has been elected as the eighth President of Lucy Cavendish College.

She will succeed Professor Janet Todd.

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UPDATE LENT TERM

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

New Year honours

TRAVEL

Broaden your mind Explore new horizons with the alumni travel programme in 2015. Our specialist small-group tours, some of which are run jointly with the University of Oxford, are an opportunity to travel with fellow alumni accompanied by an expert scholar who brings in-depth knowledge and insight to your trip.

Explore Georgia and Armenia on the ancient routes of the Caucasus with Dr Hubertus Jahn, lecturer in Eastern European history, or explore the tombs and temples of Malta and Gozo, constructed more than 5000 years ago, with Dr Simon Stoddart of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Foodies can indulge in Piedmont under the guidance of wine, food and travel writer Marc Millon, while nature lovers will spot butterflies and orangutans in Borneo with Dr Michael Brooke, curator at Museum of Zoology. alumni.cam.ac.uk/travel

Two Cambridge luminaries were recognised in the Queen’s New Year honours list.

Clinical microbiologist Professor Sharon Peacock was appointed CBE for her services to medical microbiology. Peacock is known for her work with the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Thailand, where for seven years she directed a wide-ranging programme of bacterial disease research. In the UK she has focused on the role of sequencing technologies in diagnostic microbiology and public health.

Professor Graeme Barker was made CBE for services to archaeology. The former Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Barker is known for his research focusing on prehistoric archaeology, the relationship between landscape and people, transitions from foraging to farming, and the origins of human behaviour and migrations.

New alumni groups Alumni in Brazil and Oman now have access to our ever-expanding alumni network. Former students wishing to network, socialise and make new friends in Sao Paulo should contact Andreia Costa Vieira on andreiacostavieira@usp.br Alumni in Oman should get in touch with Gavin Daniel of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Oman on oxbridgemuscat@gmail.com.

New Pro-Vice-Chancellors The University Council has appointed three new Pro-Vice-Chancellors who will take up their positions in the coming months. They are Professor Eilis Ferran (focusing on human resources and international affairs), Professor Chris Abell (research) and Professor Nigel Slater (enterprise and regional affairs).

They will join Professor Graham Virgo, ProVice-Chancellor for Education, who took up his post in October last year, and Professor Duncan Maskell, when he starts as Senior Pro-ViceChancellor in August 2015.

The five Pro-Vice-Chancellors are responsible for taking forward the University’s strategy and policy development, and supporting the Vice-Chancellor in his or her role in providing leadership to the University. Each post covers areas of strategic importance to the University.

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DIARY LENT TERM clinical veterinary anatomist Dr David Bainbridge discussing the origins and power of the female body shape in a lecture entitled Curvology. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

CRASSH Rumours, conflict, conspiracy Alison Richard Building (Sidgwick Site) 19 May

Treasured Possessions

Ben Oppenheim (Berkley) and Professor Kelly Greenhill (Tufts/ Harvard) will give this public lecture, followed by a wine reception. It is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulmefunded project Conspiracy and Democracy.

Fitzwilliam Museum 24 March – 6 September

New Rhythms

From exquisite silks, via armour, to snuff boxes and tiny keepsakes, Treasured Possessions sets astounding and bizarre items alongside everyday objects.

The exhibition, which comprises 300 objects, spans the decorative arts from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

In 2016 the Fitzwilliam Museum will celebrate its bicentenary and this exhibition will highlight the diversity and quality of its applied arts collections.

Kettle’s Yard 17 March–21 June 2015

fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Ballet Central ADC Theatre 10–11 April 2015 Ballet Central, the Central School of Ballet’s touring company, performs a programme of ballet, neoclassical, contemporary and narrative dance in a family-friendly show.

Cambridge Literary Festival Various venues, Cambridge 15–19 April 2015 This year’s outstanding line-up at the Cambridge Literary Festival includes nature writer Robert Macfarlane, the ever-hilarious comedian Omid Djalili and 8 CAM 74

legendary children’s writer Judith Kerr. Philosopher AC Grayling will also be appearing, along with poet Roger McGough and biographer Antonia Fraser. Other key speakers include commentators Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton and Patrick Cockburn. cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

Cambridge Society of the Application of Research Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Churchill 13 April 2015 Join members for a debate on the government’s role in the discovery of new antibiotics, and their distribution and control.

Hay Festival

New Rhythms includes sculpture, drawings and paintings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died aged 23 in the First World War, and his contemporaries David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Percy Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Auguste Rodin, Helen Saunders and Alexander Archipenko.

A contemporary dance and music commission completes the exhibition.

Singing on the River King’s College Chapel 21 June To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the completion of the stone structure of the chapel, the King’s Men will play a riverside concert featuring music from every century.

21–31 May 2015

Save the date!

Join University luminaries at Hay this summer for the Cambridge Series, a strand of talks featuring our academics and alumni.

Highlights include a debate on India-Pakistan relations and

The Alumni Festival turns 25 this year. Catch up on the University’s current thinking and connect back with friends over three days of intellectual stimulation.

25–27 September 2015

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My room, your room Room N4B, Pembroke

Words Kate Hilpern Photograph Marcus Ginns Joe Thomas (Pembroke 2003) is an actor and writer, best known for playing Simon Cooper in the E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners.

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Ben Harrison, 21, is a third-year law student at Pembroke. “People tend to congregate in my room, although that may be just because it’s the one with the most sherry and tea,” he says.

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oom N4B is hidden under the eaves of N Staircase of the Old Master’s Lodge. Looking at it now for the first time in nine years, Joe Thomas recalls “I climbed out of that window as part of a prank once. It’s probably not quite as dramatic as it sounds as there is a sort of balcony and it wasn’t exactly free running. But still.”

Current resident Ben Harrison, clearly impressed, says it’s him who tends to be the focus of any pranks in the room these days, but that they are nowhere near as daring. “You can see how I might be teased for having some OCD issues,” he laughs, waving his finger around what is undeniably an exceptionally ordered room.

“Well, at the end of an evening in here, my friends will often turn a clock upside down, swap a couple of pictures around or change my screensaver image.”

The tidy are always vulnerable, points out Thomas. “I’m tidy, so I know. Untidy friends can’t be so easily pranked.”

The best... ceiling in Cambridge Millie Brierley is reading Modern and Medieval Languages (French and German) at Clare.

I remember very little about Freshers’ Week. Looking back now, I remember a blur of new faces, sweaty handshakes and general social ineptness. I think I have, for the most part, successfully (and oh-so-healthily) managed to repress the whole experience. But, in among all the awkwardness, I do have one enduring memory, and that is matriculation. Specifically, the matriculation service.

I had seen Clare’s chapel before, of course – on visits and open days – but seeing it for the first time after matriculation, as a fully-fledged member of College, felt altogether different. I walked past the plain stone walls of the antechapel, over the monochrome flagstones covering the floor, and took a seat in one of the dark wood pews.

Then, I looked up. In that moment, I thought I might never look down again. All the other, understated, trappings of the chapel were, I realised, just tactics: like cyclists in the peloton, allowing the true star – the ceiling – to break away and sprint to the finish.

A pristine, chalky white, the ceiling is studded with moulded flowers, each within its own frame of

sparkling gold. On the dome above the altar, these patterns rearrange themselves to create a honeycomb of golden, tessellating hexagons.

The effect is truly mesmerising.

Vaulted, the ceiling is all curves and smooth lines. With the choir singing and organ playing, it is as though the chapel were cupping its ear: the sound bounces around that arched surface – surfs its contours – creating the most almighty, marvellous swell of sound.

In that first service, in Freshers’ Week, the choir sang Zadok the Priest. The music swirled through the tunnel created by the vaulted ceiling and I cried because it sounded so beautiful. Of course, Clare’s wonderful chapel choir played no small part in this, but the ceiling acted like an extra member, adding its voice, such as it was, to the music being created beneath it.

Sitting there in my brand new gown, still but a daunted first year, I realised that this chapel – and its ceiling – was, in some way, mine.

I looked up at the gold and the white and could not believe that beneath those dazzling colours, in their hypnotic motifs, was a place for me.

Marcus Ginns

It was pure chance that Harrison managed to secure this room for his third year, he admits. “I’d been living outside the College during the second year and was really keen to return, but I missed the ballot because I’d got confused about the dates,” he explains.

But as luck would have it, N4B came up for grabs and it was affordable too. “Missing the ballot is literally the kind of thing I’d have done when I was here,” says Thomas, laughing hard and adding that – also in common with Harrison – he couldn’t wait to live in again for his final year. “My room in my second year was also outside College and it was basically a cupboard with a sink in it. This room, on the other hand, became a much-loved bolthole.”

Mind you, adds Thomas, it used to get icy cold.

“There were days I wondered if I could bring myself to step out of bed.” Harrison nods, giving him a knowing look. “Yes, that is most definitely still the case.”

But while Harrison’s room contains an antique bookshelf, crystal sherry glasses and decanter, and pictures on the wall, Thomas says it never occurred to him to put his own mark on his surroundings. “You’d go into some of the girls’ rooms and they’d have their own lights and throws and family pictures up and my reaction was always, ‘Are you allowed to do that?’

Plus, I’ve never been a very good domesticator of spaces, if I’m honest.”

Harrison’s neatly arranged papers on his desk and perfectly stacked bookshelves serve as proof of his disciplined and studious personality. Thomas, on the other hand, says he was disorganised. “I never quite came to terms with the fact that you’re left to your own devices at university and that the carrot-and-stick thing that happened at school no longer occurred.”

He also declares himself to have been easily distracted, particularly by Footlights. “I guess you could say the subtler pleasures of history didn’t glow as brightly as the thrills of making people laugh. I didn’t study quite as hard as I should have done and I had no plans for when I left. Luckily, I wound up moving into a flat where I was surrounded by better-motivated friends.”

“Well, it’s not like it didn’t pay off,” points out Harrison good-humouredly, whose next step couldn’t be clearer. “I want to apply for the Bar, so in many ways it’s like going back to the UCAS stage,” he says, recalling the moment when that process drew to a conclusion. “I was on a family holiday in Spain when I found out my A-level results, which my Cambridge offer was dependent on. Nobody had really slept the night before, but when I phoned my teacher to get them, he was in the Co-op! Nevertheless, he had good news and my mum started to cry,” he says, explaining that he’s the first person in his family to go to university.

Thomas’s parents, on the other hand, had both been to Cambridge. “Not that it made me any less delighted when I got the offer,” he says, “although I think it’s only looking back now that I realise just how formative my years here were. It affected everything about me – the friends I have, the whole way I think, the books I read.”

Harrison nods. “I too have a sense of that happening, this feeling that the person I’m becoming now is here to stay.”

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William Vanderson/Getty

This year, the Women’s Boat Race will at last take place on the same course as the men’s contest and with equal funding.

It’s the culmination of a long battle for equality since a Cambridge women’s crew first faced Oxford 88 years ago.

PULLING TOGETHER

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n 1927, a Newnham eight travelled to the Isis to take on an Oxford women’s crew.

It would not be a race in the accepted sense.

Heads of the women’s Colleges had ruled that lining up side-by-side was unladylike, so the crews took it in turns to row, and according to The Times, were judged on “steadiness, finish, rhythm and other matters of style” over the half-mile course.

The Times goes on to report “large and hostile crowds gathered on the towpath”. A New York Times correspondent credited the spectators with more benign intentions, writing that “a crowd of fully five thousand persons was on hand as a willing cheering section”. But whichever report is the more accurate, Oxford’s victory is a matter of record.

The umpires could not agree on style marks, so the Dark Blues’ superior pace carried the day.

These women were true pioneers – the Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club (CUWBC) would not

Words William Ham Bevan Portraits Alun Callender Opposite page: Joanna Busvine (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1982).

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be formed until 1941 – and they struggled to gain acceptance for women’s rowing. By 1935, the crews were allowed on the water at the same time to race over a 1000-yard course, and rowed on the Cam and Isis on alternate years (save for two contests on the Thames in the early days). However, one important matter – whether women should be awarded a Blue, a Half Blue or nothing at all – was to remain unsettled for much of the race’s subsequent history.

No race took place in 1953, after the Oxford women were banned from the Isis for rowing over a weir and their club collapsed from lack of funds. The fixture fell into abeyance until it was revived by a pair of engineering students in 1964, but not everyone at the University was ready to

CUWBC A brief history

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hail its return. It was only a few years before that a College boat club captain had written to CUWBC: “I personally do not approve of women rowing at all. It is a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous.”

Such attacks were not taken lying down.

Jane Kingsbury (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1969), co-author of Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club 1941-2014: A Struggle Against Inequality (Trireme), says: “At one point the CUWBC cox, a feisty Canadian called Ruth Kidd, declared that if attempts were made to ban the women from rowing on the Cam, she would register their boat under the Liberian flag of convenience.”

Sarah Barstow (Hughes Hall 1964) rowed in the 1965 Blue Boat on the Cam, winning

comfortably after Oxford caught a crab.

“I don’t think there were more than a dozen or so [members] in CUWBC,” she says. “Rowing was not regarded as very feminine – after all, it was the 1960s. We had two coaches, engineering students from Corpus Christi and Emmanuel, and also Canon [Noel] Duckworth, chaplain of Churchill. He had not only coxed the Blue Boats in the 1930s but also the British eight in the 1936 Olympics.”

At a university not short of eccentrics, Canon Duckworth stood out. Having helped found a boat club at Churchill, he turned his attention to coaching CUWBC – something he continued to do well into the 1970s. His enthusiasm was such that he would often ride his bicycle into the river during races, and he developed a unique rowing vocabulary.

1927

1941

1953

1975

The first Women’s Boat Race takes place on the Isis, with teams marked on ‘steadiness, finish, rhythm and other matters of style’.

CUWBC is founded and the first Blues are awarded for the Women’s Boat Race.

No race takes place after the collapse of Oxford University Women’s Boat Club. The fixture is not revived until 1964.

The women’s reserves boat is christened ‘Blondie’, after Debbie Harry’s 70s pop group.

Far left: Jane Kingsbury (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1969) Left: Rosie Johnston (Churchill 1973) Right: Siobhan Cassidy (Homerton 1994)

Women’s rowing at Cambridge was at the point of extinction. A meeting was held in the summer term and it was made clear that if our lot didn’t pick up the baton, it would die out.

A boat was a ‘chumpha chariot’, oars were ‘chumpha sticks’ and CUWBC were the ‘Sweaty Betties’ or ‘Perspiring Persephones’.

But the Canon’s dedication to women’s rowing was absolute. He often used his influence against more reactionary forces on the river, most notably seeing off an attempt to have the women’s boat banned from the Bumps.

Nonetheless, Varsity women’s rowing remained an ad hoc affair, with primitive equipment and facilities. Marian Marland (Newnham 1969) remembers preparing for the Boat Race in a traditional wooden “clinker” boat that required an exhausting effort just to carry from the boathouse. “We boated out of the ’99 Club [a city rowing club] in which we had a cloakroom with

some hooks and no showers. There was nothing very official at all, but we were such a happy bunch. We weren’t trying to win the Olympics; we were amateurs doing well and having a wonderful time.”

Marland rowed in the Blue Boats of 1970 and 1971, winning on both occasions; but just as memorable were the other races in which Cambridge competed.

“We were taken off to a few Head of Rivers, things like that, and they were very cold winters. I remember Bedford in particular, which had very low bridges. As we rowed under them, the person at the front had to break the icicles as we went under.”

CUWBC was not yet on an even keel, as Vicky Singh (Newnham 1971) discovered when she came up. Though keen to try out

rowing, she noticed that the women’s sport had no presence at the Freshers’ Fair, and that few members of the College were rowers.

It was only when a third-year came knocking at her door in search of new blood that she had the chance to register her interest.

Singh ended up becoming CUWBC presi-dent almost by default. “Women’s rowing at Cambridge was on the point of extinction again. A meeting was held in the summer term and it was made clear that if our lot didn’t pick up the baton, it would all die out. So three of us became the new officers and I became president. It wasn’t because of my rowing skills.”

The Boat Club’s nomadic existence continued to present problems. “We kept our equipment at the Trinity boathouse.

1975

1977

1980

1984

2015

A women’s reserves race between Blondie and Osiris becomes a regular fixture. Cambridge enjoy a six-year winning streak.

The Henley Boat Races are created, comprising the two women’s races and the lightweight men’s competition.

Canon Noel Duckworth, coach of CUWBC and staunch advocate for women’s rowing, dies.

A third women’s contest, the Lightweight Women’s Boat Race, becomes part of the Henley Races.

An expected TV audience of 100 million watch the first Women’s Boat Race on the same course as the men’s competition.

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We had nowhere to change, though, and used their bike sheds. Later they allowed us upstairs to their cloakroom where the spare beer barrel was stored and we could use the loo. I can’t remember washing kit much, and the men never did. Theirs always stank.”

This slight edge over the men in matters of hygiene was instrumental in gaining the women a coach. “Somehow David Maxwell agreed to coach us,” she recalls. “He was a European youth medallist and won silver at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. He never rowed or coached for his College, Jesus, but coached our Blue Boat. He said it was because we tried harder and smelt better than the men.”

As more Colleges became co-educational in the mid-70s, competition for Varsity places became fiercer – and was accompanied by a more structured training regimen and visiting coaches of international stature dropping in to select crews. In 1975, a contest between the Oxford and Cambridge reserve eight started to take place annually (though there had been two such races in 1966 and 1968, both of which Cambridge won).

Rosie Johnston (Churchill 1973) made it into the 1975 reserves crew “by a whisker” and realised something was lacking – a name for its boat. She says: “Not long before the day of the race, we were at the boathouse having our weigh-in. Goldie rowed past looking smooth and impressive, and somebody said we should have a name too.

“It was in the very early days of Blondie, before their first album, and I’d noticed Debbie Harry as a stand-out talent among the punks of the time. Goldie and Blondie – it felt right to me and I started singing one of her songs. Everybody agreed and we were Blondie. I’m pleased it has stuck.”

Her crew went by some less flattering names, too. As well as the Sweaty Bettys, the women were known as the ‘Rumpo Express’ by some University sportsmen. “We trained at Fenner’s gym – an innovation in those days and quite a shock to the men,” says Johnston.

“What would now be seen as sexist teasing was regular during our outings and every time we went for a jog together, we’d gather a following of overexcited men.”

In 1977 the women’s race ceased to take place on the Cam and Isis, joining the men’s lightweights contest at Henley. The move was marked by the conferring of Blues rather than Half Blues on the Varsity crew (though alumnae recall the regulations were complex, with other conditions attached to the award).

It also coincided with CUWBC getting a better standard of equipment, an urgent consideration after their old clinker lost against a sparkling new Oxford boat in the

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previous year’s contest. But with sponsorship unforthcoming, the crews had to do their own fundraising. Anita Mills (née Crafts-Lighty, Churchill 1974), who rowed in the 1976 and 1977 Blue Boats, says: “I actually organised an event to raise money to help purchase a shell for the first boat, which we rowed in in 1977. My grandmother donated some money so we bought a set of aluminium oars, which were all the rage at the time. That boat was called Evenden – I named it after her.”

The vogue for aluminium oars caused its own problems in the bitterly cold Cambridge winters. “I remember doing a sponsored row for CUWBC,” says Penelope VincentSweet (née Sweet, Clare 1976). “You had to be careful not to put your hand on the shaft because the skin stuck to the aluminium.”

As the 70s drew to a close, CUWBC enjoyed success beyond the Boat Race.

Like many of her contemporaries, VincentSweet had never rowed before coming up to Cambridge. Within four years she had not only beaten Oxford in Blondie and the Blue Boat, but had rowed in boats that won the Southern Universities Regatta and become Head of the Cam and the Ouse.

This success led to Vincent-Sweet’s selection for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where Great Britain came fifth in the coxed eights.

It was a far cry from the experience of her mother, who had almost rowed for Oxford in the late 40s. “She was first reserve, but the race was on the Cam and they couldn’t afford her rail ticket. She waved her friends off at the station, who actually had to carry their oars on the train to Cambridge,” she says.

The addition of a women’s lightweight contest in the 80s (which will remain at Henley in 2015, along with the men’s lightweights) and yet more strenuous training schedules marked a growing seriousness among competitors. “We certainly put in the hours,” says Joanna Busvine (Murray Edwards, New Hall 1982), a veteran of the 1985 Boat Race. “My recollection is sort of doing three to four hours a day, six days a week: an outing every day and usually a gym session in the afternoon.

“The river froze over in January and we found all sorts of weird and wonderful things to do. We had a very gruesome aerobics teacher who came in and did the men as well as the women. The men found it very difficult, which was quite entertaining.”

On occasion, they would face reminders that they were still not accorded the status of the men’s club. During her book research, Jane Kingsbury was told by a late-80s crew member about a café that the women would frequent after training sessions in Ely.

She says: “They were quite pleased that they had negotiated a special price for their drink and snack – until they discovered that the CUBC men not only had tables specially laid for them, but also that their pasta meal was provided free of charge!”

For graduates who had already rowed at other universities, the set-up at Cambridge could seem very basic. On arrival at Cambridge, where she was to gain a place in the 1995 Blue Boat, Siobhan Cassidy (Homerton 1994) had already represented Great Britain.

“Cambridge was a shock, with a narrow stretch of river, very limited training opportunities and a different coach every two weeks – and I’d always rowed at clubs where the men and women trained together,” she says. “But I was rowing with some fantastic women, and it was amazing that so many people gave up so much of their time.”

After winning all but one race in the 90s, CUWBC has found victory elusive in the 21st century; Oxford has notched up 10 wins to Cambridge’s four. Now working on a PhD in mathematics, Anna Railton (Pembroke 2007) was part of the losing 2009 and 2010 crews before finally beating the Dark Blues in 2012.

She says: “Losing the first time was something I got over quickly, but 2010 was properly awful. It’s such a binary thing – your entire season is shaped by one race. Two years later, we tried very hard to lose by catching a crab, but it was a crew that deserved to win.

I was so glad that we pulled it off.”

And after all the ups and downs of the previous 80 years, Railton’s time at Cambridge has seen the greatest leap forward for women’s rowing – not just the impending move to the Tideway but access to world-class equipment and the use of newly constructed women’s changing facilities at Goldie Boathouse. Soon, all four of the University’s elite boat clubs – men’s, women’s and the two lightweights – will share a new boathouse on a 12-acre site at Ely. For those outside the two universities, though, the spectacle played out on fourand-a-quarter miles of the Thames will be all that matters. “I think it is going to be a big story for equality,” says Helena Morrissey (Fitzwilliam 1984), CEO of Newton Asset Management and the driving force behind her company’s sponsorship of CUWBC and the move to the Tideway. “Women who were at Cambridge or Oxford a long time ago get in touch and say how they never thought this day would happen and how it means a lot. It’s one of those things they think is long overdue but are happy that it’s finally happening – so we have to seize the day and make it as good as it can be.”

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Archaeological artefacts often begin to decay as soon as they are removed from the ground or water. Halting the process takes a combination of art, expertise and a big dose of chemistry.

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old remains perfect; fragments of bone can survive cremation. Bronze tarnishes and iron can corrode to nothing. Insects feast on palm-leaf manuscripts. Old glass takes on a beautiful, iridescent patina of decay. One moment can survive centuries of burial if the soil is right, while whole civilisations are lost through an accident of climate.

And some long-gone objects still stubbornly cling to life: wood can leave an echo in grains of sand, while a pattern on medieval linen can imprint itself on bronze. Preservation is a complex, patchy story, and yet whole historical arcs have been built on little but the tenacity of certain metals.

Sometimes preservation is an exact science.

On 19 July 1545, just two kilometres from the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, the Mary Rose – a warship built by Henry VIII and named after his sister – met a fleet of French galleys and sank with the loss of around 500 crew members and 19,000 artefacts.

At least, that is how many have been recovered from the wreck site so far – the salvage operation began in 1971 and continues today, even though the ship itself was raised in 1982.

There are ceramic jugs and bronze bells, leaded brass chainmail, ivory and wooden nit combs, and wooden surgeon’s canisters containing traces of

Words Lucy Jolin Illustrations Angus Greig

Preservation Keeping intact an object that’s been under the sea for 500 years is not as simple as just removing it from the water. Waterlogged wood can lose up to 70 per cent of its volume when it dries.

It warps and cracks.

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Scientists are working on a new treatment made from non-synthetic substances – principally chitosan, a natural antibacterial which gives structure to shrimp shells, and guar, a bean commonly used as a food thickener.

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a grey powder of beeswax and poppy oil, used to treat inflammations and as a painkiller. There are pine tool holders, rat bones, and an oak, bark and yew board for tables (an ancestor of backgammon).

But although they have been successfully salvaged, the process of preserving these objects must continue – and creates ongoing challenges, particularly when it comes to waterlogged wooden objects.

“The brief was quite vague: help preserve the Mary Rose,” says chemist Dr Zarah Walsh, who took on the job of finding a new way to preserve waterlogged wooden objects while undertaking postdoctoral research in the Chemistry Department’s Melville Laboratory of Polymer Synthesis. (Professor Mark Jones, head of conservation at the Mary Rose Trust, and Dr Oren Scherman, lecturer in Chemistry, were principal investigators on the project.)

Keeping intact an object that’s been under the sea for 500 years is not as simple as just removing it from the water. Waterlogged wood can lose up to 70 per cent of its volume when it dries. It warps and cracks.

Traditionally, wooden objects are preserved using polyethylene glycol (PEG). Large pieces are sprayed; small pieces are submerged in the substance. It works by liquid exchange. The PEG pushes the water out and replaces it, stabilising it and bulking it up.

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Analysis Certain materials fluoresce when exposed to ultraviolet light – a useful property when a conservator is trying to decode a degraded or restored surface. On an Egyptian coffin, traces of natural resin varnish applied as part of the original decoration emit a pale greenish glow. Modern glues or paints, applied during early conservation treatments and which can be difficult to detect with the naked eye, stand out by fluorescing in contrasting colours.

“But it’s not a perfect solution,” explains Walsh.

“PEG can degrade down to formic acid, which is bad for the cellulose in the wood. In seawater, iron degrades down to nothing, so the wood can be saturated with iron ions. Add that to the presence of sulphur in the water from organic deposits – dead fish – and you get sulphuric acid, which is also damaging to cellulose.

And because PEG is very good at moving ions from one place to another, it allows those iron ions to move through the wood. So instead of getting a local problem, you get a widespread problem.”

Dr Walsh and research co-author Emma-Rose Janecˆek came up with a simple and elegant solution to tackle these problems: a new treatment made from non-synthetic substances – principally chitosan, a natural antibacterial which gives structure to shrimp shells, and guar, a bean commonly used as a food thickener. The new treatment is about to be tested on larger pieces of wood. “It was good to use a substance from the sea,” says Walsh. “It felt great to think about the circular nature of it: it was all about things coming from the water.” (Those shrimp shells preserve lives, too: chitosan is the key ingredient in the HemCon bandage introduced by the US Army in 2002, as its binding properties can help stem uncontrollable bleeding on the battlefield.)

Sometimes preservation is a glorious marriage of ancient and totally modern. In the University Library sit more than 1000 tiny manuscripts from south Asia, written in a variety of languages including Sanskrit, Nepalese and Tamil. They have been created not just on paper but also on pieces of palm leaf and birch bark – many of which only survived because they happened to be written or preserved in Nepal and therefore in the right climate.

“Paper was introduced to India relatively late – not before the 12th century, and it didn’t really catch on until the 15th century,” says Dr Vincenzo Vergiani, senior lecturer in Sanskrit, who has recently completed a project to catalogue the collection. “Now, in India itself – and by that I refer to more or less what it is today, the modern state of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan – the climate is such that manuscripts don’t survive long. Palm leaf is very sturdy material.

It’s very good for a writing support but in the heat and humidity, bugs feast on it. So the further south you go, the shorter the life of the manuscript. In south India they don’t survive for more than 100 years, 200 years at the most, which means they need to be recovered regularly. In the north, it is a bit less hot and humid.

But Nepal, on the other hand, has the perfect climate.

It’s more temperate – cold winters, less humid in the

Maintenance The Museum of Zoology is currently undergoing a major three-year redevelopment. As part of this project, more than 2000 mounted, stuffed birds are being repaired and cleaned. Many of the birds are frozen (to eradicate insects) and then dry cleaned with a brush and a museum vacuum. In some cases, this is followed by wet solvent cleaning. To repair and stabilise feathers, a Preservation Pencil is used to fire a fine jet of moisture at the specimen, allowing the feathers to be manipulated back into their original shape. Each bird can take anywhere from 20 minutes to two days to clean and repair.

summer. So there you have manuscripts going back to the first millennium AD.” The palm-leaf manuscripts are surprisingly hardy, says Vergiani: you don’t even need to wear gloves when you handle them, and they are, of course, kept in strictly temperature-controlled conditions. But the collection has also been digitised, meaning that researchers don’t even need to be in the same room as the manuscripts they are working on. In many cases, examining an object digitally can be even better than doing so in real life: you can magnify it and get up close without the risk of damaging it for future generations.

Preservation isn’t just about objects. Environment is when it gets really tricky. “When you’re excavating, it’s the structures and the things all around you that contribute to your thoughts,” says Dr Helen Geake, Visiting Scholar at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. “With a grave, you’re more likely to stand around discussing what that funny brown stain is than you are to talk about the objects, because that brown stain is much more fleeting. If you don’t talk about it then, if you don’t take a photograph of it then, you are now going to dig it away because you have to find out what’s underneath.”

It’s an ongoing story – sometimes, a messy one. “It’s tempting to be critical of things people have done in

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the past, but if they hadn’t done them, we wouldn’t have that object now,” says Julie Dawson, senior conservator at the Fitzwilliam Museum. When we imagine a preserved object, we tend to imagine that it is in its original form, “an imagined mythical state”, she says.

But conservators no longer attempt to achieve this.

These days, past attempts to preserve have become part of the object’s story: the 19th-century iron nails hammered through an ancient Egyptian coffin in order to hold it together, the corroded Roman bronzes chemically stripped and repatinated by an early collector in order to give them a more acceptable aesthetic.

Dawson points to Object GR.2.1885, a statuette of Apollo. Originally it was just an anonymous torso carved in ancient times. In 1793, British artist John Flaxman and the Italian sculptor Antonio D’Este added arms, legs, a head and a quiver of arrows. “It’s become something else. Now, it tells us also about what somebody who’s restoring a piece of classical sculpture in the 18th century thought and felt about it, and what was informing that practice at that time.”

It’s also about what isn’t there: inferring the existence of things that you don’t have, based on what you do. So if you find woodworking tools, then you know people were working wood. Or sometimes, you can use a proxy: one thing that represents something else. “For example, Ben Cartwright, a recent

Extending life Insect pests like moths and carpet beetles can destroy textile and fur collections. Traditional fumigation methods are toxic and prohibited by law, so at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) freezing is used to kill pests instead. Textiles are sealed in polythene bags with as much air squeezed out of them as possible in order to prevent surface condensation during the freeze-thaw process.

The packages are frozen at -30 degrees for a week, which kills all life stages of the pest. However, some pest eggs are very tough and can withstand extreme cold for a long time.

The SPRI operates a strict quarantine programme, freezing all new material as well as anything suspected of infestation.

PhD student of mine, was looking at textile working and how it might have changed through time with the arrival of the Vikings,” says Dr James Barrett, reader in medieval archaeology at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. “The textiles themselves are rarely preserved, but it’s possible to find their impressions in metalwork, in graves.

“Or take the Scar Viking boat burial on the Scottish island of Sanday, which had very poor preservation of wood. Archaeologists there were able to actually take blocks of the sand where the wood had been, impregnate them with resin and then look at them in detail. In doing that, you can see where the planks and the caulking between them were. And in this instance, there were even some grains of a different sand in the caulking that allowed them to infer that the boat had not been made in Scotland but imported from somewhere else.”

When Geake, a regular on Channel 4’s Time Team, participated in a BBC television programme on earlymedieval seafaring, the production company received a furious letter concerning the discussion on the role of women within Viking society. “This is a lie!” it read.

“The Vikings were all men!” It was funny, she says, but it illustrated a truth about preservation: we build our stories of the past simply on the accident of what’s been left behind. We can’t adjust for that, or attempt to produce a full understanding of the past, she says. All we can do is attempt to understand our understanding.

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Professor Alison Bashford explains why the history of quarantine has led her across oceans.

Words Victoria James Photograph Marcus Ginns

C

ontinents and oceans – the whole vast expanse of the globe – are the domain of Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History. Her most recent book, published last year, bears the all-encompassing title Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth.

But this global perspective began with a very specific and contained study of just a handful of quarantine stations in 19th- and 20th-century Australia.

Examining the mechanics of quarantine and how its rules were applied revealed the way in which ethnic

selection – under the guise of border health control – shaped Professor Bashford’s native Australia as a ‘white’ nation.

“I was analysing quarantine and immigration law as a ruse, essentially, for the racial nationalism that was very strident in Australia,” she recalls.

“Nineteenth-century physicians and statesmen alike would talk about leprosy as ‘the Chinese disease’, and so quarantine was used as a mechanism to keep out Chinese people specifically. It was a legal mechanism for producing ‘White Australia’. That’s not even a matter of interpretation. That’s a fact.”

Since the publication of that first study 25 years ago, the idea and implementation of quarantine has taken Professor Bashford in many directions. For example, it has become a prism through which to explore eugenics, as immigration and quarantine became tools to shape a future population in a way that was deemed ‘healthy’.

And as one of the original international agreements to require trust between states and regions, quarantine is part of the history of international relations. It even encompasses intelligence technology, given the need to transmit information about outbreaks that will arrive before the infection does.

The roots of the concept hint at its complexity.

The term quarantine derives from the Italian quaranta, meaning 40 – that is, a 40-day period of isolation, after which suspect vessels, cargo or individuals can be judged free from infection. The language of origin is no coincidence, for it was the great trading city-states of medieval Italy that first practised quarantine.

BORDER CONTROL CV 1990 BA, History, and University Medal, University of Sydney

2010 Fellow, Academy of the Humanities Australia

1995 Lecturer in History, University of Sydney

2013 Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge.

Fellow of Jesus, Cambridge.

2008 Chair, Department of History, University of Sydney 2009–14 Professor of Modern History, University of Sydney

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While advances in pharmacy, surgery and therapy have transformed medicine, quarantine has not altered for hundreds of years.

What came before, such as the casting out of lepers described in biblical and classical texts, should more properly be described as exclusionary practices.

One poignant precursor of true quarantine is the self-seclusion of plague-struck villages across medieval Europe.

True quarantine comes in the wake of a more sophisticated and connected world, predicated on the worldwide circulation of goods – and the ships and people that transport them. “Early modern city-states in Italy are where it began: Venice, Milan, and the seaports,” says Bashford. “It’s tied up with commerce and the movement of goods and people. And where you have that, you have government authority. So the history of quarantine is one very interesting way to think about the histories of states.”

Curiously, Bashford explains, Britain – with its global maritime empire – was an exception to the global pattern of quarantine. This might seem counterintuitive, given the immense traffic of goods to this island via the English Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic. But just as the rest of the world was introducing or tightening quarantine measures in the 19th-century, the UK was loosening them, in order to cope with the sheer volume of merchandise arriving at its border.

“Commercial interests forced a different system on to the English and British policy world,” Bashford explains. “It is still the case [today] that in other countries, people are screened for infectious diseases offshore at the point of departure, while in the UK, the borders are remarkably porous in this respect.

If someone entering is sick, they are re-routed administratively into the NHS.” Britain aside, the practice of quarantine has been remarkably consistent throughout time and across continents. Indeed, it is still practised today in a way that the merchants and public officials of medieval Italy would recognise. While advances in pharmacy, surgery and therapy have transformed medicine, quarantine has not altered, conceptually or practically, for hundreds of years.

As a result, Bashford says she is able to see the themes and questions of her work playing out in real time whenever another pandemic hits the news, as with the ongoing Ebola crisis, or the 2002-3 SARS outbreak. “SARS literally cleared the streets; cities like Toronto were completely bare of people,” she says.

“New border mechanisms came in in Hong Kong, temperature scanning was introduced.” She convened a multidisciplinary conference, Medicine at the Border, in the wake of the outbreak.

Now it is the turn of Ebola to fill our news bulletins and newspaper headlines. For Bashford, it isn’t easy viewing. “It’s hard to admit, but unavoidable,” she says. “As a historian of infectious disease and of public response to infectious disease, I see it roll around again and again. Ebola now feels like watching SARS unfold, when nobody quite knows what to do. And when no one knows what to do, they reach back to older mechanisms”.

The present form of Bashford’s quarantine work is as chief investigator of the Quarantine Project,

a major international collaboration which last year saw more than 70 scholars from around the world ‘isolated’ at North Head, the former Australian quarantine station in Sydney. The project draws on geography, archaeology, history and heritage to look at the material legacy of quarantine, in the form of not only the site structures of the Q Station, but also the remarkable personal records left behind by those detained there.

These records take the form of ‘mark making’ – a term that encompasses what might be labelled graffiti, but which in practice could be anything from the incision of a name and date, to the composition of poems, or expressions of longing either for the homeland left behind, or the desired new homeland of Australia. Bashford describes these as “wishful nationalisms” testified to at “liminal sites on the very edges of ‘homelands’ that were only aspirational”.

And the move to Cambridge is already bringing Bashford fresh avenues for her quarantine research.

She has just been appointed a trustee of Royal Museums Greenwich, and has been reconstructing the remarkable journey of one stricken steamship, which voyaged from Europe to Oceania with a deadly freight.

The vessel departed Marseille, then took on smallpox infected stokers in Egypt but nonetheless passed quarantine stations in the Red Sea after the diagnosis came too late. Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) didn’t want to take in the infected sailors, and so the ship journeyed on to Australia – with the disease still on board.

Beyond quarantine, her chief project is completing a new study of Thomas Robert Malthus – a fellow Jesuan. The 18th-century political economist is best known today for his observations on the socioeconomic risks posed by population growth, but Bashford is fascinated by his writings on indigenous people.

“This work is also global, in a sense,” she explains.

“Malthus is typically assessed through the British domestic history of corn laws and the poor laws, but he also wrote on indigenous people in the Americas, in the Pacific islands, in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales. Looking at Malthus and the new world will shed fresh light on this famous Cambridge alumnus.”

But while relishing the multidisciplinary life of the modern professor, Bashford hasn’t left behind the hardhitting engagement with difficult political and ethical questions that launched her career.

“What does a nation do,” she asks, “when it sits, in epidemiological terms, in complete contrast to the nation next door … where there are very different standards of living, very different epidemiological conditions?” The Asia-Pacific region is a good example. Australia has had a very low incidence of tuberculosis. Yet neighbours such as Indonesia, New Guinea, and much of the south-east Asian region, typically have a much higher prevalence of TB – in strains that are multi-drug resistant.

“In my early research, I worked hard to make sure the use of quarantine and immigration to produce White Australia was understood properly,” Bashford says. “But this is a harder fact to work with.”

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D

oes infinity exist? Is it really possible for something to go on and on without end? It is an ancient question that has huge implications for maths, physics and cosmology. And yet it is also a question that has reality in everyday life – a question that even young children grapple with as they learn to count: 1, 2, 3 ... 100 ... 1000 ... 1 million ... the biggest number you can think of? One gazillion?

Aristotle, the first person recorded to consider the issue of infinity, distinguishes between two varieties of infinity: potential and actual infinity. Potential infinity characterises an unending universe or an unending list – for example the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. These lists or expanses have no end or boundary: you can never reach the end of all numbers by listing them, or the end of an unending universe by travelling in a spaceship. Aristotle was relatively happy with potential infinities, content that they didn’t create any conflict with his understanding of the universe.

In contrast, Aristotle banned actual infinities.

Defined as a measurable, local item – such as the density of a solid, the brightness of a light, or the temperature of an object – that becomes infinite at a particular place or time. Encountering this infinity locally in the universe was, as far as Aristotle was concerned, an impossibility. His only permissible actual infinity was the divine – and this philosophy underpinned Western and Christian thought for several thousand years.

Aristotle conceived it, Galileo ran away from it.

Professor John Barrow considers the role of infinity in our understanding of the universe.

BEYOND NUMBER Illustrations Satoshi Hashimoto

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“I think this is one renormalisation he will find satisfactory...�

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But towards the end of the 19th century, mathematician Georg Cantor developed a more subtle way of defining mathematical infinities. Cantor recognised that there were ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ types of infinity, and he declared countable infinity a minor infinity.

Countable infinity can literally be counted – put in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.

This takes in the unending list of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on), but also any other series that can be counted without limit.

This idea had some funny consequences. For example, if you make a list of all the even numbers, you have a countable infinity. Intuitively you might think there are only half as many even numbers (2, 4, 6, 8…) as natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…) because that would be true for a finite list. But when the list becomes unending that is no longer true.

This fact was first noticed by Galileo (although he was counting the squares 1, 4, 9, 16 and so on, rather than even numbers), who thought it was so strange that it put him off thinking about infinite collections of things any further. He thought there was just something dangerously paradoxical about them. For Cantor, though, this feature of being able to create a one-to-one correspondence between a set of numbers and a subset of them was the defining characteristic of an infinite set.

Cantor then went on to show that there are also other types of infinity that are in some sense infinitely ‘larger’ because they cannot be counted in this way.

One such infinity is characterised by the list of all real numbers. These cannot be counted; there is no recipe for listing them systematically. This uncountable infinity is also called the continuum.

But finding this infinitely bigger set – the real numbers – wasn’t the end of the story. Cantor showed that you could find infinitely bigger sets still, all the way upwards forever: there was no biggest possible infinite collection of things. If someone presented you with an infinite set A, you could create a bigger one that wasn’t in one-to-one correspondence with A just by finding the

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collection of all the possible subsets of A. This neverending tower of infinities pointed towards something called absolute infinity — an unreachable summit of the tower of infinities.

Another type of infinity arises in gravitation theory and cosmology. Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that an expanding universe (as we observe ours to be) started at a time in the finite past when its density was infinite – the big bang. Einstein’s theory also predicts that if you fall into a black hole you will encounter an infinite density at the centre. These infinities, if they do exist, would be actual infinities.

People’s attitudes to these infinities differ.

Cosmologists who come from particle physics and are interested in what string theory has to say about the beginning of the universe would tend to the view that these infinities are not real, but are rather just an artefact of the unfinished character of the theory. There are others who think that the initial infinity at the beginning of the universe plays a very important role in the structure of physics. But even if these infinities are an artefact, the density of those false infinities is stupefyingly high: 1096 times bigger than that of water.

For all practical purposes that’s so high that we’d need a description of the effects of quantum theory on the character of space, time and gravity to understand what was going on.

Something very odd happens if we assume that the universe will eventually stop expanding and contract back to another infinity, a big crunch. That big crunch could be non-simultaneous because some parts of the universe, where there are galaxies and so on, are denser than others. The places that are denser will run into their future infinities before the low-density regions.

If we were in a bit of the universe that had a greatly delayed future infinity, or even none at all, then we could look back and see the end of the universe happening in other places – we would see something infinite. You might see evidence of space and time coming to an end elsewhere.

To many people the idea of a finite universe raises the question of what is beyond.

There is no beyond – the universe is everything there is.

It is hard to predict exactly what you will see if an actual infinity arises somewhere. The way our universe is understood at the moment implies a curious defence mechanism. A simple interpretation of things suggests that there is an infinite density occurring at the centre of every black hole, which is just like the infinity at the end of the universe.

But a black hole creates a horizon around this phenomenon: not even light can escape from its vicinity. So we are insulated, we cannot see what goes on at those places where the density looks as though it’s going to be infinite. And neither can the infinity influence us. These horizons protect us from the consequences of places where the density might be infinite and they stop us seeing what goes on there, unless of course we are inside a black hole.

Another question is whether our universe is spatially finite or infinite. I think we can never know. It could be finite but of a size that is arbitrarily large. But to many people the idea of a finite universe immediately raises the question of what is beyond. There is no beyond – the universe is everything there is.

To understand this, let’s think of two-dimensional universes because they are easier to envisage. If we pick up a sheet of A4 paper we see that it has an edge, so how could it be that a finite universe doesn’t have an edge? But the point is that the piece of paper is flat. If we think of a closed 2D surface that’s curved, like the surface of a sphere, then the area of the sphere is finite: you only need a finite amount of paint to paint it. But if you walk around on it, unlike with the flat piece of paper, you never encounter an edge. So curved spaces can be finite but have no boundary or edge.

To understand an expanding two-dimensional universe, let’s first think of the infinite case in which the universe looks the same on average wherever you go. Then wherever you stand and look around you, it looks as though the universe is expanding away from you at the centre because every place is like the centre.

For a finite spherical universe, imagine the sphere as

the balloon with the galaxies marked on the surface.

When you start to inflate it the galaxies start to recede from one another. Wherever you stand on the surface of the balloon you would see all those other galaxies expanding away from you as the rubber expands.

The centre of the expansion is not on the surface, it is in another dimension, in this case the third dimension.

So our three-dimensional universe, if it is finite and positively curved, behaves as though it is the threedimensional surface of an imaginary four-dimensional ball.

Einstein told us that the geometry of space is determined by the density of material in it. Rather like a rubber trampoline – if you put material on the trampoline it deforms the curvature. If there is a lot of material in the space, it causes a huge depression and the space closes up. So a high-density universe requires a spherical geometry and it will have a finite volume.

But if you have relatively little material present to deform space, you get a negatively curved space, shaped like a saddle or a potato crisp. Such a negatively curved space can continue to be stretched and expand forever. A low-density universe, if it has a simple geometry, will have an infinite size and volume. But if it has a more exotic topology, like a torus, it could also have a finite volume.

One of the mysteries about Einstein’s equations is that they tell you how you can work out the geometry from the distribution of matter, but his equations have nothing to say about the topology of the universe.

Maybe a deeper theory of quantum gravity will have something to say about that.

John D Barrow FRS is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and a Fellow of Clare Hall. He is the director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, of which Plus is a part. His latest book is 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know About Maths and the Arts (Bodley Head).

A version of this article first appeared in Plus Magazine (plus.maths.org), a free online magazine about maths, published by the University and aimed at a general audience.

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fizmer – n., rustling

noise produced in grass by petty agitations of the wind. *******************

A poet’s field guide

For a decade, Dr Robert Macfarlane has been compiling a dictionary of terms for nature and landscape in Britain. Here he gives a glossary of place-words from Cambridgeshire and its neighbouring counties.

Photography Julian Calverley, Roger Coleman, Toby Glanville and Justin Partyka

******************* tabernacle – n., farming term for an old barn or store-shed ******************* 32 CAM 74

Julian Calverley

fizmer – n.,

Roger Coleman

tabernacle – n.,

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*******************

donk, donkey – adj.,

wet, moist or damp; generally applied to land or soil. *******************

H

aze-fire, tarn, hoarhusk, gruffy-ground, af’rug: for nearly a decade now I have been collecting place-words – terms for aspects of landscape, nature and weather, drawn from dozens of the languages and dialects of the British Isles. The original impulse arose from a sense that our modern lexis for landscape has become impoverished in terms of variety and precision. The most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, for instance, excluded the words acorn, beech, cygnet, fern, pasture and willow, replacing them with blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste and MP3 player. A shared literacy of landscape is being lost, and it seemed to me worthwhile to record and celebrate some of the fine-grained and diverse place-vocabulary that has existed in these islands in the past.

What began as a work of salvage became one of guarded optimism, though, as I travelled the country meeting farmers, conservationists, glossarians, writers, sailors, walkers and other place-specialists, and learning both from their living languages and their knowledge of vanished vernaculars: the extraordinary Hebridean Gaelic vocabulary for moorland and peat, for example – or the trove of East Anglian words for arable agriculture, weather and water.

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roke – n., smoke-like mist that rises in the evenings off marshes and water meadows; also very faint rain. With so much standing water and wet ground, the epiphenomena of moisture have been wellrepresented in East Anglian dialects, with numerous words for kinds of mist (mug), dew (dag), heavy soil (clogsum, clunch, clag) and mud (slab, slip, slub).

Roke is thought to come from the Old Swedish rökr, meaning smoke or vapour, has memorable regional counterparts and variations in, for example, Yorkshire (summer geese, meaning the steam that rises from the moor when rain is followed by hot sunshine) and Shetland (grumma, meaning a mirage caused by mist rising from the earth).

rodham – n., a raised bank or ridge of silt in the Fens, formerly the bed and sides of a river or tidal creek; roddamy land is rolling or undulating land.

Most rodhams (also known as roddons) are thought to have formed between 1500 and 6000 years BP, during periods of extensive silt deposition in Fenland rivers. Those rivers later dried up, and subsequent shrinkage of the surrounding peat – due to the drainage of the Fens – left the rodhams standing proud. Peat being such poor founding material, settlements in the Fens have often followed the lines of rodhams (examples include the villages of Benwick and Prickwillow). The extent of such land features – like Henry James’s “pattern in the carpet” – can be hard to discern at ground level. When aerial photography emerged as a technique in the 1920s, though, the roddams could suddenly be seen from above: wriggling across fields, showing pale against the black of the peat – the ghosts of ancient waterways. fizmer – n., rustling noise produced in grass by petty agitations of the wind. Fizmer is a fabulously onomatopoeic wind word, and therefore kindred with better-known terms such as susurrus. John Clare relished words concerning the sounds of air, and sounds travelling through air, and his poetry includes references to suthering (a heavy sighing or rushing sound) and crizzling (the action of frost forming on water: “And the white frost gins crizzle pond and brook”). Fizmer also puts me in mind of zwer, a wonderful Exmoor term for the sound a covey of partridges makes when taking flight.

rawky – adj., of weather or atmosphere: cold, damp, chilly, dull, foggy. Anyone who has studied at Cambridge will have experienced a rawky day, in which the cold feels much keener than the air temperature suggests it should. Typically, this is because of the notorious east wind, more recently christened the ‘wind from the Urals’, but in the early 19th century known as the ‘red-wind’ – and blamed for bringing the blight with it. A contemporary student version of rawky is baltic, though this is by no means specific to Cambridge, and tends to be prefixed with an unrepeatable intensifier.

******************* rawky – adj., of weather or atmosphere: cold, damp, chilly, dull, foggy. ******************* 34 CAM 74

Toby Glanville

donk – adj.,

Justin Partyka

rawky – adj.,

CAM 74 35

Roger Coleman

horizontigo – n.,

Roger Coleman

bullfinch – n.,

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******************* horizontigo – n., the malaise induced by sustained exposure to flat terrain; the sudden feeling of fright brought about by contemplation of an intensely lateral terrain. *******************

smeuse, smuise, n., a hole in the base of a hedge caused by the repeated passage of a small animal; a hare’s track through a hedge. While researching my new book, Landmarks, I became interested in the capacity of certain words to direct attention to landscape phenomena that might, because unnamed, otherwise pass unnoticed. Smeuse is one of these; since learning it, I have begun to see these signs of creaturely habit while walking footpaths near the city.

clock-ice – n., ice that has been cracked and crazed by fissures, usually produced by the pressure of walkers or skaters. East Anglian dialect is unsurprisingly poor in words for aspects of high ground (where Gaelic and Scots excel), but it does do well with terms for snow and ice, including windle (a snowdrift), blunt (a heavy fall of snow), stivven (filled with drifted snow), and the beautiful ungive, meaning to thaw. The appeal of this verb I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift – an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.

horizontigo – n., the malaise induced by sustained exposure to flat terrain; the sudden feeling of fright brought about by contemplation of an intensely lateral terrain. I confess that this coinage was sent to me by a correspondent who suggested that a noun was urgently needed for such a feeling. I rather like it, and – as a mountaineer who lives in Cambridge, and is thus a chronic sufferer of horizontigo – I take this opportunity to encourage its future usage.

honeyfur – n., the soft seeds of grasses and rushes.

In 2013, I worked with a former anthropologistturned-children’s educator, Deb Wilenski, who was researching the language-for-landscape of pre-school children. From January to April, Wilenski worked

weekly with a group of around 30 four- and fiveyear-olds as they explored the Hinchingbrooke Country Park in north Cambridgeshire, an area of woodland, meadow and lake. She tried to record without distortion how the children met the landscape, and how they used their bodies, senses and voices to explore and relate it. The children, Wilenski wrote, ‘weaved words and ways together’, creating stories, place-names and coinages to account for the world they were inhabiting. Among these coinages was a word used by a girl who had run her pinched fingers together along a stem of meadow grass, bunching up the seeds as she did so into a soft fingerful of honeyfur. It was a word that could have come straight from the poetry of John Clare, and a reminder to me that although we have forgotten thousands of place-words, new ones are constantly being made.

mabish, mavis – n., regional names for the song thrush (Turdus philomelos). In 2006 I went to the Fen village of Methwold Hythe to interview a 98-year-old farmer, Eric Wortley, who had spent his entire life living and working on his family’s land. In nearly a century, he had been twice to the East Anglian coast, once to Norwich (around 40 miles away) and never to London. Eric’s speech was thick with dialect terms. He recalled birds’-nesting as a boy during the first world war, taking eggs from the nests of jennies (wrens) and mabishes.

The Northamptonshire poet John Clare – whose work is famously rich in regionalisms for nature, place and weather – uses mavis for song thrush in his poem The Fallen Elm (“The mavis sang and felt himself alone / While in thy leaves his early nest was made”); he elsewhere refers to the yellowhammer (with its beautiful Linnean, Emberiza citrinella) as the “writing lark”, an allusion to the scribbled black marks on its eggs that resemble handwriting.

Dr Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel and University Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

His latest book, Landmarks, is published by Hamish Hamilton, and is part of the Crossword prize on p48.

******************* bullfinch – n., a hedge that is allowed to grow high without laying ******************* CAM 74 37

Jill Calder

University matters 41 My Cambridge 42 Reading list 44 Cambridge soundtrack 45 A sporting life 47 Prize crossword 48

Extracurricular CAM 74 39

Extracurricular

University matters A Cambridge education Professor Graham Virgo Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education Jim Spencer

I became Pro-Vice-Chancellor in October last year, having been a College Senior Tutor for a decade and Deputy Chair of the Law Faculty. I was also an undergraduate at Cambridge, and have been lecturing here for more than 25 years. My brief as Pro-Vice-Chancellor covers all aspects of policy and strategy relating to education: undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education. In the short time since I took office, I have been heavily involved in reviewing what we do at Cambridge, and identifying what we might do better to ensure that it remains a global leader in education.

Our primary aim is excellence in teaching and learning – and we will use all tools, both traditional and innovative, to achieve this goal. So while the supervision and lectures will remain right at the heart of a Cambridge education, we must ensure we can make the best use of technological advances to enhance our provision.

In lectures and supervisions, we are considering how we might introduce greater digital interaction. For example, students might work from iPads or other personal devices, with information being transferred from the lecturer directly to the student.

I think it is important to stress that the introduction of such technological innovation should not undermine the significant benefits of a lecturer standing in a theatre or seminar room and communicating directly with students, if that is the most effective way of engaging with them. It is the same with supervisions: sitting down in a room and engaging in discussion and debate with a small group of students is what makes the Cambridge teaching experience so special, and this must be maintained. But we want to make greater use of new ways of conveying information and ideas to suit teacher and learner alike.

Beyond this, we aim to provide all students with a personal electronic timetable, from the start of their course and all the way through. This will help them to keep track of which lectures, supervisions and practicals they have scheduled and how their work should fit around them. The University is adopting Moodle, a virtual learning environment, and that will open up very many opportunities for different, innovative ways of teaching and accessing materials.

Our primary aim is excellence in teaching and learning – and we will use all tools, both traditional and innovative, to achieve this goal.

We have begun a full-scale review of the examination process, including what we examine and how we do so.

This includes assessing what the impact might be of introducing exams done on a computer, over those written by hand.

We are also doing a great deal of work to enhance the learning experience of our graduate population – both research students and those doing taught courses – alongside our undergraduates.

Four other issues are worth emphasising. The first is student wellbeing: questionnaire responses show that some students have a sense of being overwhelmed by the amount of work they are expected to do, and are not feeling

as satisfied as they hoped to be in their engagement with their courses. We must ensure that there is sufficient time for our students – who are among the brightest – to reflect and think critically, whichever course they may be doing.

The second is libraries. We are spending a lot of time considering this question: in the new world of IT, what should a library be for, and what should its resources look like? We are certainly not getting rid of books, but we are increasing access to digitised information.

The University Library, for example, has a significant project under way that is archiving web resources so that they are then available for posterity. This is closely linked with our commitment to openaccess research – something that has great potential for enhancing the student experience.

Sport is the third consideration. The recent review of sport governance in Cambridge led to a Sports Committee being established, which I chair. I want sport to continue to form an important part of the student educational experience.

We want to raise its profile at all levels, from elite sportspeople to those who simply enjoy using the facilities for fitness and recreation, and to make sure that appropriate provision is made for all groups. It goes back to the idea of taking student wellbeing, both physical and mental, very seriously.

Finally, the Institute of Continuing Education is doing very creative work in identifying new programmes for parttime students and revamping the existing ones. Again, there is an awful lot that can be provided online, with students creatively engaging with us from outside the University; and this holds true for our professional and executive education programmes, too.

But whether our students are pursuing intellectual study for personal or professional reasons, we will always strive to deliver an educational experience that is outstanding – and that is distinctly Cambridge.

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Extracurricular

Teaching lesson My Cambridge

Becoming a teacher takes both study and practice. Here, three Cambridge-educated primary school teachers reflect on how the University shaped their careers and classroom philosophies. iPad portraits: Sam Kerr

Alison White

(Homerton 1983) Faculty of Education tutor (formerly Acting Head, Watergall Junior School and Offord Primary School)

I tried to fight my family genes for teaching, and started a degree in psychology in Ireland.

But while there, I spent some time in a school and it helped me realise I really did want to teach. I applied to Homerton and began my BEd Hons in 1983, studying history and education. Homerton has long since provided the whole range of subjects as a full College of the University, but at that time it was just for us trainee teachers.

I found it a really warm and supportive place, and I’m still involved with the College.

That very first year inspired lesson ideas that continue to engage even 21st-century children. I’d cycle around Cambridge with my bicycle wheels practically square under the weight of all the books in the pannier. I remember Dr Peter Warner’s landscape history course, which I loved.

I still often apply those ideas,

helping children navigate their localities and explore local histories, as with recent projects on buildings related to Oliver Cromwell, or three soldiers from the first world war commemorated in a local church.

After graduating, I began my career at a very multicultural school in Peterborough. That was fascinating, having been educated at church schools myself. It gave me an enduring interest in helping children to learn about different faiths and respect the views of others. Now, when I work with Cambridge PGCE students, I try to encourage them to come with me to somewhere like a mosque or gurdwara. I hope it gives them the confidence to think of taking their own classes to such places.

When I first started, teachers were more or less left to decide what was taught.

Since then we have had the national curriculum and now the new curriculum! I’ve always felt there was great potential in cross-curricular teaching; which is more relevant to children’s lives and can reflect their interests and promote enjoyment. Above all, it’s about making sure children become lifelong learners.

My very first year inspired lesson ideas that continue to engage even 21st-century children. I’d cycle around Cambridge with my bicycle wheels practically square under the weight of all the books in the pannier.

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Georgia Woodhead (Hughes Hall 2013) Newly qualified teacher, St John the Baptist C of E Primary School, Hoxton, London After studying geography at St Andrews, I worked for a year at a boarding school in North Yorkshire as a live-in house assistant and coaching sports and music. We’d do outdoor education in the hills along ‘forest school’ principles, building dams. I loved it.

After a masters in environmental policy at Oxford, I began work as an environmental consultant.

But I figured out pretty quickly that something was missing, and that something was working with children.

Cambridge was the only place I wanted to do my PGCE. The department is so innovative, it’s second to none. I love the concept of learning without limits, because you don’t know what children are capable of. The science teacher training was

particularly brilliant: building air rockets, cutting up flowers, acting out the movement of molecules. It really helps you communicate that enjoyment to the children.

It’s not been entirely easy – there was a time when I was questioning my abilities and my Cambridge mentor, Mary Anne Wolpert, was invaluable, and still is. Now I’m a newly qualified teacher at St John the Baptist C of E Primary School in Hoxton. It’s really taught me the importance of building children’s social confidence first, before you can impact on their learning.

My experience in the classroom has inspired me to pursue a part-time masters in education, alongside teaching – something that will let me use my research skills to explore the relationship between social and learning confidence.

I’ve applied to Cambridge, of course. Fingers crossed!

James Biddulph (Homerton 2000) Head, University of Cambridge Primary School I realised I wanted to teach during a year’s scholarship in Nepal, after graduating in English and music from Durham in 1998. I was in a village that was 24 hours by bus east of Kathmandu, followed by a four-hour walk.

It gave me time to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life.

At Cambridge, there was an expectation of intellectual rigour that you don’t find everywhere. Dr Pam Burnard trained me. Actually, the word ‘train’ is terrible; she inspired me. She still encourages me, because she’s been there all through my professional career.

Cambridge is my professional home and Pam is like family.

I started at a primary school in Newham, London – I think I got the job just because I could play the piano – and I stayed for seven years. At that school there were 48 different

languages spoken, and it made me think about what creative learning means in culturally diverse communities – current research tends to be from a white western perspective.

So that led me to start a PhD at Cambridge in 2010.

Now I am so excited to be Head of the new University of Cambridge Primary School, taking its first pupils this year.

We will be very much part of the family of Cambridge schools, but close links with the faculty will make the school unique. There will be a professor who will spend half their time here and half at the faculty. From day one, the University is part of this school.

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Extracurricular

CAMCard holders receive a 15% discount on all book purchases at Heffers in Trinity Street, Cambridge and online at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/camcard.

Reading list Dr Alex Chin Interview: Lucy Jolin

Marcus Ginns

Dr Alex Chin Winton Advanced Research Fellow in the Physics of Sustainability Dr Alex Chin was 13 and mooching around the local comic shop in his home town of St Albans when a cover caught his eye. It wasn’t the wham-bam superhero stylings so beloved of his younger brother. It was a strange, bronze-embossed image of a darkhaired, dark-eyed man, set against a backdrop of minarets. The story’s title: Ramadan.

The comic: Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking, sprawling, worlds-within-worlds work The Sandman.

Ramadan, a stand-alone story within a longer storyline (the Distant Mirrors cycle), tells of Haroun al Raschid, King of Kings, who summons Morpheus, Lord of Dreams (the eponymous Sandman) and begs him to take his glorious kingdom into the land of dreams – “providing that as long as mankind lasts, our world is not forgotten”.

At the end of the tale, replete with the colours and splendours of old Baghdad, the frame pulls back. This is just another story, being told to a small Iraqi boy in the ruins of modern-day Baghdad. “And though his stomach hurts (for fasting is easy, this Ramadan, and food is hard to come by), his head is held high and his eyes are bright.

For behind his eyes are towers and jewels and djinn.”

“It was just… a story,” remembers Chin, now the Winton Advanced Research Fellow in the Physics of Sustainability and a Fellow of Robinson. “There was nobody being punched to the moon. I was enchanted.

I more or less read it on the way home. It haunted me. I went back for more but they didn’t have many back issues. Then I found a shop that sold loads of posters and junk.

They were closing down and they had loads of graphic novels. So I got the old trade paperbacks, the collected volumes of everything that had been published up until then.

The comic was still being published, so I read all the back issues while the new ones were coming out.”

The overarching story of The Sandman is that of the Endless – Dream, Death (his older sister), Desire, Destiny, Delight (who becomes Delirium), Despair and Destruc44 CAM 74

tion. But it weaves in countless storytelling traditions, drawing on Greek myths, African legends, Egyptian gods and Chaucerian tales. We meet, among many others, Loki, Lucifer, Shakespeare, Titania, Cain and Abel (they’re still arguing), Nero, Marco Polo, Mark Twain and Richard Nixon – as well as very recognisable, normal people, caught up in the designs of the Endless.

For Chin, who admits that he “didn’t read very widely” at the time, The Sandman was

a gateway. “I just couldn’t get enough of it. I’m a huge reader now, partly because it drew from all these different sources and I decided that I’d go and check them out – Shakespeare, for example, which I’d done at school and hadn’t liked but was converted to. That’s a process that’s still going on today, I’m afraid! There’s one issue where Kit Marlowe is the big playwright and Shakespeare is a bit downtrodden, staring into his tankard. So he strikes up this deal

Recent reads Terrence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, Ufos, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End of History (HarperCollins, 1992) “This is a relentless stream of speculation concerning human evolution, aliens, the I Ching, the collapse of time and how to commune with fungi.”

Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Icon Books, 2011) “A travelling companion – it took the edge off a great number of tedious train journeys last year.”

Michel Tournier, The Erl-King (Atlantic Books, 1970) “A strange, compelling and poetic nightmare. I couldn’t get away from it.”

Extracurricular

Cambridge soundtrack Neil Amin-Smith Interview: Dorian Lynskey C Brandon/Getty

to write two plays for Dream, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, which appear in the final issue. It’s very moving.”

Chin still has all his comics, and they travel with him. Re-reading them during a stint as a researcher in Germany, he found them a great comfort while he was away from home – not just as a reminder of his teenage years but also as a connection to the UK. “It’s hard to describe, but they’re very British. It’s all about stories. Yarns and fireside tale-telling. There’s one story set in a pub called the World’s End, which really appealed to me. It’s about people in a tavern, sharing tales on their way to somewhere else.”

Chin also sees a link to his current research, which focuses on quantum effects in molecules and structures that appear in biological systems, such as photosynthesis.

“The stories are extremely diverse but there is a feeling throughout all of it that there’s some connection,” he says. “You keep going down and down. On one level it’s a fantasy comic, but then there are all these things that tumble out of the background. Even the gods are moved by other forces.

“And in quantum mechanics, there’s an inherent, fundamental uncertainty about things. There are objects that give rise to natural phenomena that are not directly observable in the way they function.

I like the idea that it’s not all nailed down.

In fact, in many ways, the more you try and fix something, the more unknowable the future becomes. There are all these things to keep looking for, and some people want there to be some kind of final theory, but I hope it goes on forever, to be honest.

I’d be sad if it finished.” Like The Sandman, physics is a story within a story – and such stuff as dreams are made on.

Neil Amin-Smith (Jesus 2007)

The record that reminds me of Freshers’ Week Stronger by Kanye West At every event I went to for the whole of the first term this got played and now I can’t hear it without it taking me back to College bops. It was the most ubiquitous song. What surprised me about Cambridge was how many people were doing amazing things outside their studies. Anyone who wants to can find the time to do quite incredible things. I think everyone outside Cambridge overplays the amount of work you actually have to do.

The record that reminds me of performing in a string quartet String Quartet No 8 by Shostakovich I sort of knew Grace [Chatto] (Jesus 2005) from Clean Bandit before. We’d crossed paths at a lot of youth music things and she got in touch two or three weeks after I arrived and said “let’s make music together”. We didn’t want to play in the usual classical music forums because nobody who wasn’t involved went to the concerts. It was people playing for each other all the time. We wanted to play to people who wouldn’t otherwise go to classical music concerts so we played anywhere that would have us. This was one of the first things we played together.

It’s also significant because we sampled it in some of the earliest stuff that we made as Clean Bandit.

The record that reminds me of running a club night So Derobe by Joy Orbison Grace and I set up a club night at Kambar called National Rail Disco – we were on a train when we decided to do it. It ran for about two years. Dubstep and garage were the two main sounds. So Derobe was from the more interesting left-field side of dubstep that crossed over around that time.

That song would set off our night.

The records that remind me of forming Clean Bandit Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio/ Survivor by Destiny’s Child Jack [Patterson] (Jesus 2005) made recordings of our quartet. He started sampling them, chopping them up and putting beats under them. That was the first inspiration for Clean Bandit. We played May Balls as the Chatto Quartet featuring Love Ssega (Dr Ssegawa-Ssekintu Kiwanuka, Jesus 2005). We used to do a mash-up of Gangsta’s Paradise with Survivor because they were basically the same chords and they both already have strings in them.

It always went down well. Ssega was such a charismatic frontman. When we were catapulted into another realm of live shows last year, we felt more comfortable than we would have because we’d supported people like Dizzee Rascal and Ellie Goulding at May Balls.

The record that reminds me of leaving Cambridge Help Me Lose My Mind by Disclosure (featuring London Grammar) When I finished my masters exam Help Me Lose My Mind dominated my freedom.

While I was studying for the exam we went on tour with Disclosure and Mozart’s House went into the Top 20. It was the moment when I knew I was going to leave Cambridge. I possibly would have done a PhD, but when you have a song in the Top 20 it’s hard not to follow it.

Neil Amin-Smith plays violin and piano in Grammy award-winning Clean Bandit, whose debut album New Eyes is out now.

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Marcus Ginns

Extracurricular

A sporting life Hare and Hounds Words Becky Allen For such a simple sport, cross-country running stirs strong passions. For some, it brings back the darkest of school days, lumbering across cold, ploughed fields in flimsy shorts. For others, like Lewis Lloyd, it’s far more enjoyable.

A third year PPS (politics, psychology and sociology) student at Pembroke, he is captain of Hare and Hounds, the University’s cross-country running club, so called because club runs once involved the hounds following a course laid out by the leading hare.

One of the oldest running clubs in the world, it counts among its former members Alan Turing and Chris Brasher, who was pacemaker for Roger Bannister’s four minute mile in 1954 and went on to win gold in the 3000m steeplechase at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

Lloyd has been a runner since his early teens, when a teacher suggested he join a local running club after winning a crosscountry race at school. The weather no longer fazes him. “I run because it’s what I do, it’s part of me,” he says. “I’ve had

some really great runs in howling wind, where you feel elemental, it’s exciting.”

He sympathises, however, with suffering schoolmates. “For lots of people it was a form of torture, something the PE teacher would use as punishment. But my dad used to run competitively, and we’d watch athletics together, so I saw the more glamorous side of the sport.”

Lloyd also seems to have inherited from his father the lean and light build of a long-distance runner. Most at home in the 1500m, he mixes summers on the track with winters running cross-country, which helps him build endurance as well as speed. “The track feels like a performance, a spectacle. People can see every move you make, every mistake. Cross-country feels a lot more natural,” he explains.

The highlight of his season is the British Universities and Colleges Sports (BUCS) Cross-Country Championships, a huge annual event that sees university runners from across the country converging to compete. “The Varsity match is special, and everyone knows how historic it is, but BUCS was one of the best weekends away I’ve had in my time at Cambridge,” says Lloyd. “It was nice to see so many familiar faces. I like that sense of community.”

Lloyd is keen, too, to promote the club’s community spirit. “We don’t want to present ourselves as an elite force. We have people who are very competitive, and as a club we want to do well, but the club should fulfil another role – and that’s giving people the opportunity to run with others.”

That ethos is evident in the Hare and Hounds’ biggest event, the Boundary Run. This year more than 800 runners will take part in the marathon or half marathon around the fringes of Cambridge. “It’s the club’s calling card,” says Lloyd. “It’s organised entirely by students but anyone can take part, and at £15 it’s probably the cheapest marathon in the country.”

As important as the competition is for Lloyd, running 50-60 miles a week also gives him thinking time and therapy too. “Politics asks big questions, from the meaning of justice to human rights, and going for a run helps you work out where you stand. Running is good for that, it gives you a bit of distance from the reading, the lectures, the people around you.”

Equally important are the miles he runs without thinking: “Cambridge is such an intense environment that it’s important to have moments of release. So just as I have runs when I think about things, I also have runs when I need to drop it all and just run. Because it’s such a simple thing, you’re just putting one foot in front of the other for an hour. You can just focus on that, I find it therapeutic – especially in exam term.” cuhh.soc.srcf.net

CAM 74 47

Extracurricular

$

CAM 74 Prize Crossword

Pairs

by Schadenfreude

All entries to be received by 8 May 2015.

Send completed crosswords: • by post to CAM 74 Prize Crossword, University of Cambridge, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB • online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam • by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk The first correct entry drawn will receive £75 of vouchers to spend on Cambridge University Press publications and a copy of Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane (Pembroke 1994), an exploration of the linguistic and literary terrain of the British Isles. Two runners up will also receive £50 each to spend on CUP publications. Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 75 and posted online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/magazine on 15 May. INSTRUCTIONS

ACROSS

35 cells are to contain a pair of letters (entered side by side), either in natural order due to shortage of space or as a result of clashes between single letters in crossing answers. Solvers must order the latter to reveal a verse with a pair of consecutive words missing (but making the same sense) which will appear in normal reading order in the 35 cells. Single letters to be removed from each clue before solving, never leaving a nonword, spell out some thematic examples. Numbers in brackets give the number of cells occupied by the answers.

2 Royal Society’s about to admit East Germany’s one fine brain (6) 8 Scouts close to the farmhouse belonging to urban community (6) 12 An east European dated our bald servant (6) 13 Secure poet’s to give lover ecstasy at college (6, 2 words) 14 Stoppage of work starting to choke worker’s guild with America for base (6) 15 Video section covering navy cuts, now forgotten (5) 16 Poets need energy for black winters in Lerwick (5) 18 Over three sent back to remain as still as possible (4, 2 words) 19 Hoard kept by wickedly neat colleen (4)

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20 A type of clay I found in tomb crawling with lice (8) 22 Sheila’s friend’s recipe for catholic griever (6) 24 IRA rebel put in a rack (9) 28 A girl painted this sunless lake (5) 31 Less unstable than the end of mine shaft (5) 33 Swindler and mother part in this complicated procedure (9) 35 Oaf overcome by dodgy stout occupied the bench for a longer period (6) 36 Hymn tunes seem to stop rector going to antique festivals (8) 38 A goose’s rear feather (4) 40 A rhythmic pattern echo received

by Samoan twin (4) 42 Inactivity in Bear Hotel (5) 45 Rule advanced by Henry Ford’s first law book (5) 46 Ore and earth put into brown grinding tool (6) 47 Did gland welcome absent oxide?

(6) 48 Posh bird to blend into the home counties? (6) 49 Dutch uncle’s main judge no longer in use (6) 50 Tumour beginning to affect diseased node with matter (6)

DOWN 1 Awful cheater and crook would like a sharper’s trick (8) 2 Early in chase forward (4) 3 Game shot north of river somewhere in the Rhineland (4) 4 Perth’s argute solicitor invested in pottery (6) 5 Aisle dancing not keeping wide apart (4, 2 words)

6 Praise slow local holding Obama’s chopper up (5) 7 Holy man abandoning quiet inflection (7) 8 Hackers ruin game title with fifty missing out (8, 2 words) 9 Rare bird? One seen twice (4) 10 Over by Swann leading to extra run for Sehwag maybe (6) 11 New rose coloured primer (5) 15 Assaults mostly restrain mean sons (5) 17 Small WI birds beside dray (6) 21 Science master has worked outside Eton (4) 23 Bright active Liberal supports the other kirk officer (6) 25 Loose woman and poor Saul involved with a serious offence (8, 2 words) 26 Young woman possessing nothing to clock up (4) 27 Judge sunk before the fourth day vacillated emotionally? (8) 29 Vintage alcoholic drink consumed by masculine husband (5) 30 Cabinet minister on course wearing a top hair adornment (7, 2 words) 32 Upper-class cute floozy playing a flute? (6) 34 A vessel able to carry regulars from Rugby (6) 35 Water pump quickly raised to save pedalo (5) 37 That girl Amy with adult bust (5) 39 Striker turned up without positive punches (4) 41 Form a foundation slowly according to the Good Book (4) 43 Rubles found in open tin in Yerevan (4) 44 A northern hotel supporting town function (4)

Solution to CAM 73 Crossword Defining Layers by Schadenfreude Winner: Angela Price (Girton 1959).

Runners up: Robert Martin (Trinity 1968) and Jonathan Crowther (Corpus 1961).

Special mention to Nigel Harris, who writes: “Having solved this, I think I’m perhaps not as bird-brained as I thought I was! I have enjoyed all the CAM crosswords that I have attempted, but this is the first I have submitted. Thanks for the online entry form.”

Thematic answers are names of birds: TAR/ ROCK, MAR/TIN, FAN/ TAIL, GOD/WIT, KING/ FISHER, LEATHER/ HEAD, SAW/BILL, SPAR/ROW, CON/ DOR, WOOD/PECKER. Each consists of two words which define the entered answers. ORTOLAN, MERLE, SCAUP and PELICAN appear in the top and bottom rows, resolving the ambiguity in 3 down.

Down answers are REDOWAS, GARDAI, ENUCLEATIONS, IGLOO, WASTER, SHIN PAD, HANUMAN, MANGLED, LOURE, WRYER, PREFABS, CURTAIL, ETERNAL, BAUCIS, DEPART, CHEEP, BEANS, POLES, ILIAC.

CAM 74 49

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