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LIM SIEW-LIAN: HOW DO I KEEP GROWING? A LANDMARK YEAR FOR BRAIN RESEARCH STAY HEALTHY, LIVE LONGER
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In the service of society
Caring and campaigning Dr Comfort Momoh MBE, Women’s Healthcare, 2002 SUKI DHANDA
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he campaign to end female genital mutilation (FGM) has become mainstream news in recent years, something clearly welcomed by Dr Comfort Momoh, who established the African Well Women’s Clinic at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1997. ‘The media support has been good in raising awareness,’ she says. ‘The people calling me are young people wanting to find out if they’ve been through FGM or not. Demand is high.’ Dr Momoh sees between 300 and 350 women a year, and is disappointed that even ‘so-called health professionals’ are still not reporting when they find affected women. ‘I know of women who have had children in the UK and no one here has picked up that We need they’ve gone through FGM. imams that’s one of and pastors So the challenges.’ taking The numbers a stand of girls and women in the UK affected by FGM may exceed 135,000, and 200,000 girls are at risk each year of being taken overseas by their family to have FGM. In July, the Home Affairs Select Committee asked for the immediate implementation of a national action plan to respond to this ‘growing crisis’. Recommendations include better safeguarding of girls at risk and a need for more prosecutions to send a stronger message. While prosecutions have their place, Dr Momoh says she wants to focus on prevention. She spends half of her time visiting schools to raise awareness among pupils and teachers, and works
closely with GP practices, mosques and churches. ‘Some people still see FGM as a religious obligation, so we need imams and pastors taking a stand to support the campaign.’ She has helped set up 16 more clinics across the UK and her outreach work stretches beyond London, into Kent and Surrey – and even internationally on frequent trips to Africa. She advised the World Health Organization on the issue of FGM, and in 2001 she represented the UK at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Do you know alumni we should feature in future issues for their service to society? Please let us know! Email InTouch@kcl.ac.uk
‘I’m part of a group that supports midwives and birth attendants in Chad and in Nigeria. I want to do more to support family planning and the general wellbeing of women and girls, helping them to make the links between their human rights and these religious and cultural practices.’ Recipient of many awards, including an MBE, Dr Momoh says, ‘All the recognition and awards I have received I dedicate to the women and girls who have been through FGM. It bleeds my heart.’ AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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JIM WINSLET
Curious? Cigar-wielding Yathesa Sreecumaar (Dentistry, 2012) and his moustachioed guest Sandhya Narayanam were among the dozens of couples who took a turn in the Gatsby Ball photo booth during Alumni Weekend. Curiosity was the theme of this year’s weekend, and more than 550 alumni as well as 440 guests were curious enough to attend. Every class from 1946 to 2014 was represented – encompassing more than 160 courses of study and 14 countries, including Australia, Malaysia and Pakistan. Plans are well under way for Alumni Weekend 2015, which will explore happiness, to be held 12-14 June. To learn about holding a reunion celebration during Alumni Weekend, please see page 32. Mark your calendar!
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Update
Resurrecting the College’s eye on the sky Students are again examining the heavens from the observatory atop the King’s Building
SUKI DHANDA
Reader in Physics Malcolm Fairbairn remembers identifying the presence of ammonia and methane in Saturn’s atmosphere as an undergraduate, peering through a telescope and examining the planet’s swirling clouds with his own eyes before splitting the light into its component parts and analysing it. Ever since he arrived at King’s, he has wanted his physics students to enjoy that same experience. From Dr Fairbairn’s office on the seventh floor of the Strand Building, the obvious place to make this happen has been in plain view: the observatory dome atop the King’s Building. Sadly, the fibreglass dome, constructed in the 1980s, sat unused for more than a decade, its telescope and mechanics no longer in working order. Beginning this autumn, however, students are again exploring the night sky from the roof of the King’s Building. Dr Fairbairn successfully applied for an £18,000 grant from the College Teaching Fund to refurbish and equip the observatory. Assisted by undergraduate student Edoardo Paluan, Dr Fairbairn devoted much of the summer to cleaning the observatory and adjacent hut, assembling the mechanical system that will rotate the dome, setting up the new 14-inch Celestron telescope and installing a digital link so data collected through the telescope can be sent to lecture theatres below. For safety concerns and because 4
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the dome is small, just three metres in diameter, only four or five students can be in the rooftop observatory at a time, meaning it’s essential to make real-time images available for classroom viewing. While the telescope is state-of-theart (£10,000, including the mount), Dr Fairbairn has been frugal with his grant money. A used windscreen wiper motor, purchased from a scrap yard, powers the dome when it rotates. Central London, of course, is not the ideal site for a telescope. Between the light pollution and heat turbulence, the observatory won’t rival the Hubble Space Telescope. ‘I’m quite proud of the fact that this is probably the worst place in the world to put a telescope,’ says Dr Fairbairn. Despite the hazards of London’s atmosphere – and there are ways to mitigate light pollution with filters – students using the telescope will be able to see distant galaxies and study the atmospheric gases of nearby planets, just as Dr Fairbairn did in his undergraduate days. ‘This is a fundamental physics experience,’ he says. ‘To view a distant planet’s atmosphere with your own eyes and then to take and scientifically analyse data yourself to find out what it’s made of, that’s an important part of being a physicist.’ He adds, ‘And during the day we can spy on people in the Shard.’ Dr Fairbairn writes a blog about the observatory. You can find it at darklondonskies.com
Alumni benefits and services +44 (0)20 7848 3053 alumoff@kcl.ac.uk King’s College London James Clerk Maxwell Bldg 57 Waterloo Road London SE1 8WA © King’s College London 2014 In Touch is published by the College’s Fundraising & Supporter Development office. The opinions expressed in it are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the College. The College will publish the next issue of In Touch in spring 2015. Editorial +44 (0)20 7848 1031 InTouch@kcl.ac.uk Editor James Bressor Editorial Assistant Jules Foreman Contributors Louise Bell, Cally Brown, James Bressor, Kirsty Buck, Jules Foreman, Lucy Jolin, Alyssa Martin, Helen May, Amy Webb Photography Julian Anderson, Sanjit Das, Suki Dhanda, David Levene, George Osodi, Gus Palmer, Karen Robinson, Phil Sayer, Arnhel de Serra, Jim Winslet Illustrations David Biskup, Tom Gauld, Jakob Hinrichs, Belle Mellor, Toby Morison Design Esterson Associates +44 (0)20 7684 6500 Repro DawkinsColour Print Warners In Touch has been produced using paper from sustainable sources and bleached using an elemental chlorine-free process. The paper is produced at a mill that meets the ISO 14001 environmental management standard and the EMAS environmental management standard. The magazine is fully recyclable.
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Update
Doctors of Another Calling These medical professionals are known for their books, movies or politics, not making house calls
REX/ROGER-VIOLLET
At first glance, St Luke, Copernicus, Guy’s alumnus John Keats, Arthur Conan Doyle and Che Guevara don’t appear to have much in common – but they do. All five of them are doctors who made their mark in the world in a field other than medicine. They and more than 30 other physicians are profiled in a new book co-edited by Dr David KC Cooper (Guy’s, Medicine, 1963). Doctors of Another Calling explores the lives of doctors remembered for their work in science, religion, literature, sports and other endeavours. ‘Within every professional working group there are individuals who have other serious interests, some of whom leave
Doctor-turned-author Arthur Conan Doyle: he also stood twice for Parliament, but was not elected
the profession to explore those interests full-time,’ says Dr Cooper. ‘The medical profession, however, seems to abound in those who have made names for themselves outside of medicine.’ While they achieved fame for something other than caring for the ill, some of the individuals in the book never stopped working as physicians; Copernicus, for example, continued to practise even as he was turning the study of astronomy on its head. Keats, on the other hand, drifted away from medicine, with his mind wandering off even in the midst of his medical classes. The book quotes a letter from Keats to a friend: ‘The other day, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy land.’
Others abruptly stopped working as physicians. While Guevara had trained with his fellow revolutionaries, when he landed in Cuba with Fidel Castro in 1956, he was there as a medic. As the book reports, in the midst of fierce fighting Guevara ‘put down his medical supplies and picked up guns and ammunition’. Other luminaries featured in the book include author and St Thomas’ alumnus W Somerset Maugham (much of his early writing was based on his experiences as a medical student in Lambeth), philosopher John Locke, explorer David Livingstone, writer Anton Chekhov, miler Roger Bannister and Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. Doctors of Another Calling is published by the University of Delaware Press with Rowman & Littlefield.
Reggie’s round-up Schools to Faculties As of the beginning of September, most of the Schools at King’s are now formally known as Faculties, each now led by a Dean. For example, the School of Arts & Humanities is now the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. The College has established a new Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, formed by merging elements of the School of Biomedical Sciences with the School of Medicine. Two components of the former School of Biomedical Sciences – the Division of Developmental Neurobiology and the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases – have merged with the Institute of Psychiatry to form the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience. (To learn more about the newly established IoPPN, please turn to the feature article on pages 20-23.) Creation of the Faculty of Life Sciences
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& Medicine brings together basic, translational and clinical scientists to provide new cross-divisional research collaborations. The education portfolio of this new Faculty consists of undergraduate biomedical science degree programmes together with several health professions programmes, including nutrition and dietetics, medicine, pharmacy and physiotherapy. The Faculty also has an expansive postgraduate taught programme portfolio, with more than three dozen courses of study covering basic science, programmes for health professionals and pharmacy/pharmacology. The other new names at the College are the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences, the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy and the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery. The names of two Schools, The Dickson Poon School of Law and the Dental Institute, remain unchanged.
Jo Brand
Jo Brand honoured In July, the College recognised comedian Jo Brand with an honorary fellowship for her work as an advocate for people with mental health problems, her support of mental health research and her longstanding association with South London and Maudsley. Prior to becoming one of the UK’s best-known comedians, Brand was a psychiatric nurse, working at both the Maudsley and Bethlem. ‘Dealing with people who were at the end of their tether could be very difficult at times,’ Brand told together magazine in 2012. ‘The rewarding bits were the times when I felt that I’d done something to make someone’s life better, whether it was arranging admission, doing some counselling or making them a cup of tea.’
Stay healthy, live longer King’s recommends Preventing – not treating – disease should be your goal to stay healthy as I age. The alternative is to slide into a routine of worrying about my health until later in life. Unfortunately, putting off a focus on health has some nasty consequences. Research has clearly shown that by not managing my weight and fitness I’m more likely to develop type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, which means that I will die at a younger age – resulting in less time with my family and friends. Sadly, I generally fall short of my lifestyle
Dr Scott Harding, lecturer in nutritional sciences, suggests five areas of your life to focus on for healthier living and aging
Like many of you, I struggle to find the right balance of diet, exercise and other lifestyle habits that keep me at the right body weight and level of fitness. As someone who researches and teaches in the area of diet, lifestyle and chronic disease, I understand all too well the consequences of not prioritising these aspects of life. I know I need to find this balance if I want
goals and, based on the most recent UK health statistics, so do the two out of every three people in the UK who are classed as overweight or obese. Below are my suggestions for staying healthy and living longer. Dr Harding researches how diet and lifestyle can reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and why some people do not respond to diet and lifestyle approaches. He is based in the Diabetes & Nutritional Sciences Division. You can follow him on Twitter, @scottvharding
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BELLE MELLOR
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YOUR WEIGHT While it might seem obvious and a bit of a no-brainer, most people who need to lose weight do not. Find the strategy that works for you and stick to it. If it gets boring, find something new to challenge yourself.
YOUR WAISTLINE There is overwhelming evidence showing that having high abdominal fat – easily determined by your waist circumference – means you are three to five times more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. By losing weight you should see your waistline shrink as well.
YOUR ACTIVITY Do you know the recommended physical activity requirements for the average UK adult? Don’t worry if you don’t, when surveyed most people in the UK did not know either. What is most worrying is that many people never achieve the weekly minimum. You need at least 150 minutes per week of physical activity that gets your heart rate up and the sweat running down your brow – now you know!
YOUR INACTIVITY Many people equate increasing physical activity with decreasing inactivity but they are very different things. Think about the body positions you spend most of your day in – if it does not involve high levels of walking, stretching, jumping, running, twisting and climbing, then you are too inactive. Many occupations and home-related activities require little use of muscles and require very low levels of energy – both of which contribute to decreased fitness and increased body fat. You need to move more and sit less.
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YOUR BAD HABITS Quit smoking, drink less alcohol and get more sleep. Smoking, moderate to excessive alcohol consumption and too little sleep just compound the risk of developing lifestyle-related diseases like type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.
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Update
Professor Jill Maben OBE Q&A The challenges are great, but so are the rewards
What’s driving the UK’s nursing shortage?
We have experienced a boom and bust approach to nurse staffing in the last decade. On the demand side, nurses have extended their roles, undertaking more junior doctors’ work, and we have increased nursing needs from a population living longer. On the supply side, there has been a shortage of nurses to fulfill this increased demand and in addition a decrease in the training places available to educate new nurses. NNRU research suggests that one nurse to eight or fewer patients constitutes a safe staffing level in acute hospitals. Approximately 40 per cent of acute NHS trusts will need to recruit more nurses to achieve these ratios. This shortfall is likely to be met by recruiting internationally qualified nurses from overseas. Is there reason for hope?
There is. The recession and a move to an all-degree entry into nursing in 2013 have made nursing an attractive career again. However, the nursing workforce is an ageing workforce, and many nurses are quitting the profession early. The Centre for Workforce Intelligence has predicted a shortfall of 47,500 nurses by 2016. 8
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What’s the situation globally?
There is an international shortage of registered nurses, with many nurses migrating from Africa, India and the Philippines to Australia, the US and UK. This so-called ‘brain drain’ slowed in 2005 after a peak in UK international recruitment in 2002, but it is currently on the rise again to meet the UK’s nursing shortfalls. Is there enough support for nurses?
New nurses are not always supported well, and we still do not have mandatory support in the first few months of being a newly qualified nurse. My own research suggests this is a critically important time, where values and ideals can become compromised and crushed in poor environments. Good role models and feedback are critical to support new nurses. Without this, many nurses leave the profession early, a personal tragedy and a waste of public investment in their education. Much of my work is about developing and maintaining positive practice environments to prevent this. Is nursing still a profession that young people should consider?
Nurses are privileged to be with people at the most intimate and important times of their lives: at diagnosis, through recovery, at difficult setbacks or at the end of life. To nurse someone back to health or make them more comfortable, to listen to a patient’s worries and try and provide some support and solace – these are the moments that make nursing so worthwhile. All nurses have at least one patient they will never forget and many patients have nurses they will always remember. Few professions are so privileged.
SUKI DHANDA
Professor Jill Maben was awarded an OBE for services to nursing in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours. Professor Maben, who received her MSc in Nursing from King’s, joined the College’s National Nursing Research Unit (NNRU) as a senior research fellow in 2007 and was appointed Director in 2011, when she was awarded her personal chair in Nursing Research. The Health Service Journal named her one of the 100 most influential people and one of the most inspirational women in healthcare in 2013.
Battling one of the world’s deadliest diseases King’s in the news A team from King’s helps Sierra Leone contain the Ebola virus challenge,’ Dr Johnson, right, told the Daily Mail. ‘This new threat was something that they hadn’t faced before and would require technical advice, extra manpower and trusted friends.’ The King’s team has advised Connaught Hospital on how to develop a preparedness plan, identify cases, set up isolation units, protect staff and dispose of medical waste. These guidelines became a model for other hospitals, and the King’s team has continued to provide technical advice to the Health Ministry, along
An unconventional approach A retired professor is developing an innovative vaccine against Crohn’s Crohn’s disease (CD) is an aggressive bowel disease that affects an estimated four million people worldwide. Sufferers of this chronic condition are usually told that it’s incurable. Professor John Hermon-Taylor, a retired professor of surgery who now works full-time voluntarily as a molecular scientist at King’s, has a more positive outlook. He is developing a vaccine against what he believes to be the predominant cause of CD and is working towards getting it manufactured and through clinical trials. Professor Hermon-Taylor has researched Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) and its relationship to CD for more than three decades. MAP is a bacterium that causes Johne’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease in cows, similar to CD. His research has proven that MAP is found in
Running for the vaccine Dr Amy Hermon-Taylor has supported her father’s life work in many ways. She has fundraised by running two marathons, with another planned in Toronto for May 2015. She has also set up a website and social media pages encouraging people to donate time and money to the cause. ‘I’ve grown up with the fight to cure Crohn’s disease as a topic of daily conversation,’ she says.
milk from infected cows, as well as in water supplies, resulting in an environmental cycle between cows and humans. Many people are susceptible to illness brought on by MAP, meaning that they can develop CD; 92 per cent of CD patients test positive for MAP. Studies in cows show the MAP vaccine to be effective. ‘This is not a conventional vaccine in the sense that it’s used to prevent disease, although the vaccine can be preventative,’ says Professor Hermon-Taylor. Working without funding from the government or major CD charities, Professor Hermon-Taylor is raising investment funding to get the vaccine through clinical trials. CD sufferers and their families have provided ‘pivotal’ support for the research, with the Crohn’s community donating nearly £825,000 over 17 years.
with groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organization. ‘The people of Sierra Leone have been through many challenges over the years, from war, cholera and everyday struggles of life, so they are remaining resolute in the face of this,’ says Dr Johnson. The King’s team consists of clinicians, with two consultant-level physicians, two junior doctors trained in tropical medicine, two nurses, a pharmacist and a hospital manager. They are all volunteers from the College, Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley. If you want to support Dr Johnson and his team, please visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk/ ebola-emergency-appeal
TOP 10
NATIONS WITH THE MOST KING’S ALUMNI*
101,992
1,832
5,621
1,140
2,853
1,097
1,893
1,090
1,878
1,026
United Kingdom United States
Singapore
China (inc Hong Kong) Greece
Germany
France
Malaysia Canada
Australia
* Alumni with known addresses
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DAVID BISKUP
Dr Oliver Johnson (Medicine, 2010) is leading a team from King’s in Sierra Leone on the front line in the fight against the Ebola virus. As reported by the BBC and in the Daily Mail, Dr Johnson and his colleagues were already in the capital Freetown as part of the Sierra Leone Health Partnership, established to support long-term development of this west African nation’s healthcare system, when the Ebola crisis broke. Working at Connaught Hospital, Dr Johnson’s team decided to stay in Sierra Leone to help care for patients with the Ebola virus, a fatal disease with no known cure. ‘From the moment we heard about the first Ebola cases, all of our instincts on the team here and back in London were to do everything we could to help our colleagues overcome this new
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Campaign Update
Questions for the next year More ways King’s is changing the world Can we advance cancer research and speed up clinical trials, providing patients with new treatments faster? What lessons can we all learn from the rapid growth of emerging economies? How do we connect the finest minds across academia, arts and culture?
These are just some of the questions at the core of World questions|King’s answers as our campaign enters its final year. King’s publicly launched the campaign in 2010 with a £500 million fundraising target, a goal we reached in May of this year. Your generosity has improved the lives of millions through better palliative care, research into developing politically and economically just societies and earlier, more accurate diagnosis and treatment of several forms of cancer. Building on the campaign’s momentum, we are seeking to raise another £100 million by the end of 2015, and we hope you, and the entire King’s community, will help us achieve this new goal.
ACCELERATING CANCER RESEARCH
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Uniting world-leading scientists and clinicians under one roof, the Cancer Centre at Guy’s will push the frontiers of research into several forms of cancer and accelerate the creation of new treatments. The centre will advance a wide range of research tools, including bio-informatics (the application of computer science and IT to biology and medicine) and bio-banking (the storage of cancer tissue samples for future research). By breaking down barriers between researchers and clinicians, the Cancer Centre will give more patients the opportunity to take part in the latest clinical trials and benefit from the most advanced treatments in development.
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The campaign continues to emphasise the priorities announced four years ago, such as support for King’s world-leading neuroscience and mental health research and advancing humankind’s understanding of evolving shifts in global power. We’ve also identified a small number of new priorities where the King’s community can make a significant difference in the lives of countless people around the world. We’ve outlined five of these priorities on these pages. King’s is home to hundreds of the finest academics, researchers and clinicians found anywhere; for many of them, philanthropic support is crucial. With your help, the World questions|King’s answers campaign is funding their essential work: developing breakthroughs that will forever change how many illnesses and disorders are treated; providing unbiased, scholarly policy analysis to governments; and preparing the next generation of leaders using innovative teaching techniques.
Please visit kcl.ac.uk/ kingsanswers to learn more about the campaign’s impact and to make a gift
A COLLISION OF ART AND SCIENCE
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Science Gallery at King’s College London will be a space where art and science collide, providing researchers, academics, students and members of the local community with a vibrant setting for sharing and exploring ideas. Free to visit and with a particular focus on young adults, the gallery will engage visitors in cutting-edge research in science, the arts and design. It will also be a major asset to student life, offering skills development and job opportunities. Opening in 2016 on the Guy’s Campus, the gallery will include exhibition galleries, event spaces, a theatre and a café. It will be part of the Global Science Gallery Network, inspired by the success of the first gallery, opened by Trinity College Dublin.
LAW FOR A GLOBAL SOCIETY
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The Dickson Poon School of Law is establishing itself as the world leader in the study of transnational law – law that transcends national boundaries – and stepping up its efforts to provide students with financial support, often through scholarships, such as students in the Dickson Poon Scholars programme, left, and King’s Nigerian Law Scholars Fund (see page 12). Investment in these initiatives will be accomplished in part through the generosity of alumni and friends in the new Law Circle, featured on page 13.
© CLAUDIO CASSARO/SOPA RF/SOPA/CORBIS
Why I give to King’s Dr Maurice Rothschild Guy’s, Dentistry, 1955 Dr Maurice Rothschild has enjoyed a successful career as a dental surgeon and continues to operate a private practice in London. In addition to volunteering for the Dental Institute by interviewing prospective students, he recently established the Maurice B Rothschild Medal and Prize for Excellence in Endodontology.
NEW ECONOMIC LESSONS
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With the support of campaign donors, King’s has vastly expanded its global vision and reach during the past decade. One initiative, the International Development Institute, is examining today’s emerging economies, exploring the sources of their success and the major development issues that they continue to face. The institute is focused on understanding how emerging economies are confronting the challenges of promoting growth and broadening their societies’ inclusion in the benefits of growth. The fast-growing societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East may offer lessons for the developed West as well as many of the world’s poorest nations.
When I interview potential dental students hoping to study dentistry at King’s, I am highly impressed by the calibre shown by most of the current applicants. Those who ‘make the grade’ have been carefully selected and must thereafter be encouraged to strive for excellence in all that they are capable of achieving. When I was a student, I treasured being awarded the Newland Pedley Medal and Prize in my final year before graduation. By awarding a
similar medal and prize in my chosen specialism, I aim to inspire others to succeed in attaining excellence in the same area of expertise. Helping students makes me feel that I am returning some of the inspired gifts of knowledge and professional skills that I acquired from my teachers. We were taught by dedicated dental professionals whose guidance and tuition remained uppermost in our minds throughout our practising lives. Alas, the pre-eminence of the Guy’s name has faded following the merger with King’s, but the size of the new Dental Institute now makes it a world-class example of how such a merger can change our vision for the future. I would ask all who can do so to be generous in offering contributions to sponsor excellence in future generations, such as through the Dental Circle. In the Guy’s spirit of dare quam accipere, it is always preferable to give than to receive.
MORE PEANUTS, NOT FEWER
JULIAN ANDERSON
FOOD AND DRINK/REX
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King’s researchers are working to improve children’s health on many fronts, with their efforts sometimes going in unexpected directions. Researchers in the Department of Paediatric Allergy are leading clinical studies to determine the best strategy to prevent peanut allergy. The department’s Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study is one of the largest studies of its kind, and its findings will inform global health policies, helping children in the UK and around the world. LEAP is striving to determine if repeated exposure to peanuts from an early age can eliminate allergic reactions. AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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Campaign Update
A fund to create leaders and fight brain drain Now more than ever, scholarship support is essential for many university students
GUS PALMER
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less-privileged students in Nigeria to access the kind of education I received is extremely limited,’ says Ogunbiyi. ‘So funding a scholarship that provides even a few young students with that opportunity is something I feel strongly about.’ The first recipient of the scholarship, Adetokunbo Daniel Eribake, started at The Dickson Poon School of Law in September. The scholarship guidelines include a provision encouraging recipients to return to Nigeria and use the skills and knowledge gained at King’s ‘to effect positive change’. ‘One of the biggest obstacles holding back development in Nigeria is the availability of a skilled young workforce working in positions that can add long-term value to the economy and the nation as a whole,’ says Ogunbiyi. ‘I believe that you can have maximum impact working within the Nigerian system and that’s why we encourage our recipients to apply the skills they acquire for the betterment of Nigeria as a whole rather than themselves individually.’ Dr Austen-Peters adds, ‘Nigeria as a country needs talented and well-educated people that can help the country move in the right direction. Brain drain is a problem.’ Ogunbiyi taught English in Bangkok and then at an orphanage for a year immediately after King’s – ‘just what the doctor ordered after what was quite a stressful year of finals in law’ – before working in financial law. He was then a founder
Dr Adegboyega Austen-Peters, right, and Constantine Ogunbiyi, lower left, have established a scholarship fund for Nigerian students in the LLM programme; Adetokunbo Daniel Eribake, below right, is the first recipient
GEORGE OSODI (2)
Two friends of The Dickson Poon School of Law have joined together to establish a scholarship fund for Nigerians who want to study law at King’s, an outstanding example of providing support to deserving students, who come to the College from around the world. Constantine ‘Labi’ Ogunbiyi (Law, 1994) and Dr Adegboyega ‘Timi’ Austen-Peters have generously created the King’s Nigerian Law Scholars Fund, which is available to Nigerian residents with demonstrated financial need in the one-year LLM programme. Providing up to £25,000 per student, the scholarship is intended to defray the cost of tuition and living expenses. The idea for the fund was mooted by Dr Tunde Ogowewo, a senior faculty member, who proposed the scholarship as a way to attract more academically talented Nigerian students to the School’s LLM programme. ‘The number of opportunities for
and Chief Executive of First Hydrocarbon Nigeria Limited, and he was part of a team that established Afren plc, a FTSE 250 company. ‘I could not be in the position I am in now without my law degree from King’s,’ he says. ‘That’s one of the reasons I’m keen to help ensure that others have that same opportunity.’ Dr Austen-Peters graduated from LSE, earned a master’s at Cambridge and received his PhD from Oxford. He worked for the United Nations and a Nigerian law firm before opening his own practice. ‘London is the home of common law and the place where you will be taught by leading thinkers in the subject,’ he says. ‘Furthermore, it’s a great place to build a network of contacts for the future.’ Providing support for deserving students is a top priority of the College. If you’re interested in establishing a scholarship fund or bursary, please contact us at +44 (0)20 7848 3053.
The College has established its newest donor recognition circle, honouring supporters of The Dickson Poon School of Law. The Law Circle recognises alumni and friends of the law school who give at least £1,000 in a year. It joins the College’s three other donor recognition orders – the Principal’s, Dental and Medical Circles. ‘I have met many law graduates who recall their studies warmly, who are proud of King’s and who say King’s was central both to their success and who they are today,’ says the Dean, Professor David D Caron. ‘The Law Circle is a response to the desire of these alumni to ensure the greatness of their School and to give back to an institution that was central to them at a particularly important point in their lives.’ Professor Caron says the goals of the Law Circle are as wideranging as the wishes of the School’s supporters. Many alumni want to help students by funding scholarships, while others want to support specific areas, such as research. In addition, he says, students have indentified their top priorities: a stronger library, greater support for mooting, increased financial aid and the development of clinics that will give them ‘a taste of the professional world’. ‘Our aim is to graduate individuals steeped in the British legal system who are at the same time deeply appreciative of other legal systems and how these systems are being knitted together,’ says Professor Caron. ‘The Dickson Poon gift has given us the opportunity to take on these visions, but no single gift can execute them. The efforts and generosity of the Law Circle is essential to these ambitions: the circle makes many special activities happen and makes a tremendous difference to individual students.’ To learn more about the Law Circle, please email giving@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3406.
Honouring a role model, helping today’s students A new scholarship fund will assist PhD students for two decades Umesh Kumar, an assistant professor at the University of Delhi, is the first recipient of the Dr Doris Chen Mathematics Scholarship, which was established to support five PhD students in the Mathematics Department over 20 years. The scholarship fund was created through the generosity of Professor William Chen and Dr John Chen, sons of the late Dr Doris Chen, a pioneering academic whose teachings and writings influenced a generation of mathematicians at the University of Hong Kong. Professor Kumar, who studied for an MSc in Financial Mathematics at King’s in 2010-11, arrived at the College to begin his PhD in September. ‘I’m very excited to be back,’ he says. ‘This is a world-class academic environment, and for anyone studying financial mathematics, where better to be than right next to the City?’ The subject of Professor Kumar’s doctoral thesis will be stochastic modelling. Indispensable to both financiers and insurers, these complex mathematical models are used to analyse and predict the seemingly random behaviour of assets such as stocks, commodities, derivatives and currencies. There is also huge potential to apply the models in the fast-growing area of risk management. Once he completes his PhD, Professor Kumar plans to return to India, where the study of financial mathematics, he says, is still in its infancy. ‘There are many students wanting to study in this area, but not many teachers,’ he says. ‘The University of Delhi is keen to build up expertise, and I hope to play my part in that. This scholarship has made it possible for me to take the next step in my studies and my career.’
SANJIT DAS
Introducing the Law Circle
Professor Umesh Kumar, above, first recipient of the Dr Doris Chen Mathematics Scholarship; below, the late Dr Chen
An elegant life in numbers
Dr Doris Lai Chue Chen was an influential academic and, as the first female mathematician at the University of Hong Kong, a powerful role model for a generation of students. She studied first at Sun Yat Sen University in Canton, then moved to London in 1949 to earn her MSc and PhD at King’s. In 1953, she was appointed assistant lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hong Kong, where she subsequently became lecturer and remained until her retirement in 1985. Her book Elementary Set Theory, written jointly with Dr Kam Tim Leung, became a must-read for undergraduates and also for pupils hoping to enter the university. To her students, she was a symbol of culture and elegance, and a teacher of rare warmth and kindness. Dr Chen spent her retirement in England, and travelled extensively through Europe and Asia. She died in 2012, aged 82. AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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SUKI DHANDA
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‘HOW DO I
KEEP GROWING?’ Since she was a child, Chelsea College alumna Lim Siew-Lian has been defying expectations
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BY JAMES BRESSOR
A
s a polite, unassuming 14-yearold Malaysian girl on an English boarding school hockey pitch, Lim Siew-Lian could have shrunk away when a couple of players from an opposing team started smacking her shins with their sticks. ‘These girls started to hit me and one of my teammates who was also from Malaysia,’ she recalls. ‘My friend and I looked at each other and said, “Should we tell the sportsmaster or should we fight back?”’ Lim pauses and laughs. ‘We decided, no, we’re not going to tell. We just whacked them back, the same as they did to us. The message was very clear.’ In many ways, that moment summarises the traits that have defined Lim’s life: proud, tough and assertive, but always thinking before acting. Those characteristics have served the Chelsea College alumna well. For more than 40 years, she has been central to one of Asia’s fastest-growing conglomerates, the Genting Group, which today has more than 100,000 employees across several sectors, including integrated resorts with casinos, cruise ships, oil and gas, factory outlet centres and biotechnology. The group has expanded aggressively across the globe, with nearly 50 casinos in the UK alone. This business empire has a long history, but it took off when Lim’s father obtained a casino license for a hilltop resort more than 40 years ago. Fresh out of Chelsea with her pharmacy degree, Lim oversaw all of the new casino’s operations. It was a daunting task for a 21-year-old, but before Chelsea and even before St Francis’ College in Letchworth, Lim had been over-achieving.
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‘I grew up in a time when families still adhered to Confucian values. Loyalty was the first thing that the family expected, above all else,’ she says. ‘If you were born a girl, you were expected to obey your father. When you married, you were supposed to obey your husband. And when you grew old, you obeyed your son.’ COMING TO THE UK AND RETURNING HOME
While her mother – who had grown up with 21 siblings – could be puritanical, she was liberal about her children’s education. She made sure all six of them learned both Mandarin and English. ‘My mother said, “One day the world will have to learn Chinese.” That was more than 50 years ago, and she was right. It was my mother who persuaded my father to send me to boarding school in England.’ Her father would have an even greater impact on her life. Tan Sri Lim Goh Tong was born in China, grew up poor and immigrated to Malaysia at age 19. By the 1950s, he was a successful entrepreneur involved in construction and mining. The Asian business world at the time was very much a men’s club and fathers typically groomed their sons to follow in the family business. Young Siew-Lian,
I wasn’t even allowed to play card games growing up
who spoke her mind at the dinner table, impressed her father, and he realised that this daughter could one day help him, beginning with a family trip to Europe when she was 13. The holiday included visits to British boarding schools – where Lim stashed away application forms – followed by Paris and then on to the marble region near Pisa. Tan Sri Lim had purchased a marble quarry in Malaysia but he didn’t know anything about the equipment needed. After a cursory stop at the famous leaning tower, they went to a nearby quarry. While her father met with the quarry’s manager, Lim wandered around the grounds, taking down names and information about the various pieces of equipment. On returning home, she presented her father with a neat sheaf of papers containing enough information to order the equipment – and the completed application form to St Francis’. Chelsea College followed boarding school. Being a student in London during the late 1960s was great fun – ‘Who wouldn’t enjoy it? You’re in Chelsea, right?’ – and she met her husband Leong How-Seong, also a pharmacy student from Malaysia. ‘We became friends and partners in our practicals,’ she says. Upon graduation, her father surprised her with an unexpected career option. Tan Sri Lim was eight years into the riskiest venture of his life. Convinced that Malaysians would flock to a hilltop resort for cool weather, he was staking his entire fortune on developing thousands of hectares of rainforest now known as Genting Highlands. It was an immense gamble: miles of roads needed to be built, great expanses of raw land had to be cleared and nobody really knew if the resort would prove popular. Well into the project – inspired by a visit to Las Vegas – Tan Sri Lim obtained a license to operate a casino in Genting.
‘I didn’t know what a casino was,’ says Lim. ‘I wasn’t even allowed to play card games growing up.’ Lim’s father asked her to come home and oversee the resort’s operations. After much deliberation, she agreed to return to Malaysia. Her father would manage construction of the roads, buildings and other infrastructure, and she would take charge of all administrative and operational matters at the hotel and casino. She soon realised that her Chelsea education had prepared her for Genting: lectures and practicals had provided her with the discipline and investigative skills to analyse challenging situations, develop solutions and methodically execute plans. ‘While I was given carte blanche right at the beginning to manage Genting, I also was very fortunate to have my father guiding me, especially in the early years,’ she says. ‘I learned a lot from him and he relied a lot on me. I just attended to the needs of the business. But we were small, and starting small was an advantage.’ Over the years, Lim and her team of senior managers developed a detailed operations manual and made Genting the first casino in Asia to embrace computer technology. While she could be hard-nosed with staff, she treated employees with respect. She and her team established a share option scheme that rewarded long-serving staff, from busboys to senior managers. After ‘18 years in the hills’, Lim decided to move on. Genting Highlands had grown from 100 rooms to more than 5,000 rooms and the administrative and operational processes she had developed were firmly in place. She wanted the flexibility to pursue other opportunities and to travel to England,
where her three children were attending boarding schools. She soon entered her next career when the family trust was put in her care. Her analytical skills, judgement and, most importantly, patience – learned at Chelsea and nurtured at the resort – were essential. ‘I used the discipline that I had developed at Genting over the years to start this small portfolio, which has grown,’ Lim says. ‘I now realise there was a marked difference: running Genting was largely influenced by a sense of family duty and cultural expectations, whereas running an investment portfolio offers freedom of choice. And as an investor, my judgement and confidence are critical. Without my university education, I wonder whether I could have made this transition.’ THE BEST YEARS OF HER LIFE
Lim is now looking forward to the future, saying these will be the best years of her life. Her three children are grown and successful. Both of her daughters have degrees from King’s: June studied mechanical engineering and has worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the investment bank China International Capital Corporation; Jacqueline earned her MBBS at King’s after completing her MA at Cambridge, and she attained membership to the Royal College of Physicians. Her son Justin, an Oxford graduate, is Genting’s Head of Strategic Investments and Corporate Affairs. Able to look back at her time at Genting with satisfaction, Lim now pursues a variety of interests. She serves on the board of the Cancer Research Initiatives Foundation (CARIF), the only private cancer research facility in Malaysia. Her studies at Chelsea, where she realised that most research involved
westerners, made her an advocate for more cancer research with Asian populations. Helping women succeed in the business world is another priority. Lim spoke at a Forbes forum for businesswomen in Thailand last year. She advises young professionals to speak up for themselves, not to be afraid of failure – ‘When you fail, it’s actually how you pick yourself up that counts’ – and to ask for help when it’s needed. ‘Recognise your strengths but, more importantly, recognise your weaknesses,’ she says. At the forum, she emphasised the importance of education, describing it as the most valuable investment in anyone’s life. With education comes knowledge and confidence, ultimately leading to independence. Through education, she says, women are empowered to seek their own destiny and achieve equality. Asked how she measures success, Lim defines it as a lifelong process. ‘At any age, we should ask, “How do I keep growing?”’ she says. ‘When you’re in your 20s and have just completed your education, you ask, “Where do I want to go?” In your 40s, when you’ve had children, you ask, “What can I do now to be successful?” And now in my 60s, I still ask myself, “What next?” I still need to grow.’
When you fail, it’s how you pick yourself up that counts
Lim Siew-Lian with her parents on her graduation from Chelsea College
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PHIL SAYER
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The College’s new Principal & President, Professor Ed Byrne, a neuroscientist, veteran administrator and poet, is now in post, coming to King’s after five years as Vice-Chancellor of Monash University in Australia. He recently sat down with us to share his vision for King’s. There are two levels of major international, research-intensive universities. There’s a university that is credible, has its story and is making a major contribution in its own country, and has some international impact. There are about 150 universities like that in the world. Then there are a much smaller number of really great international institutions that stand a little ahead of the rest because they have a culture that attracts the brightest and the best. The top 10 or so US universities are at that level. Oxford and Cambridge are at that level. King’s has all of the building blocks in place to aspire to that. It has a great tradition. It’s renowned internationally. It has wonderful academic strengths in key areas – not in all areas, but in certain key areas. It finds itself, through an accident of history, right at the heart of London, when London has arguably become the world’s great city again. So I believe King’s has massive opportunities to rise with London and consolidate a position among the very great world universities. There are challenges of the time and challenges facing King’s specifically. What are those challenges that are worldwide? First, universities have become increasingly more expensive to run if they’re researchintensive at a time when productivity and income streams have flattened. As part of this, there is a tendency throughout the West, and in the UK perhaps more than most countries, to transfer the cost of education from the public to the private purse. That means universities must be increasingly aware of the fee-paying student as a consumer.
A second, deeper and more profound challenge relates to essential changes in educational philosophy and pedagogy, which are part of the information revolution. No institution, however august, can stand still here. Students today are children of the IT world, and they do not expect to be served up a blackboard-and-chalk level of education, dressed up with PowerPoints. Another educational content challenge is temporal endurance. When I did medicine years ago, a medical degree was expected to keep one credible for a lifetime of professional service. Now a professional degree probably lasts about five years, and then you’re in need of major refreshment. Then there are issues related to demography. Today, two-thirds of the world’s middle-class people live in Europe and North America. In 10 years, this totally inverts and two-thirds live in Asia, with a majority in China. This is altering the mix of the university world dramatically, with an accelerated rise of Asian institutions, but it’s also contributing to a huge body of mobile students who will spend periods of study in the West, much greater than we have yet seen. King’s has four sets of challenges that to me stand out. Firstly, any remaining work around establishing King’s as a single, cohesive university needs to be accomplished rapidly.
Professor Ed Byrne AC 2009–2014 President and Vice-Chancellor,
Monash University 2007–2009 Vice Provost (Health), UCL 2003–2007 Dean, Medicine, Nursing & Health
Sciences, Monash University 2001–2003 Professor of Experimental
Neurology, University of Melbourne 1993–2003 Director, Melbourne
Neuromuscular Research Unit & the Centre for Neuroscience 1992-2001 Professor of Clinical Neurology, University of Melbourne
This has largely been done by Professor Trainor, but there are still some divides between the components that make up King’s. One can see traces of parallel structures in the university. Secondly, the federal University of London has been a great institution and a beacon of learning around the world. King’s now needs to steer its way, in every way, as a strong, independent, free-standing university, which it’s been now for more than a decade. How that will be done will require thought, work and sensitivity. Thirdly and most importantly, King’s must embrace the educational, philosophical and pedagogical principles that I referred to earlier, and make sure that it is delivering a quality of education fit for the early part of the 21st century in a way that is at least as good as, and ideally better than, any other institution in London, and that measures up well against the American Ivy League universities. Fourthly, King’s must continue growing its research base. In addition, I believe King’s must look carefully at its portfolio and fill some of the gaps – and two gaps stand out. The first is to strengthen business activities at King’s. The second is in the exact sciences and engineering, where there are huge opportunities, not to step back and re-enter traditional engineering disciplines, but to build a presence in the new engineering disciplines. How King’s responds to these global and local challenges will require consultation and discussion within the King’s community, and I plan to have wide discussions in the coming months with internal and external stakeholders. King’s is a great research and education university at the heart of the world’s greatest city. Getting that message embodied and real in the life of the university in the most effective way will be part of my job. This is not new; Professor Trainor and his team identified all of this, and I intend to build on the unique strengths of King’s that relate to London.
Professor Ed Byrne challenges the King’s community to be ambitious
‘KING’S HAS MASSIVE
OPPORTUNITIES’ AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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Building on 20 years of remarkable advances, this is a landmark year for the College’s world-leading research into the brain
COLLABORATION, TECHNOLOGY AND SHEER INGENUITY
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TOM GAULD
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If you want to change the world, you’ve got to be a bit bold
BY LUCY JOLIN
H
ow do you begin to study the brain? It only weighs around three pounds, but it can seem as impenetrable as the depths of the ocean. It can’t be easily biopsied like the liver or lungs, or grown in a dish like the tissue of those organs. There’s no equivalent of kidney dialysis if it fails. The complexity of the heart has nothing on the brain’s 86 billion neurons, with an estimated 100 different chemical neurotransmitters passing trillions of signals between them. So it’s studied using technology, collaboration and sheer ingenuity – and King’s is at the forefront of all three. The College has strengthened its position as a world leader in the study of the brain with the completion of two new facilities in 2014: the NIHR/ Wellcome Trust King’s Clinical Research Facility, dedicated in May, and the soon-toopen Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, both based at Denmark Hill. These new centres are bringing together clinicians and researchers from all disciplines of neuroscience who were previously scattered across more than a dozen buildings. Both new facilities are equipped with the very latest cutting-edge technology – from computers that can map the entire human genetic code to super-resolution microscopes that can study the behaviour of a single brain tissue molecule. It’s work that desperately needs to be done. The societal and monetary costs of neurological disorders are enormous, and soaring. Consider these statistics: 25 million working and school days each year are lost to migraine in the UK alone. Stroke costs the NHS around £2.8 billion annually. There are already 44.4 million people with Alzheimer’s disease worldwide, and that figure is expected to hit 133.5 million by 2050. And those alarming figures don’t include numerous
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other conditions, such as depression, bipolar disorder, autism, epilepsy, head injuries – it’s a long, long list. In response to this challenge, neuroscience has advanced hugely over the last 20 years. ‘Being able to identify the “why” is key,’ says Professor Peter Goadsby, headache specialist and Director of the NIHR/Wellcome Trust King’s Clinical Research Facility. ‘Genetics is the “why”. Why do I have this? Why am I depressed? Why do I have a headache, a tremor? Why me? Then there’s the “how”, which we can answer with functional imaging. This allows us to see what parts of the brain are active or inactive and start to begin to identify patterns of change that correlate with the disorders. That’s been incredibly important for mental health and neurology, because the site of the organ of interest is inaccessible. You can’t just peer into it and chop bits out of it, because everyone wants to keep theirs, quite understandably. ‘Then there’s the translation of neuropharmacology into developments that are allowing us to really think about bringing new therapies to patients. In the headache world, we’ve been able to turn understanding in the labs into real, tangible new therapies. And we’ve been back and forth in the virtuous cycle, so we’ve been able to develop new therapies, ask questions about how they work, realise that we could do better and develop newer therapies that give you a better insight into the disorder. We’re currently working on what we hope will be the first mechanismspecific treatment for migraine prevention. All the other therapies currently being used were actually designed for something else. That’s tremendously exciting to me: to be able to contribute to both the betterment of people and the future, by understanding their conditions more completely.’ GENETIC ENGINEERING
Last year, King’s saw a first in the UK: a boy born free from the gene that was responsible
for motor neuron disease (MND), which had killed his uncle and his grandmother, and which his mother carries. This family have been under the care of Chris Shaw, who is Professor of Neurology and Neurogenetics at the newly renamed Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) and Director of the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute. His team identified the causative gene mutation while a team at Guy’s carried out an innovative procedure that ensured the mother would not pass the illness on to her child. Firstly, the mother’s ovaries were stimulated to produce eggs and they were fertilised in the laboratory with the father’s sperm. Doctors at Guy’s removed just one cell from each early-stage embryo and tested it for the harmful gene mutation. An embryo that was free from the mutation was then implanted back in the mother’s womb. ‘I looked after this baby’s grandmother, so I have known the family for nearly 15 years,’ says Professor Shaw. ‘Obviously, the effects of this disease have been very traumatic, but it was hugely important to know that the next generation would be free of MND.’ This kind of cutting-edge genetic engineering, with a tangible patient benefit, is exactly the kind of project it’s hoped that the new buildings will encourage. In 2000, the first map of the human genome was published. That project took around 15 years and cost £250 million. That same process can now be done in a week for around £1,000. These advances have opened new avenues for exploring the genetic nature of brain disease. ‘Things that were unimaginably complicated, painstaking and expensive are now relatively trivial in terms of the technology to be able to generate the data,’ says Professor Shaw. ‘We now need to be able to handle that data and analyse it with powerful technology and that’s coming online as well. So absolutely, we will be able to map
your entire genetic code and look at what disease genes you might be susceptible to. And of course, ultimately, for people who are of high genetic risk, there is the option of pre-symptomatic treatment, which would be pretty extraordinary.’ THE BRAIN AND MIND
As well as in the science itself, there has also been a big shift in neuroscience thinking over the last 20 years towards a closer link between the brain and the mind, says Professor Shitij Kapur, Dean of the IoPPN (formerly the Institute of Psychiatry). ‘Look at your newspapers in the morning and what you find is brain images of people when they are making moral decisions, for example. Or the brain circuits involved in making financial calculations. We are beginning to link functions that we previously thought were just about the mind to structures and circuits in the brain.’ Professor Kapur’s School became the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience in September. ‘The name is catching up with the reality of the breadth of King’s offerings in this general area,’ says Professor Kapur. ‘The IoP was always broader than just a place for psychiatrists. But over the last few years, there has been a substantial expansion in the area of brain sciences and psychological sciences, and it seemed appropriate to explicitly acknowledge that, and bring the sciences together to actually make fundamental discoveries in that area.’ So from bench to bedside and back again, the brain is slowly starting to yield up its secrets, thanks to technology, expertise, and, of course, those who are funding these things. ‘Philanthropic contributions can simply change the direction of a field,’ says Professor Goadsby. ‘With philanthropic support, we are able to take bold decisions. And if you want to change the world, you’ve got to be a bit bold.’ AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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FAITH IN WORDS AND VERSE Praised for her ‘confident, edgy, dynamic’ performances, King’s student Megan Beech is speaking out against inequality and misogyny
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KAREN ROBINSON
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BY JULES FOREMAN
P
ublished poet, social commentator, feminist, activist and Victorianist – Megan Beech is all of these and more at the young age of 20, as she begins her third year of studying English literature at King’s. Beech has emerged as a prominent voice in her generation through her growing presence in the performance poetry scene, an up-and-coming movement that has been a major part of her life since she won her first open-mic slam three years ago. It’s easy to see why: watching her perform, online or live, her emotional and fervent delivery, punctuated with sharp gestures, can mesmerise. Beech has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember. She cites Percy Shelley as her favourite poet, and her early work was focused solely on the written word until she discovered through YouTube how the genre could take a more communal form. ‘I was 16 or 17 and seeing people emerging, watching videos online of spoken-word artists like Kate Tempest or Dizraeli and just finding it really exciting,’ says Beech. ‘The idea of instantly being able to engage a reaction from what you’re saying to an audience appealed to me a lot.’ Growing up in the market town of Bridgwater, Somerset, Beech attended the nearby Glastonbury Festival many times. Her first triumphant slam performance in a dimly lit basement in Bristol, however, led to an invitation to perform on stage at Glastonbury. She has since been invited to the Southbank Centre, Latitude and Larmer Tree Festivals, and has performed at institutions including the British Museum and Keats House. Beech attributes her growing confidence to the role of the audience, as well as her own. ‘The great thing about spoken word is that it’s pretty universal, everyone can engage with it on some level,’ she says. ‘It’s exciting
to feel the energy of the other people in the room as they react to certain things. If I see people nodding their heads or laughing about what I’m saying, that encourages me to get more impassioned. I like the intimate connection that I get with people when I’m performing.’ Her passionate performances have caught the attention of others. ‘Megan Beech is a powerful force… a wave of passion that challenges the status quo and rails against inequalities and apathy,’ says Peter Hunter of Apples and Snakes, a leading performance poetry organisation. Her verse and performance style are often described as ‘powerful’, which is certainly an apt description; the frenetic energy, the way she waves her arms and her passionate delivery combine to enthral her audiences. One of the key elements of Beech’s work is her use of internal rhyme, which contributes to the distinctive rhythm of performance poetry. She is also, as Hunter notes, not afraid to respond to social issues. She attacks gender inequality and misogyny, often focusing on its influence in the media. In her poem 99 Problems she ponders: And maybe one day newspapers will make the decision, to cut the front pages dedicated to dissecting feminine physique, and instead choose to speak about rape victims being stoned to death in Iran. ‘It’s become normalised,’ says Beech. ‘We expect to turn on the TV and be told what Prince William said and what Kate Middleton wore. She isn’t allowed to speak, she’s expected to be a walking supermodel at his side. The fact that in mainstream media that kind of rhetoric isn’t challenged means it’s become normal to people.’ This unspoken acceptance of treating women as objects in everyday life angers Beech, particularly within the environment where she currently lives: a university. She
We expect to be told what Prince William said and what Kate Middleton wore
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speaks of ‘freshers sexism’, which includes parties branded ‘Tarts and Vicars’ or ‘CEOs and Sluts’, themed to encourage men to be fully dressed and of high status but women to be sexual objects wearing minimal clothing. This reflects a culture in which near-naked women dance around suited men in music videos and ‘lads’ can make light of rape, another issue that Beech confronts in a poem written in response to her halls of residence displaying an offensive joke on its TV screen notice board: I wish someone could explain to me, when it became acceptable to use sexual assault as a punchline. Surely that’s not fine. Beech is angry, and she says so repeatedly through her verse. She is challenging these attitudes, becoming what she calls a ‘toleranter’, someone who is not tolerant of widespread misogyny in today’s society but is instead ‘toleranting’ – which is the title of one of the poems that feature in her book When I Grow Up I Want to be Mary Beard. The book’s title is another dig at a society that judges women based on how they look, not by what they think or say. Beech describes Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge and a regular columnist for The Times, as her idol. When Professor Beard received abuse about her looks and violent threats on Twitter following an appearance on Question Time, Beech was moved to write the poem that later became the title of her book. ‘It struck a chord with me because it’s about silencing women’s intelligence and I’m someone who wants to go on and do things in academia. To think that a woman is still being judged for her age or the way she looks and not what she says in 2014 is completely mad.’ Beech, whose research interests gravitate mostly around Dickens, is already prominent within King’s academia. She is treasurer of the English Society, has performed at departmental parties and poetry nights and has spoken about her achievements
WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE MARY BEARD
When I grow up I want to be Mary Beard. A classy, classic, classicist, intellectually revered. Wickedly wonderful and wise full to brim with life, while explaining the way in which Caligula died, on BBC prime time. And I would like, like her, to shine. The kind inclined to speak her mind, refined and blinding. Yet I am finding it tough to grow up in a world where Twitter is littered with abuse towards women, where intelligent, eminent, eloquent females are met with derision. Because she should be able to analyse Augustus’ dictums or early AD epithets, without having to scroll through death, bomb and rape threats. Do not tell me this is just the internet or a public figure deserves everything they get. Because this isn’t just about one academic, it’s endemic in this society enmeshed in sexist rhetoric. I cannot live accepting it! Because when I grow up I want to be Mary Beard, to wear shiny converse and converse on conquerors and pioneers. A sheer delight, an igniter of young minds, but never a victim. Like Minerva herself, a goddess of wisdom.
in seminars for first-year students. She has also undertaken a research fellowship at the College’s Cultural Institute, a centre for exploring innovative cross-discipline partnerships. Considering she did not originally apply to King’s but was accepted on an adjustment offer – for students who have exceeded their predicted A-level grades – her tutors find it a privilege to have Beech so immersed in their department’s activities. ‘What stands out about Megan is that she is just very good indeed,’ says Professor Josephine McDonagh, Head of the Department of English and fellow Victorianist, whom Beech describes as ‘the best kinds of people’. ‘She has great facility with words. Her poetry is inventive and sharp and witty. As a performer she is equally impressive – confident, edgy, dynamic. She enriches the English Department with her talent for language. She’s a top student, hard-working and high-achieving.’ On the acknowledgements page of her book, Beech praises the English Department at King’s as being ‘a great supportive force’, particularly the female academics whom she is ‘inspired by and aspires to be on a daily basis’. She plans to complete a master’s degree – at King’s, she hopes – and remain in academia. ‘I’ve no idea what career path she is likely to follow,’ says Professor McDonagh. ‘In my mind, she’ll be successful in whatever she elects to do.’ If her words in Toleranter are anything to go by, Beech will continue to speak her mind, regardless of which path she chooses: But I refuse to feel bruised by the state of the news and choose to pursue the view that one day hope will rise as high as the soaring price of fuel. I renew my faith in words and verse and saying what you dare, in plucking on guitar strings and expressing something rare.
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Passionate about music and driven by ideas, Alex Beard keeps the Royal Opera House ‘confidently insecure’
DEVOTED
TO THE
ARTS
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DAVID LEVENE
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BY LUCY JOLIN
I
t’s a drizzly, grey spring day but the rain hasn’t deterred the ballet lovers outside the Royal Opera House. Even in the murk, the queue for returns for that night’s final performance of Christopher Wheeldon’s acclaimed The Winter’s Tale snakes all the way down Covent Garden. He might now be sitting in his light-filled office, with spectacular views across the market and beyond, but Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, is clearly still one of those fans in spirit. ‘My mother is a flautist, so music was always in our house,’ he remembers. ‘My dad was a surgeon but he was borderline obsessed with opera. I saw my first The Valkyrie here, aged about 12. I was going to go to my grandparents while my mother saw the show but the babysitting option fell through, so she managed to get me in, standing. I was completely blown away by it. From then on, I’d raid the parental record collection and I’d save up so I could stand in the gods.’ Music is still a passion, along with cricket, but his tastes are wide-ranging. ‘I’ve got very catholic tastes. I’m as much Dylan as I am Szymanowski. I am both. I don’t subscribe to high versus low.’ Few could argue that Beard’s ‘thoroughly mediocre 2.2 in classics’ has held him back in any way, although he’s the first to admit that he wasn’t the most attentive of students. ‘I was pretty disastrous, I have to say,’ he confesses. ‘My father died when I was 17. Absolutely the last thing on my mind was knuckling down, and my intellectual life just wasn’t there at all. In fact, my mother still has my faculty warning letter framed in her toilet.’ Unfailingly polite and comfortably selfdeprecating, Beard remembers that when he left King’s in 1984, he ‘bumbled around, racking up debts’. His grandfather offered to pay them off, as long as he got a proper job. He became a trainee accountant, a career which ended one freezing day in Dover, when he was sent to count hovercraft skirts. A succession of temp jobs followed until one day, walking down High Holborn, he saw an advertisement in a recruitment agency’s window for a clerk at the Arts Council. ‘I thought it sounded quite interesting. They wanted someone who could blag about music. I thought I could do that.’ He stayed at the Arts Council and rose through the ranks, eventually acting as secretary to Baroness Mary Warnock’s report on the Royal Opera House in 1992. Wanting to move on, he was offered a high-level post at Scottish Opera, but didn’t want to leave his new partner, lighting designer Kate. (They are still together and have two children.) Then a job at the Tate came up.
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‘They were looking for someone who was a qualified accountant, who’d run a large consumer-facing business and ideally had experience of big building projects. I am neither of those things, so I said I’m not sure it’s me. But I thought they wouldn’t have phoned if there wasn’t the smallest chance… and that small chance was enough for me to say sorry, Scottish Opera, and chuck my hat in the ring at the Tate. And that was that.’ He stayed for 19 years, working on the building of the Tate Modern and the development of its brand, eventually becoming deputy to Sir Nicholas Serota in 2002. Then, in April 2013, Tony Hall left the Royal Opera House for the BBC. ‘I thought: this job will never come up again and I’d regret it if I didn’t have a crack at it. So here I am.’ He makes it sound simple. But working in the arts, he points out, requires passion. ‘The pay’s not great, the hours are demanding, but it’s hugely rewarding.’ And he also points to the pivotal role of mentors in his career, notably the ‘extraordinary’ Lord Dennis Stevenson, former Chairman of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, John Botts, Chairman of the Glyndebourne Arts Trust, and Sir Nicholas. ‘He’s a brilliant leader who’s just the most fantastic example. He can appear to be a rather severe figure but up close he’s extraordinarily warm.’ There’s no such thing as an easy time to take over the role of running one of the UK’s most respected artistic institutions. But continuing to maintain excellence in an age of austerity is a daunting task. Creating and sustaining an environment where the world’s best artists want to make extraordinary work and enrich audience’s lives is his number one priority, says Beard. ‘That is a very easy sentence to say and a much more difficult thing to keep happening. You have to invest in new work. You’ve got to create a working environment where people feel that they love performing in Covent Garden. Three hundred people coming together, to create out of thin air something for which there may be a score but there certainly isn’t a formula – that’s a heck of a thing. And it’s so important not to lose sight of that and to ensure that there are resources and the environment in which that can happen. There are plenty of lyric theatre organisations that think they’ve got it nailed. They take their eye off the ball and then they lose the plot.’
You’ve got to be vision-led
Backstage at the Royal Opera House: ‘I’m as much Dylan as I am Szymanowski. I am both. I don’t subscribe to high versus low,’ says Alex Beard
Funding, of course, is an ever-present challenge. But Beard doesn’t believe any institution – whether it’s an opera house or a university – necessarily has the right to be supported. ‘All healthy societies rely on great institutions as platforms for whatever they’re about, whether that’s education or creating extraordinary opera and ballet and sharing that across the planet. I think they’re enormously important but you mustn’t take it for granted. A little bit of questioning and healthy scepticism about institutional values are very important. Institutions need to be confidently insecure, challenging themselves the whole time. ‘Government funding is definitely reducing. Having said that, there’s always a gap between artistic ambition and aspiration and available resources. If there isn’t, it’s time to hand the keys to someone else. You’ve got to be ideas-led, you’ve got to be vision-led, and then you’ve got to find people who share that passion and are prepared to come on a journey to support it.’ Then there are the ever-present questions that go with the territory: are opera and ballet just for the old and rich? What’s the relevance of a libretto written 300 years ago? Where are these art forms heading? They’re all questions that Beard has heard many times before, and it’s hard to argue with his answer. ‘If there’s no longer love, or death, or despair, or hope, then opera and ballet will be irrelevant. While these things exist, they’ve got a pretty strong future. ‘I’m very conscious that there should be entry points for everyone. So 40 per cent of the tickets are under £40. You can see every opera and ballet for less than a tenner, if you’re prepared to stand, and we’re now increasing the number of performances that are live broadcasts into a cinema near you. There’s a lot of power in the tension between supposed opposites, whether it’s performing at the very highest level with elite artists and then having the passion to extend access to that experience. It’s the canard that elitism is somehow in opposition to access. It’s not. ‘After all,’ he adds, ‘why bother to extend access unless what you’re doing is bloody brilliant?’ The people still queuing in the rain – young, old, black, white, British, Russian, American – would no doubt agree with him.
You can see every opera and ballet for less than a tenner
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Community Kickstarting careers More alumni are passing on their wisdom to the next generation through King’s Connect, the College’s newly expanded mentoring programme
For King’s law student Alice Francis, the chance to watch barristers analyse the intricacies of a complex commercial case in court confirmed her long-held career ambition. ‘It was then I thought, “This is definitely what I want to do,”’ says Francis, a third-year student. ‘Seeing the barristers in action was very impressive.’ Under the guidance of her mentor Sophie Weber (LLB English and French Law, 2008), a barrister at the London chambers One Essex Court, Francis is gaining valuable glimpses into the reality of life at the Bar. The pair were brought together by the Alumni & Supporter Relations Office at King’s, which has launched an expanded mentoring programme, King’s Connect. ‘Our matching system has worked very well for law and medicine students and it’s now open to everyone,’ says Alumni Volunteer Officer Maria Gutierrez, who runs the programme and offers mentoring skills training. She notes that the programme doesn’t limit students to mentors who graduated from the same course of study; it will match students and alumni with similar interests, such as theatre or jazz.
‘Alumni from all subjects can offer their mentoring services, or ask for mentoring for themselves,’ she says. As a final-year philosophy student with plans to become a barrister, William Greenall has also spent time with Weber over the last year since their introduction at a matching event at King’s. ‘I was allowed to shadow Sophie in her chambers for a day, which was great – usually this privilege is reserved for law students and people already training to be a barrister,’ says Greenall. ‘The mentoring has helped me decide to take a two-year accelerated law degree when I graduate and Sophie has been advising me on potential sources of funding.’ Weber, who won a string of prizes as a student and gained a first-class degree, returned to King’s briefly as a lecturer before starting her career at One Essex Court in 2011. She’s keen to maintain her contact with the College through talking to current students. ‘It’s good to give something back,’ she says. ‘There are lots of myths about the Bar. As an insider I can show students the nitty-gritty of our job and demystify the profession.’
Mentors can also help with specific skills, and Weber gave her students a crash course in mooting as neither had any experience in this essential area. ‘I had a mental block about it,’ admits Francis. ‘Sophie offered to set up a practice session for me and William to present a case to her. She was fantastic and made me repeat my opening statement many times, until I could do it without stumbling.’ With a new online mentoring platform up and running, Gutierrez says more students and alumni are now making connections. ‘Networking in areas like social sciences and war studies is growing fast and we are hoping to exceed our target of 1,000 mentors soon,’ she says. Online messaging and Skype make communicating easy and convenient, and alumni and students can also meet face-to-face at special King’s events or more informally if they like. ‘I’ve been impressed with how committed Alice and William are,’ says Weber. ‘Mentoring will help to kickstart their careers and I want to stay in touch.’ To learn more and for registration instructions, email mentoring@kcl.ac.uk
Start planning now for an Alumni Weekend reunion
To see photos from this year, visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk/ in-pictures-alumniweekend-2014
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Now is the time to start planning for a reunion during Alumni Weekend 2015. Particularly if you graduated in a year that ended with a 0 or 5, it’s not too early to begin organising a reunion – and the Alumni Team can help. The team can assist with each step in making your idea for a reunion become reality, from providing your classmates’ contact information to putting archival photos and other memorabilia on your table on the big day. And please remember that reunions aren’t just for class years and courses of study; you can arrange a reunion for your sports club, student society or even your halls of residence. Alumni Weekend 2015 will focus on happiness, and the Alumni Team is standing by, ready to help you plan for a happy weekend with your classmates. For more information about arranging a reunion during Alumni Weekend 2015, please contact reunions@kcl.ac.uk
1965
1990
You by the Seekers At the cinema: Worldwide hits include The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago and Thunderball On the telly: United! and The Magic Roundabout premiere
by the Righteous Brothers At the cinema: Ghost, Home Alone and Die Hard 2 On the telly: Have I Got News for You and MasterChef premiere, and they’re still popular today At the bookstore: Jurassic Park, The Bourne Ultimatum and Oh, the Places You’ll Go Sport: World Cup anguish, as a late penalty gives Italy a 2-1 win over England Noteworthy: In a tearful farewell, Margaret Thatcher stands down after 11 years as Prime Minister
CLASS OF 1965, WHAT WAS GOING ON DURING YOUR GRADUATION YEAR? Top-selling single: I’ll Never Find Another
At the bookstore:
Dune, In Cold Blood and The Autobiography of Malcolm X Sport:
Liverpool captures the FA Cup Noteworthy: Winston
Churchill, aged 90, dies at his Hyde Park Gate home
AND CLASS OF 1990, WHAT WAS TAKING PLACE IN YOUR YEAR? Top-selling single: Unchained Melody
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / HANDOUT
Gathering with classmates is a sure way to be happy in 2015
PHIL SAYER
Mentor Sophie Weber, centre, flanked by William Greenall and Alice Francis
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November. To learn more, please contact the Alumni Office at alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or +44 (0)20 7848 3053.
Events Arts & Humanities Festival
Alumni Mentoring Programme Launch
18.30-20.00, 30 October 2014 Anatomy Lecture Theatre & Museum Strand Campus Join mentors and mentees of King’s for an inspirational evening to celebrate the launch of the new mentoring programme, King’s Connect. Please book this free event online at alumni. kcl.ac.uk/alumni-mentoring-2014, email mentoring@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0) 20 7848 3053. Booking is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Ethics series: The future of reproduction: where do we draw the line?
18.30, date tbc, November 2014 Strand Campus All alumni are invited to attend the first event of this series, which will explore and debate ethical issues surrounding current topics. This event, in conjunction with the Law Alumni Autumn Lecture, will focus on potential exploitation of reproductive technologies. Hear from leading King’s academics as they discuss current research taking place across the College. To learn more, email alumoff@ kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3053.
Actor Richard Ayoade will speak at the Arts & Humanities Festival
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Alumni Weekend 2015
12-14 June 2015 Various locations Save the date for an exciting and exclusive programme of events around the theme of happiness. Of special note: the Music Department will be celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Alumni living in Hong Kong: sign up now for the Principal’s Tour
Principal’s US Tour 2014
Advent Carols
18.30-21.00, 3-7 November 2014 Boston, New York & Washington DC Venues tbc Join your fellow alumni and the new Principal & President of King's, Professor Ed Byrne, for his first tour of the US. Professor Byrne will welcome three distinguished members of the King's community to the podium and a drinks and canapés reception will follow. To learn more, email alumoff@ kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0) 20 7848 3053.
17.30, 5 December 2014 Chapel, Strand Campus The candlelit Advent Carol service will include readings and a classical music performance by the Chapel Choir, followed by a reception with mince pies and mulled wine. Tickets will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with a maximum of two tickets per person. For information, please email alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0) 20 7848 3053.
KCLA Dinner & AGM
Greek Play & alumni reception
17.00-22.30, 7 November 2014 Royal College of Surgeons 35-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields This year’s meeting and dinner will be held in the Royal College of Surgeons. Sir Barry Jackson, former Serjeant Surgeon to the Queen and President of the RCS, will speak. Tours of the Hunterian Museum will be available. To learn more, contact the Alumni Office at alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or +44 (0) 20 7848 3053.
14.00, 13 February 2015 Greenwood Theatre Guy’s Campus Join fellow alumni to watch the annual Greek Play. Students will perform Aristophanes’s Clouds. The play will be performed in the original ancient Greek, with subtitles, followed by light refreshments in the theatre bar. Tickets are £8. RSVP to alumoff@kcl.ac.uk
Upcoming reunions King’s, Dental School, Class of 1979 and 1980
21 March 2015 If you qualified at King’s College Dental School, Denmark Hill, in 1979 or 1980, please join us for this reunion. For more information, please contact Debbie Molyneaux atmolyneauxfamily@aol.com
KCHMS, Medicine, Class of 1955
Principal’s South East Asia Tour 2015 Saki Dockrill Memorial Lecture
11 November 2014 Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre Strand Campus This lecture is an annual event in memory of Professor Saki Ruth Dockrill, an inspiring teacher and worldrenowned scholar. To learn more about this lecture, please contact the Alumni Team by emailing alumoff@kcl. ac.uk or calling +44 (0) 20 7848 3053.
2-6 February 2015 Hong Kong, Malaysia & Singapore Venues tbc Join your fellow alumni and the new Principal & President of King’s, Professor Ed Byrne, for his first alumni tour of south east Asia. To learn more, email alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0) 20 7848 3053.
12-14 June 2015 Strand Campus If you graduated in medicine from KCHMS in 1955, Eileen Cobb (née Darwood) would love to hear from you! In 2015, it will be 60 years since we qualified and it would be wonderful to meet at Alumni Weekend to reminisce. Please email eileencobb@ hotmail.co.uk to learn more.
Getting involved Fundraising events in aid of King’s College London and its health partners: Guy’s and St Thomas’, Evelina London Children’s Hospital, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley
For information about either of these events, visit togetherwecan.org.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 4701. ● Bupa London 10,000
Dental Alumni Weekend
6-7 March 2015 Guy’s Campus The 2015 Dental Alumni Weekend will include the annual Dental Dinner on Friday followed by Clinical Day on Saturday, which will offer several hours of core CPD. More details will be posted on Alumni Online in early
Monday 25 May 2015 This foot race starts and finishes in The Mall and follows a route around Westminster and the City of London. ● Nightrider
Saturday 6 June 2015 This is a 100-kilometre bike ride through London at night, taking you past many of the capital’s landmarks.
KEN MCKAY/ITV/REX
15-24 October 2014 Strand Campus The King’s Arts & Humanities Festival offers dozens of free talks, workshops and performances to uncover music, literature, philosophy, history and much more. This year’s diverse programme explores the theme of underground from many angles, from underground music to the trenches of the First World War. Highlights will include actor and director Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd, who will speak about his experience directing in the critically acclaimed The Double. Comedian Rob Newman will present his new show The New Theory of Evolution. Poet and theologian Dr Rowan Williams will discuss excerpts from the four gospels with King’s Poetry Fellow Ruth Padel. Learn more at kcl.ac.uk/ahfest
PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Community
Want to get involved? Contact alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3053
We met at King’s memories of some epic student balls. Justin: We were able to share a joy of listening to jazz and playing jazz, but we started having great conversations from day one and have been talking ever since. Katherine: Justin proposed on my birthday, on the London Eye. He was exceedingly anxious about getting halfway around the cycle before proposing. As it was my birthday, we’d already planned drinks with several of our closest friends. This turned into an impromptu – and riotous – engagement party. Justin: Luckily she said yes, not just because it would be embarrassing for me, but for the six German tourists sharing the pod with us! Katherine: We got married on 4 July 2009. We chose the Fourth of July for ironic purposes, and because it fell on a Saturday that year. The wedding was at St Peter’s Church in Wolverhampton, which was the same church that my parents got married in, and my paternal grandparents before them. Justin and I honeymooned in New York, and then had a second wedding reception in California. Justin: After King’s, we went to Nottingham, where Katherine did an MA and PhD and I did a PhD. I have written a book on hip-hop called Rhymin’ and Stealin’ and am a lecturer in music at the University of Bristol, and Katherine is a lecturer in music at Plymouth University and is finishing her book on Rufus Wainwright.
Dr Justin Williams (Mmus, 2005) and Dr Katherine Williams (BMus, 2007) were united through a shared passion for music and admiration for each other’s instruments. Now both lecturers of music, they live by the harbour in Bristol. Justin: We were first together while
playing in the pit for Anything Goes with King’s Musical Theatre, though we didn’t meet then. I played trumpet and Katherine played saxophone. Katherine: It was through the University of London Big Band that we actually met; once we got talking we realised we both attended King’s. Justin: Katherine was a first-year and I was an MA student, so it took a few months for us to be aware of each other since MAs and undergrads don’t always mix. For me, there was an instant spark, as she looked pretty and had a pretty Selmer Mark 6 tenor saxophone. Katherine: Justin is Californian, while I am British born and bred. We soon realised that we’d had many similar experiences, but had different perspectives on them due to national and cultural differences. Justin: The first date was Cubana on Waterloo Road by Stamford Street Apartments, where I lived. I’m from the US, and we take girls out for dinner, so I think I impressed her with that. She ate my olives since I don’t like them, so it was a strategic relationship from the start. Katherine: We loved to walk along the South Bank and go to gigs at the Royal Festival Hall. I have really good
The Incredible Adventures of Reggie
ASSOCIATED NEWSPAPERS/REX
Reggie was once a regular participant in the Lord Mayor’s Show. Richard Telfer (Special Physics, 1966) recalls one year when Reggie’s journey back to the Strand Campus did not go as planned.
When I started at King’s, Reggie was installed on the balcony over the entrance from the Quad and held by chains of work hardening steel. Another college, I think it was Imperial, used an oxy cutter to get him. This was thought unsporting as their mascot was a fire engine, and a counter raid would have been a criminal offence. Thereafter, he resided in the beer cellar. In those days, he was solid concrete on a wooden base with tubes on it into which pi-shaped lifting bars could be
fitted. At a Lord Mayor’s Show, a large contingent used these to lift him, ridden by the Senior Woman Student (SWS), for an exchange of courtesies near St Paul’s and then on to a trolley. The SWS would be hoisted to shoulder height and would doff her mortarboard. The Lord Mayor would stand and raise his hat to her. It took at least a dozen students to lift Reggie with her on it. At one Lord Mayor’s Show, I believe it was 1965, the weather was fine, so several dozen King’s students filled a patch of pavement near St Paul’s. I remember that the police lining the route slowly bunched in front of us. We were on good terms with the City of London force, so any banter was
The Lord Mayor always doffed his hat
good-natured on both sides. When the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers float drew near, the engineers started their chant (‘We are, we are, we are the engineers...’). Most then headed back via a pub leaving a small contingent, including myself, to wheel Reggie back. At a major junction we waited for the green light then rushed across and hit a bump. Reggie fell off, smashing his base and detaching the tubes. We few, we unhappy few, had to wrestle a very heavy Reggie back on it in the middle of the traffic.
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Community To get in touch with any of the alumni groups listed below, please visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk/connect INTERNATIONAL GROUPS 01: Angola Alumni in region: 2 02: Argentina 64 03: Australia NSW 377 04: Australia Queensland 125 05: Austria 292 06: Azerbaijan 27 07: Bahamas 36 08: Bangladesh 119 09: Belgium 906 10: Brazil 365 11: Brunei 137 12: Bulgaria 104 13: Canada 1473 14: Cayman Islands 24 15: Chile 108 16: China Beijing 362 17: China Shanghai 214 18: Colombia 59 19: Croatia 31 20: Cyprus 786 21: Denmark 305 22: Dominican Republic 5 23: Egypt 141 24: Finland 194 25: France 2367 26: Germany Berlin 376 27: Germany Bonn 36 28: Germany Munich 90 29: Greece 2233 30: Hong Kong 2110 31: Hungary 85 32: India Delhi 235 33: India Mumbai 151 34: Indonesia 112 35: Iran 306 36: Iraq 85 37: Ireland 1128 38: Israel 213 39: Italy Milan 122 40: Italy Rome 121 41: Japan 741 42: Kenya 245 43: Luxembourg 163 44: Malaysia 1360 45: Malta 78 46: Mauritius 132 47: Mexico 152 48: Monaco 24 49: Netherlands 480 50: New Zealand 371 51: Nigeria 556 52: Norway 390 53: Pakistan 578 54: Peru 26 55: Poland 251 56: Portugal 381 57: Qatar 45 58: Romania 121 59: Saudi Arabia 300 60: Singapore 1294 61: Slovakia 57 62: South Africa 314
If you don’t see your country listed here, please contact us at alumoff@kcl.ac.uk
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63: South Korea 64: Spain 65: Switzerland 66: Syria 67: Taiwan 68: Thailand 69: Turkey 70: UAE 71: USA Boston Area 72: USA Chicago 73: USA New York Tri-State 74: USA Philadelphia 75: USA San Francisco 76: USA Southern California 77: USA Southern Tri-State 78: USA Washington DC Area 79: Venezuela 80: Vietnam
406 977 600 40 420 509 344 296 781 103 1533 82 129 230 320 911 49 32
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AKC Alumni Group Steven Rhodes (Theology & Religious Studies, 1988) Bar Society Bahar Ala-Eddini (Law, 2007) Chemistry and Physics Deeph Chana (Physics, 2002) Dental Alumni Association Dr Suzie Moore (Guy’s, Dentistry, 1997) Geography Joint School Society Dr Paul Collinson (Geography, 1990) King’s College Construction Law Association (KCCLA) Joe Bellhouse (Construction Law, 1996) King’s College London Engineering Association (KCLEA) Graham Raven (Civil Engineering, 1963) Theology & Religious Studies Giles Legood (Theology & Religious Studies, 1988)
77 07 47
22 14 18
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OTHER UK GROUPS Former Staff Barrie Morgan (former Geography staff) King’s Alumni Theatre Society (KATS) Kos Mantzakos (German & Modern Greek, 2001) Queen Elizabeth College Association Dr Sally Henderson (QEC, Biochemistry PhD, 1980) Southampton & Hampshire Tope Omitola (Mathematics, 1994) Student and Alumni Boat Club Rachel Fellows (current student)
France Frederico Alcântara de Melo (LLM, 2007)
I moved to Paris four years ago after living in Lisbon, London and Brussels. There is good news for King’s alumni in France: a renewed committee, which I head, has been formed following the guidance of Pierre Brochet, who organised a number of events as alumni country contact for France. Pre-summer drinks were held on 24 July and more activities will follow. The committee is also liaising with alumni contacts in Brussels and Monaco to discuss ideas and future activities. Events in France will range from the usual social drinks to conferences, seminars, cultural visits and much more! The aim is to engage French alumni who have different cultural and
academic backgrounds. France has nearly 2,000 King’s alumni, with most located in Paris. The most popular subject amongst French alumni is law. Please contact me at frederico.am@ gmail.com if you have any questions or event proposals, and the Alumni Office if you are not yet on the mailing list. I welcome assistance on funding and venues, so if you wish to host any events, please let the committee know. Finally, please note that even if you are not based in France, the committee is ready to assist you as a King’s alumnus with your visit to Paris or move to France, should you need any tips or wish to meet alumni during your time here.
For more information on alumni groups, call +44 (0)20 7848 3053 or visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk
24 52 21 49 27 26 55 09 43 61 28 25 65 05 31 58 48 39 19 29 12 40 64
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USA Ali Upton (MA, English, 2013)
I chose to study at King’s because I wanted to experience a truly international city. I wanted to be part of London and participate in all that it had to offer. As an English literature student, I was drawn to the UK for its history and culture. King’s offered me the chance to live centrally to that history, as well as the ability to attend classes at, and utilise incredible resources of, places like the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery Archives and the British Library. It was thrilling to be immersed not only in the subject I loved, but also in a culture that fascinated me. I now live in San Francisco, working for Across the Pond as a US student
advisor. We help students apply to study for bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees at our partner universities in the UK. Through this role I am able to share my experience of King’s with students and help them to reach their goals of going overseas, which is extremely rewarding. I feel blessed to have found a job where I keep touch with the UK, and therefore with one of the most deeply enriching experiences of my life. I am an alumni ambassador for King’s, which is similar to my role as student advisor, but on a more personal and informal level. Students see real value in speaking to someone who has gone through the exact same process that they are about to embark upon.
DID YOU KNOW?
● King’s College London has more than 40,000 international alumni living in 172 countries ● The largest group of alumni outside of the UK is in the United States, where we’re in touch with 5,600 alumni ● Alumni volunteers have given more than 7,600 hours to the College in the last four years
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Community The KCLA Chairman Andy Parrish (Chemistry, 1966) This is my last Chairman’s column, as after six years (the constitutional maximum, in every sense!), I stand down at November’s AGM. As our President, Nairn Wilson, and Treasurer, Nick Goulding, are also retiring, there will be significant changes in the ranks of KCLA’s senior team. With a new Principal as well, this will pose significant challenges in terms of continuity. I like to think that KCLA has made significant advances during my six years in office and Rick Trainor has been a strong and consistent friend. Ed Byrne, whom we met twice earlier this year, is also a committed supporter of the links with College alumni and I’m very hopeful that we shall continue to see this relationship strengthen. KCLA has a far more extensive programme of events than it used to – and we have just held our first Alumni Sports Dinner, preceding what I’m sure was another successful KCLA Games earlier this month. We have significantly raised the numbers of alumni involved, of all ages and subjects, even though we run on a financial shoestring. But we are still an under-valued and under-exploited resource, not just of money but, even more importantly, of experience, ability, influence and commitment. The task of the new team, together with Ed, will be to ensure this undoubted and huge potential is more fully developed, to the benefit both of King’s and of the alumni it has been my proud honour to represent. Please actively help them to do this. If you’ve not yet booked for the Annual Dinner at the Royal College of Surgeons on 7 November, do it now! Meet the new Principal and hear Sir Barry Jackson, former Serjeant Surgeon to the Queen and President of the RCS, talking on ‘Medics and King’s – Where next?’. It will be a great evening!
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AKC now available to alumni Alumni who missed out on the Associateship of King’s College while they were students can now study for their AKC through a distance learning programme. The AKC is the original award of the College, and it has been taught continuously since King’s founding in 1829. Students who successfully complete the AKC programme are eligible for election by the Academic
Board, on behalf of the College Council, as Associates of King’s College. Under the leadership of the Dean, the Revd Canon Professor Richard Burridge, the AKC has seen enormous growth in popularity within the College, with the programme’s lectures followed by more than 1,500 students and staff each year. Alumni – from King’s and its merged
institutions – can now participate in the three-year programme, at a cost of £500 per year to cover administrative costs and expenses. Each year consists of two units that feature a series of lectures on subjects such as the philosophy of religion, ethics and biblical studies. Each unit is assessed by an essay. To learn more about the AKC programme, please email akc@kcl.ac.uk
The Revd Canon Professor Richard Burridge
King’s College London Association KCLA is hosting its Annual Dinner and Annual General Meeting on Friday 7 November at the Royal College of Surgeons. The positions of Chairman and four Council members are open for election this year. Nominations may be made in writing to the Secretary, Dr Max Chauhan, via the Alumni Office by any member of the alumni community, accompanied by a seconder and the acceptance of the nomination by the member concerned. All nominations must be received by Thursday 30 October. Voting will be available on the KCLA website, kcla.co.uk. Please see page 34 for more information about the meeting and dinner.
Patron Archbishop Desmond Tutu FKC (Theology, 1965; MTh, 1966) President Professor Nairn Wilson CBE FKC Vice-President Professor Anne-Marie Rafferty FKC Past President Professor The Lord Ian McColl of Dulwich, CBE, FKC (Guy’s, Medicine, 1957) Chairman Andrew Parrish (Chemistry, 1966) Vice-Chairman Professor Patricia Reynolds (Guy’s, Dentistry, 1977) Past Chairman Steven Rhodes (Theology & Religious Studies, 1988) Secretary Dr Max Chauhan (Dentistry, 1992)
Assistant Secretary Margaret Haig
(LLB, 2004) Treasurer Nicholas Goulding
(Physics, 1968) Events Officer Alison Taylor (Human
Environmental Science, 1990) Sports Officer John (Matt) Ricketts (War Studies, 2010) Elected members ● Hannah Barlow
(Biochemistry, 2011) ● Judge Peter King TD AKC (LLB, 1970) ● Freya Pascal (Philosophy, 2012) ● Ryan Wain (LLB, 2009) ● Mary Zagoritou (Mathematics Education, 2007)
For the latest information about all of our alumni groups, go to alumni.kcl.ac.uk
Alumni benefits and services If you studied at King’s, or at one of the colleges with which it has merged, you are entitled to many great benefits. Please visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3053 for more details. Online alumni.kcl.ac.uk Facebook facebook.com/KCLalumni Twitter twitter.com/KCLalumni King’s Alumni is also on LinkedIn
Professional and Executive Development
The College offers a range of short courses, with many available to alumni at a reduced fee. For more information, call +44 (0)20 7848 6814. Executive Summer School
In Touch and other publications
In Touch is available in print, online (alumni.kcl.ac.uk/InTouch) and as as an app on three platforms: Android, iPad and Windows. Alumni Online
Alumni Online – alumni.kcl.ac.uk – is a great way to stay in touch with King’s and your friends from College. E-newsletter
Register at alumni.kcl.ac.uk for e-newsletters to keep you up to date with what’s happening at King’s. College email address
As a member of Alumni Online, you can set up a College-specific email address for professional and personal use – a good way to maintain a constant email address, even if you change service providers. To update your email address in future, all you have to do is change the forwarding address by logging into Alumni Online.
The College’s Executive Summer School will take place 13-17 July 2015. Participants can choose from a wide variety of subjects areas and identify the suitable programme for their professional education. Alumni, staff and students are entitled to a 20 per cent discount on the course fee. To learn more, please visit kcl.ac.uk/ess, email ess@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 1218.
Online journal access
Join Alumni Online for free access to myriad online academic journals through JSTOR.
Keep fit at King’s
King’s Health and Fitness Centre offers alumni an affordable training facility conveniently located five minutes from Waterloo. Alumni receive a discounted rate. To learn more about the centre, please call +44 (0)20 7848 4650. Stay at King’s
Outside term time, alumni are able to take advantage of accommodation in some of the best locations in London, enjoying excellent new facilities and having the chance to explore London all over again.
King’s Alumni Scholarships
The College is offering more than 100 awards, £2,500 each, for alumni who pursue master’s degrees at King’s. All alumni, including study abroad alumni, who achieved at least a 2.1 in their undergraduate course of study are eligible to apply. To learn more, please visit graduateschool@kcl.ac.uk
Maudsley Learning
Alumni are entitled to a 50 per cent discount on all Maudsley Learning events at the award-winning ORTUS Learning and Events Centre. To learn more, visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3053. NEW!
Royal Institution
The King’s College London Summer School is an intensive academic program open to students from around the world. Building on King’s academic strengths, the Summer School offers university-level courses. Alumni are entitled to a 10 per cent discount. For additional details, please visit kcl.ac.uk/study/summerschool
The Royal Institution is offering a 20 per cent discount on membership to alumni. Membership provides a range of benefits, including access to lectures, discourses, exhibitions and interactive activities. For more information, please email membership@ri.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7670 2961.
Use the College libraries
The Royal Society of Medicine
The College’s libraries are available for alumni to use. Reading in the libraries is free and you can borrow books and materials for an annual fee of £60. Download the application form at Alumni Online.
Alumni can receive £50 off RSM membership (excludes student membership) and pay no fee for joining, saving up to £165. Enjoy discounts on CPD-accredited meetings, access to 3,000 e-journals and exclusive club facilities. To learn more, call +44 (0)20 7290 2991, quoting ‘KCLA’.
Summer School
Online shop
The College’s online shop features a range of gifts, clothing, souvenirs and more. Visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk to learn more and buy a gift.
Language Centre on its evening courses. For more information, please email modern.language@kcl.ac.uk
GradClub
Now available at no cost, members of GradClub can use King’s Careers and Employability Centre for two years. Free services include entry into career events and one-to-one drop-in sessions with career consultants. NEW!
Online Discounts Glasses Direct
Glasses Direct offers a 25 per cent discount for King’s alumni. Simply visit glassesdirect.co.uk and use the discount code GDSTUDY25.
Learn a language
Thresher & Glenny
Want to learn a new language? Alumni are eligible for a 30 per cent discount at the King’s Modern
Thresher & Glenny, one of London’s oldest outfitters, offers King’s alumni a 15 per cent discount.
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Class notes
Fashion that makes a statement With the launch of her ethical and sustainable fashion label for young professional women, Lucy Inmonger (BA, History, 2008; MA, Public Policy, 2010) is hoping to make her own contribution to bridging the equality gap in the workplace. Little Black Suit is a new online boutique – found at littleblacksuit.net, with the tagline ‘say no to man suits’ – targeted at women in corporate professions such as finance and law, a market that is currently overlooked by the fashion industry, says Inmonger. ‘There are plenty of high street shops specialising in men’s workwear, but younger women have no direct equivalent offering affordable work clothes that are not simply male suits cut to fit the female form. The limited availability of quality clothing adds to the myth that high-level roles are not for women,’ she says. ‘I want women to feel empowered and confident.’ Inmonger has devoted 18 months to creating samples of the label’s skirts, suits and dresses and researching her audience. She developed her entrepreneurial nous working with a variety of social enterprises, and picked up dress-making skills while helping on a project in Nepal that trained
ARNHEL DE SERRA
Lucy Inmonger’s online enterprise promotes social and ethical messages
women at risk of social exclusion to become tailors. Influenced by this experience, she is determined that Little Black Suit will be a business with a strong social conscience. The clothes will all be made in the UK and leave a relatively small environmental footprint.
‘I don’t like the wastage in the fashion industry, so I’m using off-cuts of materials, which will make the business environmentally sustainable,’ she says. ‘This also means that there will only be a small number of each design before we move on to a different fabric, which will
make every item quite distinctive. ‘Writing my MA dissertation on gender roles in the workplace made me realise that your career can be defined by your gender,’ she says. ‘I’d like my brand to become a tool for networking for women in the workplace.’
‘Law has really been my life’ Trevor Moniz takes on his third ministerial post in two years With just a slight smile, Trevor Moniz (Law, 1975), Attorney General of Bermuda, admits that he occasionally offers unsolicited advice to his fellow cabinet ministers. But why not? He’s held three ministerial posts in less than two years, which, when combined with 20 years in the Bermuda Parliament, has given him a deep understanding of how government works in Britain’s oldest overseas territory. First elected to Parliament in 1993, Moniz turned down cabinet posts at that time, preferring the freedom of being a maverick backbencher. When his party, United Bermuda, lost power in 1998, it was the beginning of 14 years in opposition. ‘After a while I thought, “Well, now you’ve done yourself in because you’re not going to have the opportunity to get back 40
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on the government benches and serve in a cabinet position.” But of course, if you wait long enough, the wheel turns.’ When the newly formed One Bermuda Alliance came to power two years ago, Moniz was appointed Minister of Public Works. A year later, as part of a cabinet shuffle, he became Minister of Health and Environment, where he oversaw the largest department in Bermuda’s government and where he expected to serve for an extended time. But when the Attorney General unexpectedly resigned in May of this
year, Moniz stepped in. ‘Although I have a background in business too, law has really been my life,’ he says. As a political AG – he also holds the title of Minister of Legal Affairs – Moniz is not involved with prosecution. Rather, overseeing civil litigation, proving legal advice to the government and working on legislative and policy issues consume most of his time. In his first few months as Attorney General, he’s been involved with high-profile issues such as casino gaming and privatisation of certain government services. Describing himself as a pragmatist, he says tackling Bermuda’s debt is the government’s top priority. ‘We don’t have the advantage that larger economies have of printing money. We can’t print money. Our Bermuda dollar is pegged to
the American dollar, one for one.’ Regardless of the issue at hand, Moniz says he always prefers a measured approach that considers the views of all sides. ‘In Bermuda, you have a section of the population that is well-travelled and very progressive, but you have another section of the population that is more insular. When you want to move forward, you have to move in cautious, incremental steps.’ That journey is part of the pleasure of the job. Moniz also describes himself as a policy wonk, ‘getting down in the weeds and finding out why things aren’t working as well as they should’ – even if that means suggesting a change in tack to one of his cabinet colleagues. ‘Most of them have only had one ministry, and I’ve had three. So I love to interfere a little in other people’s ministries.’
You can view lots of fabulous old class photographs at alumni.kcl.ac.uk
While we make every effort to verify the information here, which is selected and edited for space, we cannot guarantee its accuracy. If you have concerns over any content, please contact the Alumni Office. You can update your personal records at Alumni Online. Visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk
Guy’s Dr Kenneth Heber
Medicine, 1950 Are any of Guy’s XV who trained in France in 1946 (Clement Ferrand and Paris University) still alive? My only claim to fame: I was admitted to surgical ward as a ruptured ectopic after a pain – about 2 a.m. Was present when Reggie disintegrated in the Strand! Dr Roderick Stevens
Dentistry, 1955 I am now happily retired and a past National President of the GB Round Table Association.
‘Fully involved in the community’ Tim Johnson Soon after Tim Johnson left King’s in 2008 with a master’s degree in war studies, he was offered a work placement with the Red Cross in Edmonton, Canada, where he was first advised to ‘go to the side of kindness,’ a message that has stayed with him ever since. Due to his background in war studies, a field which Johnson says ‘underlies the need for humanitarian aid’, he started work in the Red Cross’s Restoring Family Links programme, which aims to reunite families who have been separated due to war, conflict or natural disaster. Reuniting a husband and wife after four years apart was, in particular, a moment he will never forget. ‘It was incredible,’ says Johnson. ‘To know that because of our detective work, the power of the Red Cross and often a little luck, we managed to put two people back together who would have otherwise
never found one another is amazing.’ Now working within philanthropy at the Red Cross, Johnson lives in Saskatchewan in the Canadian Prairies and recently won a Canadian ‘Future 40’ Award for Community Leadership. Through his role, he has stood out within his local community as one of the new generation of leaders, builders and change-makers under the age of 40. ‘Saskatchewan is a real place of community and people pride themselves on giving back,’ he says. ‘I have gotten fully involved in the community and am currently president of an organisation representing Saskatchewan’s young professionals and entrepreneurs.’ Having chosen King’s for its reputation, Johnson was not disappointed in his experience and hopes to return to do
a PhD in the same area of study. He attributes this inspiration to his MSc programme leader, Professor Edgar Jones. ‘He was an amazing professor and, more than that, he was someone that really understood how to teach,’ he says. ‘War and psychiatry was an incredible one-of-a-kind course to take at King’s. It was fascinating, well-organised and incredibly well-taught.’ Despite the distance between Johnson and his King’s classmates, he says they remain well-connected. ‘I have stayed in touch with many, and they are climbing to some great heights in their respective countries,’ he says. ‘It has been amazing to see how well some of my classmates have done in the seven years since graduating.’
two of our members, the 1951-1954 King’s College London History School envisages one final reunion in 2014. Please contact either J Hadwin at Guilford or PS Morrish at Leeds through the Alumni Office.
Tax, written with GSA Wheatcroft, in 1975; and Encyclopedia of Capital Taxation, again co-authored with GSA Wheatcroft, in 1980. I can also claim some notoriety as the only person ever to be granted permission from HMRC to distil Scotch whisky in a Business Expansion Scheme. It is now a 20-year-old single malt which was awarded ‘Liquid Gold’ status in the Jim Murray 2014 Whisky Bible.
Kanit Muntarbhorn
Medicine, 1974 Introduced functional endoscopic sinus surgery and sleep medicine and surgery to Thailand. Co-ed, ASEAN rhinological practice, and author of one rhinology and three food books. Originator, evidence-based gastronomy. Dr David Williams
Medicine, 1978 Retired from general practice after 31 years. Dr Andrew Pryce
Medicine, 1985 The Class of 1985 Guy’s Medics 30th reunion weekend is booked for October 2015. Many have signed up already. Contact me for more details.
KCHSS Elizabeth Bainbridge (now Dyson)
Household & Social Sciences, 1950 Married in 1952, with three daughters and five grandchildren. Now enjoying retirement living in Cumbria.
King’s College London
Theology, 1955 Salisbury Diocese did me the great honour of arranging a celebration service, in Devizes, to mark my 40 years as a bishop. I was consecrated on 24 February 1974 in Westminster Abbey.
Graham Anthony
Civil Engineering, 1953 Re-invented myself as a maritime historian and now lecture extensively on cruise ships.
John Stebbing
Medicine, 1987 Consultant surgeon in Guildford, Surrey. Currently Chair, UK Joint Advisory Group on GI Endoscopy, Clinical Director of Surrey Bowel Cancer Screening Centre, member of the National Bowel Cancer Screening Advisory Committee and member of the Medical Advisory Board, Bowel Cancer UK.
The Rt Revd Bishop John Neale
The Revd John RH Palmer
Theology, 1953 I celebrated the 60th anniversary of my priesting on Trinity Sunday at the altar of St Corentin, Cury, Diocese of Truro. Peter Morrish
History, 1954 In view of the recent death of
Jean Wines
English, 1955 I am now 80 and have been retired from work as music librarian at Cardiff University since 1987. Arthritis (a knee replacement in 2013) and being carer to my older sister restrict my life considerably.
Ruth Gill
Theology, 1958 I am retired. Would like to know of any King’s College graduates who are living in Harpenden, a very lively town with many societies and centres of learning. Leonard Clark
Mathematics and Physics, 1959 Living on the border of Surrey and Hampshire. We’re still very active with gardening and helping at our grandchildren’s primary school.
George Hewson
Law, 1957 I am co-author with Peter Harris of Life Assurance and Tax Planning, in 1970; Estate Duty Statutes, first published in 1969; Capital Transfer
Peter Weaver
Electrical Engineering, 1961 Enjoying retirement after a busy career in the electronic industry and later as a consultant licensing agent. AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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Class notes The Revd Nigel Johnson
Theology, 1964 Moving from Cumbria in the Lake District to Scarborough by the sea. Dr Richard Yeo
Medicine, 1965 Living in East Yorkshire and about to fully retire and have spare time to travel and see friends. Would like to get in touch with anyone from 2nd MB April 1965 at King’s. Professor Dafydd Gibbon
German with French, 1966 Emeritus Professor of English and Linguistics at Bielefeld University. On 5 May, appointed Officier de l’Ordre de Mérite Ivoirien for distinguished contributions to research and education in Côte d'Ivoire in the fields of linguistics and speech technology. Dr Malcolm Grundy
Theology, 1968 Just been awarded a PhD by Leeds
University. Subject: Episkope as a model for leadership and oversight examined in the dioceses of Yorkshire. Professor Barry Gough
History, 1969 Published Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Next book, From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War, to be published later this year by Heritage House in Victoria, British Columbia, is a unique look at a Canadian school that virtually went to war.
At the age of 18, Brian Harris (LLB, 1956) decided to postpone university until after National Service, but on discharge from the army found a monthly salary too tempting to give up and applied to King’s to become an internal evening student. (‘Why has such a useful arrangement ceased to exist?’ he asks.) After graduating from King’s, Harris joined Gray’s Inn, enjoyed a career in the Magistrates’ Courts and became Head of Professional Conduct at the Institute of Chartered Accountants and wrote the standard book on the subject. Since retiring, he has written three books re-examining the verdicts of several prominent trials, Injustice, Intolerance and Passion, Poison and Power. More recently, he published Tales from the Courtroom, which illustrates the role of the law in resisting oppression, as well as exploring some of its foggier crannies. ‘Tales from the Courtroom is intended to inform, amuse
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Dr Malcolm Barratt-Johnson
Theology, 1969 I have just published my sixth collection of short stories, A Matter of Balance and Other Stories, by Sprie Publishing. In my retirement in Edinburgh, I continue to write and enjoy life.
Physiology, 1986 Managing Director of Medicines Development Consultancy, working with industry, government and the European Commission. Currently President of the Pharmaceutical Medicine and Research section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Twin boys now 14 years old. Married to Elissa, a medic and King’s pharmacy graduate.
John Shone
Zoology, 1969 Now retired and searching for the UK’s best cheese scone, as well as trying to learn some physics. The Revd Robin Vickery
Dr Howard Johnson
Chemistry, 1969 I retired from HSE as Head of Unit in 2010 after 33 years. Since then, time has been taken up with our four grandchildren, two in London and two in Camp Verde. We also spend a lot of the summer in Cornwall, where Nancy’s family resides and we have a chalet. I do sequence and ballroom dancing when in Sheffield.
Informing, amusing and fascinating Brian Harris
Roger Paige
and fascinate the general reader, and to provide bedtime reading for the jaded lawyer,’ says Harris. ‘I didn’t want it to be yet another “Strange Tales of the Law”, so I made a point of emphasising the role the law has played in resisting oppression, whether from robber barons or modern governments, and in promoting the right to a fair trial.’ The text has been well-received, with one reviewer describing it as, ‘a scholarly book but beautifully written from a very accessible and human perspective’. Harris’s informative but honest approach can be credited for its success. ‘I wanted to make readers understand what makes lawyers tick, but that didn’t mean that I should leave out their blemishes, for example in the case of America’s most brilliant advocate, Clarence Darrow,’ he says. Harris’s most recent publication from January of this year, The Surprising Mr Kipling, is an anthology and critical analysis of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling.
Theology, 1973 I am now writing full-time. Have written articles for the Church Times. Working on short stories and my second novel.
Richard Jackson
History, 1986 I was a member of King’s 1st XI football team that won the Premier League championship in 1983-84. Jonathan Maitland, a BBC presenter, was in the club. Peter Marshall was Head of History Department. My tutor was Professor Richard Overy, who is now at Exeter University.
William Diefenderfer III
LLM, 1974 Named founding chairman of Navient Corporation’s Board of Directors. Navient is the leading loan management, servicing and asset recovery company in the US. Have been a partner of Diefenderfer, Hoover, Boyle & Wood in Pittsburgh since 1991. Dr Julian Johnson
Physics, 1975 Chaired a panel on systems engineering info access at this year’s International Symposium of the International Council on Systems Engineering in Las Vegas. Ann Grain
Spanish & Portuguese, 1979 The consultancy I started in 2004 is going from strength to strength. Playing golf again and have started writing again too. Planning a driving holiday through Galicia and Portugal. David Musker
Biology, 1984 Promoted from chief superintendent to commander (assistant chief constable) within MPS. Amanda Blake
Medicine, 1985 GP in inner-city Bristol. Two children: boys aged nine and 12.
Jillian Ensom
Biology, 1987 Now retired from teaching and living in Pembrokeshire since September 2012. Time filled playing golf, volunteering for the National Trust and enjoying Welsh wildlife. Victoria Brock
English, 1993 Proud to be named Innovator of the Year at the FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards 2014 and to be CEO of one of Europe’s top 12 tech start-ups. Chris McMahon
Philosophy, 1993 Won a £10,000 first prize in a national investment competition run by Hargreaves Lansdown, beating 37,000 other contestants. I was able to turn my virtual £100,000 into £398,982 in five months. My strategy was to buy mainly funds with some very speculative shares. I take a more balanced approach with my own ISA investments, but the competition was a lot of fun. Dr Marc Schmidt (now Jarzebowski)
Theology and History, 1995 In my 10th year as a professional genealogist (taxodium.eu) and coordinator of King’s alumni meetings in Berlin. Two lovely children (eight and 10). Happy about old and new contacts (jarzebowski@taxodium.eu).
You can view lots of fabulous old class photographs at alumni.kcl.ac.uk
James Skinner
Sanjay Shroff
History, 1995 I studied history at the Strand Campus between 1992-95. My mentor was Dr Ray Strong.
Biopharmacy, 2001 After working in Canada and the US, I decided to go to medical school. I started in the summer as a doctor. I am happily married to my darling Rubi and we have two lovely children, Avani and Niam. Any grads from 2000 MSc Biopharmacy, please get in touch: s.shroff@doctors.org.uk
Dr Zameer Shah
Medicine, 1997 Appointed substantive consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’. Dr Elizabeth Howland
Medicine, 1998 I am working as a hospital consultant, married to Chris (GP) with three lovely children. Selso Xisto
Portuguese with English, 1998 I published my first novel in 2012. It’s a science fiction tale called Particle Horizon. I am working on my second novel now. I can’t remember who my English creative writing tutor was, but he was an inspiration!
Defence Studies, 1999 In April, I ran the London Marathon in honour of my brother, who sadly passed away from a very rare form of cancer, and I have subsequently written a book about my experience in training and raising nearly £3,600 for Cancer Research UK. It is available from Amazon. I am currently Head of Computing and E-Safety at a school near Fareham, on the south coast. My master’s was in education, particularly computers in education. Charles Gray
Geography, 1999 Recently moved to Fulmer Village in South Bucks with my wife Alexis and our two-year-old daughter Perdie. Dr Rosalind Cameron (now Bates)
Epileptology, 2000 Retired. Volunteering at a food bank in Poplar. Makes you think. John Thompson
Business Management, 2000 Assistant controller for RenaissanceRe Company. Been in Bermuda for 10 years. Married with two children.
Guy’s Dental School 1969
Dinah Skertchly (now Brookes)
Biomedical Science, 2001 I have a six-month-old baby daughter, who is beautiful. Dr Kevin Quarmby
Shakespeare Studies, 2002 After a 35-year career as a professional actor in the UK and then a lifechanging MA and PhD at King’s, completed in my 50s, I now have a tenure-track post at a prestigious US university. All thanks to Shakespeare and the King’s English Department. Just starting a new life and new career as I near 60 years old. Dr Jonathan Arnold
John Adam
Reunion round-up
Theology and Religious Studies, 2004 Chaplain and senior research fellow at Worcester College, made a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009. Author of The Great Humanists (Tauris, 2011) and Sacred Music in Secular Society (Ashgate, 2014). In 2014, convened a new seminar series in Oxford, entitled ‘Music and Theology’. Tariq Atchia
Pharmacy, 2006 Currently working with a Dutch company to develop the most advanced pharmacy automation technology in the UK. Find me on LinkedIn. Jordan Anderson
English, 2007 A record label in Montreal released an album that I wrote. Information on the album is available at jeunessecosmique.com/grandmal Matteo Pangallo
Shakespeare Studies, 2007 I’ve just been appointed a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. I did my MA in Shakespearean Studies at King’s, under the supervision of Professor
Members of the Guy’s 69 Club visiting Sutton Hoo
Guy’s 69 Club (year of entry to Guy’s Dental School: 1964) had their first dinner in early 1969 and have had an annual dinner every year since. These have usually been timed to coincide with the Annual Dental Clinical Day. However, every few years, when special occasions arise, we have celebrated with a whole weekend. On the occasion of our 45th annual dinner, it happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of our entry to Guy’s. A weekend trip to Suffolk was organised by David Jacobs, Clive Debenham and Stephen Challacombe for the last weekend in May, so 30 members and spouses collected at the Orwell Hotel in Felixstowe. On Friday night, the group were kindly hosted by Penny and Clive Debenham at their house,
Mulberry Hall at Birstall, and we visited Sutton Hoo on Saturday. This was an educational trip and made the 69 Club members realise that they have much in common with the Vikings! The annual dinner featured a trio of speakers indulging in semi-pertinent reminiscences. The weekend concluded with seaside walks and Sunday lunch. It was good to see so many turn out for this celebration. Many of the club have managed to attend almost all the dinners but some are welcomed back every few years. Most of the 69 Club have ceased working full-time but a few continue to demonstrate the skills acquired during their course at Guy’s, and some still even practise dentistry. Stephen Challacombe
Guy’s Medical School 1958 Having done our house jobs and National Service, we settled down to our chosen careers, and in 1964 we decided to meet and play golf. We have done so every year without exception, although some of the originals have moved on. This year was our 50th year.
We started by meeting for one overnight stay and then progressed to four- to five-day meetings and we have travelled throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland and France. We hope other contemporary groups will recognise us! Dr Robin Elsdon-Dew
From left: Dick Hawley, Paul Sievers, Robin Elsdon-Dew, Geoff Hayes, Jeremy Lee Potter, Roger Feneley and Mike Pagliero
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Class notes Gordon McMullan. I went on to complete my PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012. Adam Whitlock
Religious Education, 2009 Living in Ealing. Senior leader at Burlington Danes Academy, a Church of England ARK School. Responsible for RE, chaplaincy and sixth form. Advisor on issues of radicalisation and extremism. Enjoying life!
(Eissa Creations ltd) and now work as an IT consultant at CAFOD. I received my MSc and am planning to get my PhD. Available to share experience. Call or email me.
Benjamin Smith Charly Tchouadou-Ndalleu
Telecommunication Engineering, 2013 I am currently doing an internship at Telstra Global as a field service engineer. Sivanjaa Thanigasalam
Angela Chandrasena
Medicine, 2010 Working in Mansfield as a GP. Recently married Anand Patel.
Neuroscience, 2013 I am currently a first-year PhD student at UEL, studying neuropharmacology with aspects of my research based at ICH, UCL and QMUL.
Daniel Ford
War in the Modern World, 2010 My memoir of the troubled years 1939 to 1955 has been published as Poland’s Daughter: How I Met Basia, Hitchhiked to Italy, and Learned about Love, War, and Exile. Ahmed Eissa
Computer Science, 2012 I established my own business
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and provide a variety of learning opportunities all on a voluntary basis. An exciting and very fulfilling role after retiring from 40 years of teaching.
Queen Elizabeth College Valerie Latham (now Hibbitt)
Biology & Physiology, 1970 Currently Chairman of Worcester U3A (University of the Third Age). We have more than 900 members
Nursing Studies, 1972 Hip arthritis – one replaced, one to go – has forced retirement. Hoped to keep going until I was 85 working part-time in occupational health nursing.
St Thomas’
London DPM in 1972. We live in retirement in Wells, Somerset. Dr Kenneth Shimmings
Medicine, 1954 Keen ballroom and Latin American dancer. It is with very deep regret I no longer have contact with my real alma mater, St Thomas’ Hospital. Howard Bird
Medicine, 1970 Shortly to give up clinics for more time in teaching (at UCL) and research (RCM, Bapham, Dance UK etc).
Dr Peter Trafford
Medicine, 1942 Diamond anniversary: I married Josie (BJ) Hanglin SRN of Royal West Sussex Hospital on 8 July 1944 at St Dunstan’s Church, Woking. At the time, both of us were working and living in the Woking War Hospital, which was one of the hospitals of Sector VIII (St Thomas’) of the Emergency Medical Service for London. I made my career in surgery and obstetrics, served seven years in the RAMC and then in rural general practice. Later, I joined the Prison Medical Service and took the
Michael Frampton
Medicine, 1975 Almost retired from medicine now. Find working with the judiciary intellectually challenging. Dr Andrew Yates
Medicine, 1975 Recently retired from Portsmouth Hospital NHS Trust. Now looking forward to a lot more sailing, travelling and seeing family and grandchildren.
Obituaries On these pages we remember former students, staff and friends of King’s and its associated colleges and institutions.In Touch makes every effort to accommodate fitting tributes, and friends, family and former colleagues are welcome to submit obituaries to alumoff@kcl.ac.uk. However, constraints occasionally mean we may have to edit the entries.
which he found tedious, Ashman joined JUSTICE, the UK section of the International Commission of Jurists, as its legal officer. He then joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the leading lesbian and gay advocacy group at the time, and co-founded its Law Reform Committee. He went on to help establish ILGA, now known as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
John Allen
PGDip, EC Competition Law, 2003 John Allen, his wife Sandra and their three sons Christopher, Julian and Ian were aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in eastern Ukraine in July. He was a partner in the Amsterdam law firm NautaDutilh. A tribute on the NautaDutilh website stated: ‘All of us who had the privilege of working with John during his 18 years at NautaDutilh came to know him as a kind, down-to-earth and humorous man and many of us have also lost a friend. He will be dearly missed.’
Professor Chris Collinson
BSc, Mathematics, 1959 Chris Collinson achieved a first-class honours degree in mathematics and also earned his PhD at King’s. He was appointed assistant lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Hull. He later served as professor of mathematics, dean of his school and Dean of Faculty. He continued with his research no matter which post he held, publishing more than 50 articles, papers and books, and he never lost his enthusiasm for teaching and learning.
Peter Frank Ashman
LLB, Law, 1973 Peter Ashman was a talented lawyer and passionate human rights activist who devoted much of his life to securing equal rights for gays and lesbians. After two years in commercial law practice,
Frederick Friend AKC
History, 1963 Frederick Friend was a leader in the open access movement, committed to innovation at academic libraries and passionate about the democratisation of
A leading reporter of his generation Chapman Pincher FKC
Zoology and Botany, 1935 Newspaper reporter, author and thorn in the side of countless politicians, Chapman Pincher was one of Britain’s leading journalists for a generation, writing for the Daily Express during its heyday. Pincher was a pioneer of the leak, collaborating with those in power to bring murky and embarrassing secrets to light, often coaxing information out of MPs and civil servants as he wined and dined them at his favourite restaurant, L’Ecu de France, on Jermyn Street. Profiled a year ago in In Touch, just months before he turned 100, he wrote 35 books, with topics ranging from the escapades of spies to genetics. His bestselling book, Their Trade is Treachery, which accused the former
knowledge. He established the Friends of Open Access website and was one of the authors of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative, which established the broadly accepted definition of the field. He worked at a variety of university libraries over the course of three decades and was also an Anglican cleric, becoming a priest in 1983.
Chelsea College
Dr Robert Williams Medicine, 1974 Jennifer Harrison (latterly Harris)
Dr Joseph Nixon Pharmacy, 1955 Dr Michael Bale Pharmacy, 1962 Terence Steenson Chemistry, 1983
Dentistry, 1987
Guy’s
Dr S Shamim Psychological Medicine,
David Shinn Dentistry, 1951 Dr Alexander Merry Medicine, 1952 Dr Henry Pollock Medicine, 1952 Dr Alan Champion Medicine, 1953 Clifford Schreiber Dentistry, 1954 Dr Philip Elwin Medicine, 1955 Dr Sheila Lewis (latterly Cross) Medicine,
1978
1956
KCHSS
Dr John Quantrill Medicine, 1956 Samuel Shaer Dentistry, 1956 Dr David Thomas Preclinical Medicine,
Barney Lawson Medicine, 1934 Raymond Hancock Dentistry, 1937 Dr C William Jeanes Medicine, 1943 Cyril Bason Dentistry, 1944 Brian Taylor Dentistry, 1944 John Bowes Dentistry, 1946 Dr Geoffrey Ambrose Medicine, 1947 Peter Head Medicine, 1948 Dr Lionel Kreeger Medicine, 1949 Dr John Moore Medicine, 1951 Dr Patrick O’Brien Medicine, 1951 Dr Kenneth Spence Medicine, 1951 Colin Dexter Dentistry, 1952 John Scoones Dentistry, 1952 Dr David Parrott Medicine, 1956 Dr Christopher Rowland Medicine, 1959 James Sekabunga Medicine, 1959 Margaret Harwood (latterly Golder)
Dentistry, 1961 Dr John Gritton Medicine, 1961 Dr Eric Eckersley Medicine, 1964
Institute of Psychiatry
head of MI5 Sir Roger Hollis of being a spy, abruptly ended his friendship with Margaret Thatcher. He donated his 37 volumes of press clippings to King’s, along with his private papers.
Thomas Hennessy
Tom Hennessy began diving in 1964 while researching theoretical hydrodynamics at Churchill College, Cambridge. Diving physiology took a hold and he later completed a PhD in the biophysics of inert gas exchange in decompression at the University of
Commander Clement Cambrook
Mathematics and Physics, 1944 Professor Helmut Koenigsberger History,
1944 Robert Pain Engineering, 1944 James Moorhouse Mechanical
Engineering, 1945 Jack Dawson Chemistry, 1946 Peggy Boyce (latterly Spicer) History,
1948 Leslie Dicks-Mireaux Mathematics and
Dr Gweneth Chappell (latterly Urquhart)
1958
Physics, 1948
Household & Social Sciences, 1936
Dr Thomas Gilfillan Medicine, 1959 Dr Arthur Williams Medicine, 1959 Dr John Davies Medicine, 1965 Christopher Perry Medicine, 1969 Balgobiin Sukhu Dentistry, 1971 Errol Chin Dentistry, 1974
Dr Eric John Morrall German with French,
Valerie Taylor (latterly Sutton-Mattocks)
Household & Social Sciences, 1940 Hazel Broughton (latterly Plowman)
Household & Social Sciences, 1942 Ruth Whatmoor (latterly Gamble)
Household & Social Sciences, 1946
KCSMD
King’s College London
Dr Kathleen Harding Medicine, 1939 Dr Joan Gibson (latterly Garai) Medicine,
Kenneth MacDonald Geography, 1931 David Hunter Johnston 1933 William Taylor Electrical Engineering,
1944
1937
Dr Georgina Turtle (latterly Somerset)
Dr Alick Ashmore Physics, 1941 NF Berry (latterly Dennis) French, 1941 Dr Margaret Pruden (latterly Goldsmith)
Dentistry, 1944 Dr Desmond McNeill Medicine, 1947 William Keys Dentistry, 1950
English, 1942
1948 The Revd John Greene Theology, 1949 Michael David Sherrard Law, 1949 Canon Desmond Probets Theology, 1950 Philip Codd Law, 1951 Dr Avisa Morley Medicine, 1951 Dr Cyril Sheridan Medicine, 1951 Leslie Dingle Chemistry, 1952 Raymond Forsyth Law, 1952 Dr Richard Mulley Organic Chemistry,
1952 Dr Haydn Salmon Medicine, 1952 Malcolm Jowett Law, 1953 Dr Ken Taylor Physics, 1953 The Revd William Todd Theology, 1953 Basil Kenyon Law, 1954
AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
45
Cape Town. He was a leading researcher in diving-related science, with a particular interest in the needs of scientific divers. In 1991, he co-established the first MSc in Medical Informatics course in Europe, jointly with Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’ Medical School, and served as its first Course Director for a decade. Canon Desmond Probets
Theology, 1950 Soon after completing his studies at King’s, Desmond Probets was ordained at St Paul’s Cathedral and served in curacies in the UK. In 1962, he agreed to missionary service in Melanesia and was appointed sub-warden of St Peter’s Theological College on Gela, in the Solomon Islands. Two years later, he became Headmaster of All Hallows’ School in Pawa. Admired as a fine teacher and pastor, the work required a range of skills, including tropical medicine. After many years away, he returned to England and served as vicar of Timperley. He was instrumental in establishing ties between the Diocese of Chester and Melanesia. Dr Christopher Giles Rowland MBE
Guy’s, Medicine, 1971 Chris Rowland was a consulant oncologist in Exeter as well as founder
The Revd John Knowles-Brown
Theology, 1954 Dr Christopher Upton Medicine , 1954 The Revd Robert Butler Theology, 1955 Margaret Polmear (latterly Laird)
Professor Robin Stockwell
St Thomas’, BSc, Anatomy, 1956; MD, 1959 Robin Stockwell entered St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School in 1953 following National Service, earning two degrees. After a year as a house surgeon at St Thomas’, he joined the medical school’s Anatomy Department, working with Professor Dai Davies. He obtained his PhD and joined the University of Edinburgh Medical School as a senior lecturer in anatomy. He was recognised by his peers around the world for his research into the biology of cartilage cells, and was appointed to a personal chair in anatomy in 1981.
Roderick Suddaby History, 1968 Elizabeth Madgen Theology, 1969 The Revd John Affleck Theology, 1971 Peter Frank Ashman Law, 1973 The Revd Geoffrey Mason Theology
Theology, 1955
and Religious Studies, 1974
The Revd Thomas Willis Theology, 1955 John Crone German with French, 1956 Dennis Foster Law, 1957 Dr Gordon Bowra Medicine, 1958 Frances Roberts (latterly Black)
John Vinuesa Geography, 1983 Stuart Tomlinson 1985 Simon Fletcher 1986 Peter Greenwood Electrical
Spanish, 1958
Anthony Bell Pharmacy, 1989 Paul Knutson Education Studies, 1989 Ruth Hardwick (latterly Healy)
The Revd George Worthington
Theology, 1959 Lilian Young Spanish, 1959 Sylvia Lee (latterly Sutcliffe)
Engineering, 1988
Classics, 1990 Professor David Cato Construction
English, 1960
Law and Arbitration, 1991
The Revd Michael Nicholls Theology, 1960 Margaret Binnington (latterly Berry)
Dr Edmund Ryan 1992 Samuel Ross Law, 1994 Euphan Tenison Theology, 1995 Bruce Tweedy Chemistry, 1995 Dr Andrew Lingen-Stallard
Geography, 1961 The Revd Brian Dodds Theology, 1962 John Jones Medicine, 1964 The Revd Vincent Girling Theology, 1965 Dr Frank Miller (latterly Hansford-Miller)
Geography, 1965 Dr Ian Campbell Pharmacology, 1966 Robert Cruise Engineering, 1967 Dr Dennis Dean Education Studies, 1968 Michael Newbery Law, 1968 46
and Clinical Director of Friends of the Oncology Research Centre Exeter, an organisation dedicated to research and cancer care in Devon. After earning a biochemistry degree at Cardiff, he came to Guy’s in the mid-60s, bringing with him a Welsh love of rugby. After Guy’s, he held several other posts before settling in Exeter with his wife Ann and their four children. He was immensely respected in the local community for his commitment to cancer care. A series of illnesses took him away from clinical practice but did not impair the agility of his remarkable mind and the brightness of his indomitable sense of humour.
IN TOUCH
AUTUMN 2014
Midwifery, 1996 David Rawlings Healthcare Ethics, 1996 Michael Huntly Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, 1997 Justin Cross 1998 Dr Stephen Mann Classics, 1998
One of Guy’s pioneering surgeons Donald Ross FRCS
Donald Ross was widely recognised as one of the finest cardiac surgeons of the 20th century. He was among the first surgeons in the world to transplant a human heart, but his greatest achievement may have been the development of a procedure named in his honour. In the ‘Ross procedure’ – also known as the pulmonary autograft, performed on patients who need to have a diseased aortic valve replaced – a surgeon transfers the patient’s own pulmonary valve to the aortic position, and then inserts an
aortic homograft valve in the pulmonary position. This allows the healthy pulmonary valve to withstand the high pressures in the aorta. Ross’s most productive years were at Guy’s Hospital, where he was initially senior registrar to Lord Brock, and later was his colleague as a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon. In 1963, he took up an appointment as surgeon to the National Heart Hospital. Another pioneering cardiac surgeon who worked at Guy’s, Sir Terence English, said of Ross: ‘He was a superb technician and never lost his cool in the operating room.’
Lorna Wing revolutionised the understanding of autism. As a mother of a child with autism, she championed the rights of families and advocated for children with autism to be treated as individuals. From 1964 to 1990, she worked at the Medical Research Council Social Psychiatry Unit, at the Institute of Psychiatry, and in the
1970s developed the concept of a broad autism ‘spectrum’. She coined the term to express the idea that there is not one but a wide range of disorders that all share the essential features of autism. She co-founded the NAS’s National Autistic Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, in Bromley, Kent, which in 2008 was renamed the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism.
Dr Edward Denison-Davies Physiology
Iona Gilbert (latterly Muncaster)
with Basic Medical Sciences, 1999 Bill Thorgerson 1999 Karen Dobson Adult Nursing, 2001 Clare Nisbet 2001 Fiona Freedland Medical Ethics and Law, 2002
Management Studies, 1957
Dr Lorna Wing OBE
Denise Longnecker (latterly Inge)
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, 2002 Lisa Hines Nursing Studies, 2004 John Jones Community Dental Practice, 2004 Dr Datta Rao Immunology, 2004 Gareth Boylan Nursing Studies, 2006 Christine Van Der Vat Classics Non-Degree Research, 2009 Alistair Wheeler Geopolitics Territory and Security, 2012 Tolhurst Rowan Independent Prescribing (Practice Certificate), 2013 Mr Richard GapperYear unknown
Patricia Jones (latterly Thirlwell)
Nutrition & Dietetics, 1960 Charles Moreira Chemistry, 1982
Royal Dental Hospital Benjamin Fickling Dentistry, 1932 Noel Fox Dentistry, 1953 Peter Jones Dentistry, 1954
St Thomas’ Dr C Cato Medicine, 1937 Michael O Carruthers Medicine,
1943 Dr John Middleton Medicine, 1948 Dr Solomon Barron Medicine, 1949 Dr Max Borthwick Medicine, 1951 Mr John Winstanley Medicine,
Mrs Elizabeth Kohn (latterly Labbett)
1951
Year unknown
Dr Ronald Hyde Medicine, 1955 Dr Brian Greenwood (latterly TrowerGreenwood) Physiology, 1956 Dr Richard Raynes Medicine, 1958 Professor Thomas Barratt Clinical
Queen Elizabeth College Patricia Honey-Jones (latterly Mitchell)
Medicine, 1960
Household & Social Sciences, 1954
Dr John Davies Medicine, 1961
Logic Puzzle broke into four pieces. The professor was a bit sad about his carelessness, as he had liked that curious old stone. But he soon discovered something interesting: he could use the four pieces of the broken stone to weigh items on the balance scale – as long as these items were in one-pound increments – between one and 40 pounds. Whether an item was 11, 25 or 37 pounds, he could now weigh it accurately on the scale. How much did each of these four pieces weigh? TOBY MORISON
A broken stone
A few years ago, a King’s mathematics professor purchased a small farm in Shropshire, a place where he could unwind on weekends and grow some fruit and vegetables. The farm came with all kinds of tools and various implements, including a large balance scale. Next to the scale was an old (pre-metric) 40-pound stone with some initials carved into it: apparently, a previous owner had used it to weigh 40 pounds of feed. One Saturday morning, while cleaning his barn, the professor dropped the stone – and it
Send your solutions to: Logic Puzzle, InTouch, King’s College London, James Clerk Maxwell Building, 57 Waterloo Road, London, SE1 8WA or email InTouch@kcl.ac.uk. The three best solutions received before 15 January 2015 will each win a £10 book token
Last issue’s puzzle… Three boxes, one Reggie
In the previous issue of In Touch, you read about a professor who presents one of his students with a challenge. He places three boxes on a table: one box is purple, one is orange and one is green. Each has a statement written on its lid. The purple box reads: ‘The gold Reggie statue is in this box.’ The orange box reads: ‘The gold Reggie statue isn’t in this box.’
The green box reads: ‘The gold Reggie statue isn’t in the purple box.’ The professor says only one of those three statements is true, the other two are false. Which one is true? The statement on the green box is the only one that can be true, and the gold statue of Reggie is in the orange box. How do we know? The statements written on the purple and green boxes
are contradictory; that means one of them is true. But the inscription on the purple box cannot be true, because if it were, then the inscription on the orange box would also be true – and the professor said only one statement is true. Our winners, drawn at random, are Dr Julian Churcher (Medicine, 1982), Margaret Etall (Spanish, 1953) and Hugh Gibbon (Dentistry, 1969).
AUTUMN 2014 IN TOUCH
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MUSEUM OF LONDON/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
LONDON & ME
UNFORGETTABLE EVENINGS
Mary Martin, top, entertained British audiences in the musical South Pacific; above, Michael Dale and friends, from left: Ellice, studying medicine, nurses Janet and Ann and Michael, a beer, enjoying tea on the lawn, literally
48
IN TOUCH
AUTUMN 2014
I went up to King’s in October 1949, to gaunt but grand buildings on the Strand, with war-damaged London all around: double-decker trams clanged in and out of the Kingsway tunnel on the Embankment, alongside a back entrance to the College where I parked my motorcycle, used most days for the five-mile commute from Putney. Tipped straight into freshers’ fairs and club canvassing, I suddenly realised I was a boy from school, while the student affairs were largely run by men who had done their National Service – very well run, as I soon appreciated by using their headquarters in the old Chesham Hotel in Surrey Street. The Chesham offered rest and company and cheap refreshment, as well as meeting rooms and abandoned bedrooms for quiet liaisons and glimpses over the river and roofs. To dispel the wartime hangover, we got out whenever we could. With a nice nurse I’d met and many friends, our entertainment seemed to have spanned from the infamous Windmill (‘We never closed’) to Louis Kentner
playing Rachmaninoff at the Albert Hall, via Gilbert and Sullivan at the Streatham Hill Theatre and Campoli violining with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. We enjoyed Oklahoma! at the Golders Green Hippodrome, The River Line at the Strand Theatre with Kath and Roy – and the nurses, of course – interspersed with ‘Chesham Hops’ costing 1/6 per head, and Porgy and Bess at the Strand Theatre nearby. We also saw A Sleep of Prisoners at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, by the Keble Players, and later a raucous South Pacific at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Dial M for Murder got the detective juices running at the Westminster Theatre, and it’s probably still playing somewhere in London 62 years later. And then there was the thoroughly bawdy Post to Post, a London revue in the open-air theatre in Battersea Gardens... Those were fun, progressive days, even with the Luftwaffe’s modifications to London’s West End. Michael Dale Mechanical Engineering, 1953
THE KING’S COMMUNITY WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU? As a member of the King’s community, you’re part of a vibrant, worldwide alumni network and you have access to many benefits for life. You can mix and match and choose the benefits you want to use!
HOW TO GET STARTED? Visit alumni.kcl.ac.uk, email alumoff@kcl.ac.uk or call +44 (0)20 7848 3053 Enjoy a lifetime connection with King’s
WELCOME BACK Whether you are looking to develop your career or explore a new subject passion, a master’s at King’s offers you, our alumni, an outstanding academic experience. Join our vibrant and cosmopolitan postgraduate community, and connect with King’s partnerships in London and across the globe. King’s offers over 350 postgraduate courses, across ten Schools of study. Start your search today at www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus
Contact the Graduate School for advice on postgraduate study at King’s: graduateschool@kcl.ac.uk 020 7848 4146