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President’s Report
In my report last year, I noted how much more effectively than in the past we can reach out to alumni. This year, we have had an enormous and unexpected reason to be grateful for this fact.
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Up to the point where Covid struck, this had been a very successful and active year. At our September meeting, we had a wonderful turnout of year reps, and a very productive discussion about how to take the Association forward and strengthen our networks among alumni and with the College. We did keep running up against the apparently immoveable barriers to communication which are created by GDPR – the ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ – but think we are making some progress. In the meantime, Liz Cooke emphasises that she is always delighted to facilitate links and connect people to the Somerville Association rep for their year. We also agreed that it made sense for the Association Committee to ensure representation across the entire alumni community by ensuring that we have a committee member – more or less – for each ten year ‘cohort’. We seem to have achieved that by serendipity and will endeavour to maintain it.
Autumn 2019 saw the 1969 50th and the 1959 60th reunions, excellent lectures and events organised in Oxford and by the London group, carol concerts in Oxford and London, and the annual Medics’ Day. And March was set to be, as usual, an important month, with both the AGM and the Spring Meeting. Over a hundred alumni had registered to come to the Spring Meeting to hear our guest speaker, Xand van Tulleken (1996, Medicine). But then there was Covid. Xand kindly agreed to rearrange, and returned to active medicine on the front line. He also, as many of you will know, then had an all too close and direct encounter with Covid-19, starting with the classic symptoms but culminating in an emergency hospital admission with extreme heart palpitations. Millions wish him well!
Xand’s experiences underline how unpredictable and often frightening this year has been. It has also been a year when technology made it possible for us to combine quarantine and continued activity in ways no previous generation could have. For example, many people reading this will have taken advantage of the College’s programme of online events, which have kept so many alumni in touch in spite of Covid-related cancellations. (Details of all these events are advertised on the College website https://www.some.ox.ac. uk/alumni/events/.) And one very small ‘first’ among the millions was the Somerville Association’s first ever remote committee meeting.
We are particularly sad that this year’s Commemoration Service had to be cancelled. The annual service is one of the most important events in our calendar and is always greatly appreciated by the families and friends of Somervillians who have died during the previous year. There was an abbreviated Commemoration Service online on 27 June and the College has produced an obituaries booklet electronically.
Hopefully, next year’s report will be able to record a return to something closer to normality. And, at the end of a very technology-centric report, may I please, on behalf of the College, encourage anyone reading this who is not yet on the alumni email list, and would like to be, to contact Liz Cooke, elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk, or Lisa Gygax, lisa.gygax@some.ox.ac.uk
Finally, we record with great pleasure the distinguished Somervillians recognised in the delayed Queen’s Birthday Honours List this year:
Sonia Phippard (1978, Physics) CB for public service Neeta Patel (1980, Chemistry) CBE for services to entrepreneurship and technology Sacha Romanovitch (1986, Chemistry) OBE for service to business
Our warmest congratulations to them all.
ALISON WOLF (Potter, 1967)
