Wellington Cambridge Society The Wellington Cambridge Society is a loose association of alumni who live in or near Wellington, the beautiful capital city of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our membership is a mix of people who were born in the UK, went to Cambridge and emigrated here, people who were born in New Zealand and undertook graduate or in some cases undergraduate study at Cambridge, and some from other countries who have fetched up in Wellington after wandering the world. The society was founded three years ago by a group of alumni who felt there was value in us meeting together. We contacted those of our friends whom we knew had been to Cambridge, then sent email to the Cambridge Alumni Relations Office who published my email address. Requests to join started rolling in soon afterwards. Membership of our society is wholly informal. The membership list is simply a collection of email addresses. We don’t have a legal entity, membership fees or a bank account. We generally meet in the function room of a cocktail bar that regards the profit on refreshment purchases during our meetings as rent for the room. This helps us to keep the administration effort to a minimum. We try to have six meetings a year. A typical meeting contains a talk from someone about their specialist subject. We’ve had people tell us about biblical archaeology, university development in Africa, freedom of information law and many other topics. A personal favourite was It’s Our Fault, a presentation about Wellington’s unstable geology. The rest of the meeting is given over to socialising. It helps that the room we usually meet in has wood panelling and is full of books, reminding us of a don’s study. The room also has a bathtub in it for no obvious reason, and while none of us remember seeing a bathtub in a don’s study in our tutorials, it adds an eccentric touch of the kind for which Cambridge is famous. We usually have a midwinter dinner in a club or restaurant. In New Zealand, Christmas of course falls in summer, but even so we have the Northern Hemisphere cultural traditions of snowflakes and sleigh bells thrown at us by the media. We get our own back, as it were, by celebrating midwinter. This comes roughly at the same time as the festival of Matariki, or the first appearance of the constellation Pleiades signalling the start of the end of winter, which is part of New Zealand’s Māori heritage.
The British High Commission in Wellington last year invited us for drinks at the official residence. The High Commissioner told us that she is keen to develop a relationship between the High Commission and the society. That’s an interesting initiative by the FCO, and we look forward to greater cooperation between the UK government and alumni abroad. On a personal level, being part of the formation of the society has been a very interesting experience. I have had fantastic conversations with fascinating people. And, I believe, many Cambridge alumni have enjoyed – and continue to enjoy – the company and intellectual stimulation of others.