Atrium, Old Pauline News, Autumn/Winter 2024

ATRIUM

In Conversation

Omar Burhanuddin Meets Pauline Protestors on both sides of the Atlantic

John Venning leads a conversation with OP Pride

Late Life PhD

Jamie Priestley advises OPs to Stay Curious

ST PAUL’S ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Editorial

It used to be the rule that dinner party conversation must stay clear of certain topics – politics, religion and

sex. Atrium editorials should probably do the same, but it is difficult at the moment.

St Paul’s, and more particularly fee-paying parents and grandparents, are facing up to VAT being charged on fees from January 2025. This is portrayed by our new government as removing a subsidy to independent school customers. Canvassers at the General Election say the policy was well-received on the doorstep. Neither of these is a surprise.

Further into the magazine, David Abulafia (1963-67) writes, “Far more productive for society than taxing school fees would be vocal support for the efforts alumni and benefactors have been making to ensure that the great schools of England, among which St Paul’s has always been counted as one of the most prominent, can offer as many bursaries (including full ones) as possible and move towards needs-blind admission”. Robert Stanier (1988-93) contributes a letter on the same theme.

Sir Anthony Jay (1941-48) is most well-known as one of the writers of Yes Minister. Historian and Emeritus Fellow, Ronald Hyam in the Magdalene College Magazine 2016-17 wrote in his obituary of the OP and honorary Magdalene Fellow, “Long before he became famous, he made a film about Cambridge, seeking to widen its appeal to intending candidates and to advise freshers on what to expect. Naturally he sought the co-operation of the College. His 50-minute television documentary, Going Up: a personal look at being a new boy in an old university (31 August 1976) centred upon Magdalene and in particular three of our undergraduates from different types of school (boarding/ independent day/comprehensive)….

Jay’s entertaining narration concluded with an observation that if viewers thought Cambridge was too much about privilege, ‘I’ve always been for the extension of privilege rather than the abolition of it myself’”.

Of course, David, Robert and Tony are right. In July’s OPC monthly newsletter, I proposed that a ‘Bursary Boy’ network be set up. I wrote, “I received a bursary in the 1970s and believe that the luck of being at St Paul’s has opened up opportunities (not always taken) in later life for me…Those of us who benefited from assistance with fees in the past, and that includes the Foundation and Music scholars when the awards had significant financial benefits, can be the foot soldiers in campaigns to help this and future generations of bursary pupils at School. I envisage the network not only having a focus on fund raising for bursaries and partnerships but also as a source of information and advice that can be mined by current and future pupils.”

Whatever tax is in place, we should look to provide as many bursaries as possible and extend privilege (perhaps, ‘opportunity’) to as many pupils as we can. If you want to join, sign up at community@stpaulsschool.org.uk

One of my favourite moments as we pull together Atrium is counting how many contributors we have. This magazine has 21 including our brilliant Archivist, Kelly Strickland and former staff member and honorary OP, John Venning. The oldest contributor arrived at St Paul’s just after the Second World War and the youngest left after the war in Ukraine had started. Articles this

time profile Edward Behr (1940-44) another Pauline who went on to Magdalene, Jonathan Miller (194753) and Leonard Woolf (1894-99). Others describe writing a PhD later in life, setting up a school in Uganda, writing a first novel, and being gay at School.

Finally, it is my great pleasure to send congratulations on behalf of all OPs to David Ambler (2011-16) and Freddie Davidson (2011-16) on their Olympic bronze medals. For once, choosing our front cover image was simple.

Jeremy Withers Green (1975-80) OPC President

The Editorial board thanks all contributors, information providers and proof readers and particularly Kaylee Meerton and Kelly Strickland.

Cover

photo: Courtesy of Alastair Davidson: David Ambler and Freddie Davidson, Olympic bronze medallists

Design: haime-butler.com

Print: Lavenham Press

ATRIUM CONTRIBUTORS

Kaylee Meerton joined St Paul’s as the Marketing and Communications Manager in 2023, taking on the role of managing the School’s internal and external communications, as well as leading the marketing of the Old Pauline Club. Originally hailing from Australia, Kaylee relocated to London in 2022 with a short contract at King’s College London before joining St Paul’s. Prior to that, she graduated from Curtin University with a degree in Journalism and International Relations, picking up work experience in China and the United States. Her career started in the Australian regional journalism landscape, with roles as an editor and reporter for Fairfax Media, Australian Community Media and Student Edge.

Kelly Strickland joined St Paul’s School as the Archivist in 2022. She is the Archivist for both the School and the Old Pauline Club. Kelly is originally from Houston, Texas, and gained her degree in International Relations from Occidental College in California. Following her degree Kelly spent a year in Russia as an English teacher. After that Kelly started working as a financial journalist. She decided to retrain and gained a Masters in Archiving from Simmons University in Boston. She relocated to the UK in 2021 and after gaining experience working at Westminster Cathedral was delighted to take over the Archivist job at St Paul’s.

Tyler John has been the Head of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion at St Paul’s since 2022, after working in both Higher Education and corporate settings. He started a PGCE in PSHE with the University of Buckingham in September 2024.

John Venning was Head of English at St Paul’s from 1989-2014. He read English Literature at Cambridge and taught undergraduates there for a further three years while failing to complete a PhD. He then taught at Manchester Grammar School, Downside School and Malvern College. Since retirement he has done some part-time teaching, further researching and writing, and cultivates his garden in Cornwall.

Michael Simmons (1946-52) read Classics and Law at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He qualified as a solicitor and after two years as an officer in the RAF practised Law in the City and Central London for fifty years. Since retiring, he has pursued a new career as a writer. Michael is in touch with a sadly diminishing number of members of the Upper VIII of 1952.

Malcolm Sturgess (1947-52) spent half his first decade dodging bombs and doodlebugs and being bombed out four times. As a consequence of this peripatetic existence he went to nine different schools, culminating in 1947 with St Paul’s, re-establishing itself in Hammersmith. After School, Malcolm had no idea what he wanted to do as a career. He was a surveyor briefly. Then he embarked on the career he felt he had been born for. Twentynine years later, he was invalided out of teaching. Malcolm eventually began a third career running the recorded music department in an Ottakar’s bookshop. He was advised he could afford to retire in 1994 and has since spent thirty years happily involved in music, travel, steam trains and gardening.

Robin Dodd (1961-65) is a second-generation Pauline oarsman. Son of Ralph Dodd DFC (1935-38), who died in 2012, and who spoke highly of the education he received – sufficient to be accepted for pilot training, despite leaving School a year early. Ralph flew Beauforts and Beaufighters, was shot down in 1943, and spent the remainder of the war in Stalag Luft III. Robin read Rural Estate Management, at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, whipping-in to the College Beagles and hunting, followed by a career in commercial property, becoming a partner of a major West End firm. Later he was a pianist aboard ships and assistant expedition leader to the Arctic, Antarctica and the Black Sea.

David Abulafia CBE (1963-67) is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and a former Chairman of the Cambridge History Faculty. His books include Frederick II, The Discovery of Mankind, The Great Sea and The Boundless Sea which was the winner of the Wolfson History prize in 2020. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Academia Europaea, a Commendatore of the Italian Republic and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and at the University of Gibraltar. He has been the Apposer at Apposition and is a Vice President of the OPC.

Nick Birbeck (1967-72) graduated from SOAS in 1981 after a prolonged stay in Australia. He worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia from 1983 to 1995 where he set up an English school and also taught at Gadjah Mada University, training postgraduate students for overseas study. In 1995 he was employed at the University of Exeter as an Education adviser, supporting academics in all disciplines with their teaching, with an emphasis on the use of IT and, latterly, AI. He retired in 2016 but continues to teach and support academics at Exeter. He is fluent in Indonesian and Malay and once presented an English radio programme for Indonesian learners. He was a keen cricket and tennis player until a hip required replacing. He now enjoys gardening.

David Herman (1973-75) studied History and English at Cambridge and English and American Literature at Columbia University. He produced arts, history and talk programmes for BBC2, Radio 4 and Channel 4 (when it was good) for nearly 20 years and since then has written about literature, and Jewish culture and history.

Jamie Priestley (1975-80) after St Paul’s read French at Durham. He spent the first half of his career on external marketing campaigns for well-known brands like Shell and Ford, but the inside of organisations had always interested him and he began to specialise in corporate culture: how ideas take hold at work, or do not. He works with leadership teams to change the culture of their organisation. He hopes to get a version of his PhD thesis into good bookshops once he translates it into plain English.

Ben Parkinson (1978-82) at School his main interest was music. He also played in an unbeaten 4th XV. Ben worked as a cruise ship pianist in the Caribbean and he learnt of the income differential between those living overseas and in Britain. This stayed with him in his career when in 2002 he became CEO for a social enterprise, Jericho. In 2007 he left to travel to Nigeria and while there devised a project to train teenage youth to become changemakers. Now known as the Butterfly Project, this project has seven groups, based all over Uganda. In 2020 during the pandemic, Ben was able to build a unique secondary school for developing changemakers in Northern Uganda, with the support of Norton York. Ben was the 2023 winner of the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award for his work in Northern Uganda.

Norton York (1978-82) met Ben Parkinson at Colet Court and they became friends playing trombone together throughout their time there and at St Paul’s in the School orchestras. Later Norton helped Ben establish his work in Uganda. When Ben was ready to found the Chrysalis School, Norton saw a wonderful opportunity to help fund the construction as well as encouraging others to contribute. Norton’s professional experience as a school proprietor and university professor supported and developed the social entrepreneurial approach and his career in pop music education though RSL Awards, widely known as Rockschool, helped inspire the school’s approach to music.

Jonathan Foreman (1979-83) read History at Cambridge University, then Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has been a war correspondent, a film critic, a leader writer, and has

reported from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He is the author of two books, one on Foreign Aid and its challenges (Aiding and Abetting, Civitas 2015), and the other an anthology of American history (The Pocket Book of Patriotism, Sterling, 2005). He has written for many publications on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia.

Theo Hobson (1985-90) studied English Literature at York University, then theology at Cambridge. He has written some books about religion including God Created Humanism: the Christian Basis of Secular Values and much journalism, including for the Spectator. He is currently a part-time teacher, part-time writer, and part-time artist.

James Grant (1990-95) sits on the Old Pauline Club’s Executive Committee as Sports Director, as well as holding the posts of Chairman of the Old Pauline Cricket Club and Honorary Secretary of the Old Pauline Golfing Society. After a career in event organising and charity fundraising, he now works at St Paul’s as Associate Director, St Paul's Community and still feels nervous entering the staff room.

Lorie Church (1992-97): when he is away from the workplace, Lorie encourages people to put letters in little squares. He has had puzzles published in various titles internationally. As well as contributing to the Listener series, Mind Sports Olympiad and Times daily, he sets Atrium’ s crossword.

Neil Wates (1999-2004) worked in the property sector for 15 years before training as a Psychodynamic Therapist & Counsellor. He is a trustee of a UK based charitable trust and an NGO committed to the alleviation of social violence in East Africa. He also founded Friendship Adventure; a craft brewery based in Brixton. Neil is on the OPC Executive Committee.

Michael Hanson (2002-07) is the CEO and Founder of Growth Genie, a consultancy that empowers sales teams to have better conversations through training, coaching and building sales playbooks and processes. Its clients range from fortune 500 companies like JLL to fast growing fintechs like Dext.

Ammar Kalia (2007-12) is a writer, musician and journalist living in London. Since 2019, he has been the Guardian’s Global Music Critic and he has written for publications including The Observer, BBC, Economist and Downbeat. In 2020 he published a collection of poetry and an accompanying album, Kintsugi: Jazz Poems for Musicians Alive And Dead. He has an essay on music and identity in the 2022 collection Haramacy He was shortlisted for the Unbound Firsts Prize in 2022. His debut novel, A PERSON IS A PRAYER, tells the story of a family’s migration from Kenya to England over three separate days across six decades and was published by Oldcastle Books in May 2024.

Richard Griffiths (2016-2021) is entering his final year as a History undergraduate at University College, Durham. A student journalist, he has been Head of News for PalTV and won the Gold Award for News and Current Affairs at the National Student Television Awards 2024. At St Paul’s he was a keen dramatist and appeared in the film The Lady in The Van and Netflix’s The Crown. He took a gap year in 2021/22, when he worked as an aide in the House of Commons, and in 2024 he was recruited as a researcher for The Times during the General Election.

Omar Burhanuddin (2017-22) currently studies History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is passionately interested in public service, having worked in an asylum relief clinic in New York City and as an English Teacher trainee in Frankfurt. A keen writer, Omar sits on the editorial team of Varsity, the Cambridge University student newspaper. He aspires towards a career in journalism.

Atrium’s Editorial Board: Omar Burhanuddin, Jonathan Foreman, David Herman, Theo Hobson, Neil Wates and Jeremy Withers Green.

More bursaries please

Dear Atrium,

It was good to read about a focus on bursaries in Shaping Our Future: Next Steps. Equally, it is worth challenging the story.

What has been excellent at St Paul's overall in the last decade has been the revitalisation of emphasis on bursaries. As recently as ten years ago, relatively few pupils received means-tested bursaries: between 2013 and 2016 only between 49 and 62 pupils were receiving bursaries, at a value of between £750,000 and £1 million.

In the campaign launched in 2018, the goal was to increase this so that 153 boys would be receiving bursaries each year. As part of that vision, the number of children receiving bursaries increased markedly every year from 2016 to 2022, at which point 148 boys were receiving bursaries totalling £3.3 million. That represented 10% of the student body at the time, 1,480 pupils.

However, this declined to 143 pupils in 2023 and from the information given about the current campaign, it seems to have further declined this year so that only 132 pupils are currently receiving bursaries. It is worth noting that that is still double what was the case in 2015.

However, the ‘goal’ has declined in this year’s campaign from the previous vision, albeit only slightly: from 153 down to 151. That is perhaps a bit pedantic on my part. More to the point however, the 10% figure given as an aspiration in the current vision was actually achieved just two years ago: since then, it has been in decline, down to 8.7% this year. So, to say ‘continue to grow’ is not strictly accurate.

It is worth remembering that there have been visions before. In 2006, High Master Martin Stephen launched a plan to achieve needs-blind admission at St Paul’s by 2031, which is now only seven years away. It was reported in newspapers at the time that he realised that it would not be achievable straight away, and so “in the nearer term the plan at St Paul’s is to bring the number of places given to children on bursaries up to 20% of the total”. Of course, the “nearer term” never happened. It is good to encourage support for bursary provision, but it is important to note it has been rather a mixed picture lately.

Kind regards, Robert Stanier (1988-93)

Letters

A haven for completing unfinished homework and for gossip Dear Atrium,

I want to say how much I have been enjoying the latest copy of Atrium. You have managed to cover so many aspects of Pauline experience that it has taken me several weeks to reach the point when I simply had to write to you. I keep returning to my copy.

One point you might like to note in the current arguments about antisemitism: I remember (from ages ago) a classmate of mine was asked bluntly in my presence whether he had ever encountered it at St Paul’s. Looking straight at me he replied, “No. The first time I felt that was at Cambridge”. We shared a smile. We had both been in the small lecture theatre (in the Hammersmith building) for years together during the prayer session in the Main Hall. Himself as a Jew, myself as a Roman Catholic. It was a haven for completing unfinished homework and for gossip.

Best wishes, Mark Lovell (1947-53)

Not All Happy Days

Dear Atrium,

In the Spring/Summer 2024 edition of Atrium, Richard Dale remembers his ‘generally happy’ days at Colet Court. There is a poignant introduction to the article that describes an assault by a teacher that Richard was able to manipulate to his advantage in achieving a ‘boost to his street cred’.

I do not believe that Richard would include this incident in his list of happy times at School, however, I would argue that there is an underlying implication that physical violence towards children in schools in the bad old days did, to some extent, make a man or woman of you.

Beating in schools has been a subject for much entertainment and frivolity in popular culture. Dickens wrote about it and Tom Brown’s School Days was a best seller. The Bash Street Kids are no longer threatened with the cane or slipper by the teacher, but this was not the case when I was allowed to buy the occasional copy of The Beano, the final panel invariably ending with a ‘Thwack!’, ‘Swipe!’ or ‘Sting!’. Jimmy Edwards in Whacko attracted a large audience. Perversely, there is also an online game called Whack Your Teacher where children can take revenge on a virtual teacher. Perhaps one wonders why they should want to?

Like Richard, I was also in Miss Sawdor’s 1B class at Colet Court. I remember being afforded nothing but kindness by her, perhaps establishing expectations of similar treatment by teachers, all male I should add, in the following years. These hopes were short-lived. However, I would stress that although teachers frequently used indiscriminate punishments and indulged in humiliation and bullying, most were not violent. It was the few that were who one perhaps remembers most vividly.

The teacher who assaulted Richard in his article was infamous at Colet Court. I was punched on the side of the head once by this man for failing to do my homework. I witnessed several similar attacks on others, one involving a cricket bat. One boy, considerably taller than this short, stocky scoundrel, gave him some lip in the playground and was practically knocked unconscious by a right hook. I remember telling him to tell his parents. I do not know of anyone who ever did.

Mucking around in class could be a risky venture, even with relatively mild-mannered teachers. One could push one’s luck, especially if egged on by peers, resulting in an exhaustion of patience and a physical attack that could be dangerous if uncontrolled. I do not remember it being good for one’s street cred. The well-behaved classmates thought that one had it coming. Those that had encouraged the boy to horse around could take some satisfaction at anticipating the result – a childish schadenfreude. There could be little sympathy for the victim, perhaps more for the teacher.

I cannot say that I was always very scared at Colet Court. Clearly one could avoid trouble by being studious, compliant and well behaved. However, depending on

who was teaching or watching over you in the playground, one was sometimes nervous. The teachers would, I suspect, have endorsed the Freudian view that a bit of fear is needed to learn stuff. I can still remember poetry I had to recite in class, engrained in my brain for fear of a detention, or maybe something worse. Like Richard, I was ‘generally happy’, but at times I certainly was not.

A more formal and sanctioned use of violence was at the discretion of the headmaster and we were all scared of him. I was beaten for having an untidy desk. I was eight. I was also reported by a monitor for using an expletive in the playground and had to report to his office. I was asked if I knew the meaning of the word (I am not sure I did) and quizzed repeatedly. I was then told to go off to lunch while he decided whether he was going to beat me. He did not. I cannot remember what my final punishment was.

There is no doubt in my mind that the headmaster was aware of the violent tendencies of some teachers and was complicit in maintaining this culture. On reflection it beggars belief that no one ever stepped up and complained.

The sexual abuse that occurred at Colet Court and St Paul’s has been thoroughly investigated. I was not a victim, although I did witness a number of incidents that I reported to the inquiry that was conducted many years later. This abuse was utterly appalling. However, it was largely covert and I believe that the majority of children were not aware of it at the time. Physical violence, on the other hand, was overt. I made this point in my testimony. I believe that in many ways the physical punishments on children at Colet Court by a small number of individuals was equally insidious. I suspect this was beyond the terms of reference.

I have talked about these issues with a few school friends. Often there is an acknowledgement that these incidents occurred but it was the way things were at the time – water under the bridge and, anyway, we all came out OK. One can take some solace in knowing that those teachers who lashed out at children would now be behind bars. Violence of any kind towards children in schools is of course unacceptable today, even though there are some who would like to see a return to a more disciplined regime. But did we come out OK? The question is probably unanswerable. What I can say is that I remember waking up in the morning on some occasions and feeling frightened about going to a place I should have felt safe in. I would be surprised if that had had no effect on my psyche and on the many thousands of children who were victims of teacher assault. Perhaps I can understand why some people might want to play ‘Whack Your Teacher’. Past violence towards schoolchildren by teachers may not rate highly in the ‘pillars of shame’ poll alongside slavery, colonialism, antisemitism, abuse in the Church and all the rest. However, it deserves to be there and to be acknowledged. It was not some rite of passage to be looked back on with a comic book nostalgia.

Yours sincerely, Nick Birbeck (1967-72)

Pauline Polo

Dear Atrium,

I do not recall the game of polo being mentioned in Atrium but I have come across some Pauline related material on the subject. The prestigious Inter Regimental Polo Tournament of India that was dominated by famous cavalry regiments of the Indian and the British Army when stationed in India. For example, the 14th Dragoons, formed in 1715 by an Old Pauline, Brigadier General James Dormer (c. 1700), did tours of India in the 1st Sikh War 1848-49, Central India 1858-59 and 1882 -86, after which it was retitled 14th Hussars.

In 1897 an infantry regiment, 2nd Durham Light Infantry, had the effrontery to win the Inter Regimental Polo Tournament. The first time it had been wrested from the cavalry. The regiment had a brilliant polo team which included an Old Pauline, Lieutenant William John Ainsworth (1885-90) (later Lt Colonel) which had suffered only one defeat in five years. At the tournament it beat the 4th Hussars whose team included a young Winston Spencer Churchill, the 16th Lancers, 11th Hussars and the 5th Dragoon Guards in the final 6 – 1.

From the 1890s many Old Paulines served in the Indian Army including Ainsworth’s brother Captain Harry Lawrence Ainsworth (1894-99) of the 10th Gurkha Rifles, who was also an accomplished sportsman in polo, hockey and football. In 1905, Lieutenant John Clementi (1889-95), serving in the elite Queen Victoria’s Own Guides (Frontier Force), won the Cavalry Reconnaissance Cup of India. He later became Colonel Commandant of the 10th Mahratta Light Infantry.

The Wathen Hall at School is named after a member of a family of Old Paulines with Indian connections and, in this respect, Lieutenant Roger Louis Gerrard Wathen (1923-28) of the Royal Norfolk Regiment was killed in a polo accident at Jhansi, India in 1935. At the resurrected Feast Service at St Paul’s Cathedral in February, I noted on the service sheet the name of Simon Wathen as a Governor of St Paul’s Girls’ School, surely a relative, though not a Pauline.

Best regards,

John Dunkin (1964-69)

[Editorial Board: Simon has confirmed he is a relative.]

The Vivians Dear Atrium,

An OP friend lent me his alumni magazine and I was interested to read about my grandfather, Col VPT Vivian (1900-05), in the Spring/Summer 2024 Atrium (page 31).

He was, of course, a Pauline, as was his eldest son, my father JMC Vivian (1931-36, High House). Because of the war, my grandparents sent their younger son (DV Vivian) to King’s School Bruton. My father’s housemaster Rupert Martin (1927-37) had by then become headmaster there.

I followed Uncle David to KSB in 1966.

I recently had to clear out some old family papers and found amongst them Valentine Vivian’s memoirs. I gave a copy to MI6 (SIS) who seemed pleased to have them.

Yours sincerely, Simon Vivian

Diversity in Action

Dear Atrium,

In nearly adjacent articles in the Spring issue of Atrium, F W Walker is described as a ‘lunatic’ running his own asylum and responsible for a classics department of fascist tendencies and ‘great’, running a national academic powerhouse, leading the country in Oxbridge scholarships. It is good to see diversity in action.

John Venning (English Department 1989-2014)

FW Walker, High Master (1876-1905)

David Abulafia’s Atrium Notes

It was a great pleasure to receive an invitation to the Apposition Dinner for the ‘Lost Years’ of Covid, held at Mercers’ Hall this June – also a bit of a surprise, as I had already attended one a couple of years ago, as a reward for being the Apposer during lockdown, via Zoom, in Mark Bailey’s last year as High Master. But I gratefully accepted the new invitation anyway. And there Mark was in the line receiving guests, one of the great High Masters of a great School. The dinner was a magnificent occasion, with both Paulines and SPGS Alumnae from the Covid years present, elegant speeches, lively conversation, and plenty of toasts in vintage port. It was appropriate that pandemics were on my mind that evening – not just Covid but something far worse, as I shall explain. I have had the pleasure of knowing Mark since he was a candidate for a four-year post-doctoral Research Fellowship at my college in Cambridge, and I was the so-called expert interviewer. I describe myself as the ‘so-called expert’ because his command of the intricacies of the late medieval English economy, and his ability to bring to life the experience of those who lived at that time, when bubonic plague stalked the country, is very impressive. Fortunately, it was impressive enough to win the support of the committee, which included colleagues from the widest range of academic disciplines; he was duly elected to the Fellowship. Mark made a name for himself at that time for his discovery about the importance of rabbits in the medieval economy, about which he expatiated on television; but his research has always been much broader and his most recent book, After the Black Death, explains the powerful economic and social effects of the loss of perhaps half the English population in the middle of the fourteenth century, followed by further assaults of plague that prevented demographic recovery for a long while. That book is based on

the prestigious Ford Lectures in English History that he gave at Oxford a few years ago to a highly appreciative audience.

Although he was the first High Master to bear the title ‘Professor’, as part-time Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, Mark was by no means the only scholar-cum-High Master. One could begin with William Lily in the earliest days of the School; with the support of King Henry VIII and Erasmus his Latin grammar became the standard textbook in many English schools for hundreds of years. Much more recent scholar High Masters included the eminent manuscript expert and medieval art historian Walter Oakeshott, who later became Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Oakeshott’s book sales were unquestionably overtaken by Dr Hillard, whose daughter lived almost next door to me when I was a Pauline. His Latin Prose Composition may not have been most people’s favourite schoolbook, but in the now distant days when Latin was the staple of public-school education, it was a desideratum. It was not just High Masters who wrote books. I have the impression that quite a few Classics Masters at the School also produced textbooks. In VIx we used a collection of extracts from the wonderful pioneer historian Herodotus put together by Pat Cotter, the Head of Classics. And then there was the output of Tom Howarth, whose book on King Louis-Philippe was published, I think, before he became High Master, but could take credit in Cambridge Between the Wars for surreptitiously revealing that Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy. He did not get on with the Head of History, Dr P N Brooks, but Brooks produced a learned monograph entitled Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist while teaching at the School – not perhaps bedtime reading. Peter Brooks’s predecessor, Philip Whitting, was a renowned expert on Byzantine coinage and history, and

was awarded an honorary doctorate by Birmingham University in recognition of his scholarship and of his gift of his coin collection to the Barber Museum in the university.

In short, they were a donnish bunch of people who taught in a donnish way, which prepared those of us who were considered suitably academic very well for Oxford and Cambridge. In my day there rather less interest was shown in those who were not so academic, and that is a valid criticism of the School as it once was, and a complaint I sometimes hear from alumni. But the academic achievements were considerable: among historians, we can count prominent figures such as Gareth Stedman Jones (1956-61) and Paul Ginsborg (1958-63); among classicists ML West OM (1951-55), Paul Cartledge (1960-64) and Robert Parker (1964-67). At least three of those stand or stood firmly to the Left politically; but, as Paul Ginsborg remarked to a radical colleague at his Cambridge college who disliked admitting undergraduates from independent schools, “All the best revolutionaries come from public schools”.

Independent schools have for some years felt under pressure as the top Russell Group universities insist they want to concentrate heavily on admitting students from the state sector. And independent schools will soon be feeling the pressure if legal challenges to the imposition of VAT on school fees fail (legislation to impose VAT may well be in breach of the European Court of Human Rights). Far more productive for society than taxing school fees would be vocal support for the efforts alumni and benefactors have been making to ensure that the great schools of England, among which St Paul’s has always been counted as one of the most prominent, can offer as many bursaries (including full ones) as possible and move towards needs-blind admission. The number 153 for some reason comes to mind. 

Briefings

Master Remembered

Robin Dodd (1961-65), with much help from his son James, who qualified and competed in the Diamond Sculls at Henley 2024 and received his PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology/Rock Art from Aarhus University this year, shares his memories of Robin Wenham Alden MA, Assistant Master English and History, pioneer rowing coach (1962-65)

Time has come to tell the whole tale of one whose life was giving enjoyment and learning to others, enriching their lives, not least my own. Robin “Bunny” Alden was the first to bring modern circuit training to St Paul’s School Boat Club in 1963, setting the stage for future Henley wins of the luminaries described in Jonathan Whybrow’s (1974-78) excellent article in Spring 2024’s Atrium. Robin was an iconic coach, far ahead of his time, and I would like to recognise his part in laying these foundations, along with his predecessors, such as Freddy Page and Red Brown.

Robin was born and bred in Oxford, where he died aged 81 and his funeral was held in St Giles. St Edward’s (Teddies) was his alma mater, and he would have been very proud of both schools as the blustery, sunny intervals of wind-swept Henley in this year’s semifinal of the Princess Elizabeth Challenge, which saw SPSBC beat SESBC, the defending champions.

Robin’s circuit training was a great shock to the system, but quickly won over sceptics. His boyish, over-the-top enthusiasm is remembered for half killing us in Great Hall, then on the River, where we broke “flat ice and growlers” in the coldest winter in living memory, January 1963. That spring, SPSBC was ultra-competitive, Robin’s Colts A (J16) the most extreme, the hardest seats to get into for us Juniors. His cross training was a tense, fast boot camp – press-ups, vigorous exercise against the clock, weights, isometrics and skipping ropes.

By 1963, Boggo Bennett had succeeded Freddy Page as President of SPSBC, and the autumn before we sang in Alec Harbord’s Revue:

“Old Uncle Freddy and All” to the tune of “Uncle Tom Cobley, Widdecombe Fair”. I helped with the wording of the song, “Mr Brown, Mr Bennett, Mr Allport, Mr Alden and Old Uncle Freddy and All” and sang in the chorus while the audience thundered. In 1964, Robin brought the house down with fellow English Master, Peter Raby in the Masters’ Sketch. They played a pair of complacent civil servants.

At St Paul’s he was angered by the inflexible streaming system that dropped Geography in 6A, and that his talents in German were wasted. He was ahead of his time, same as in SPSBC and his outside coaching of London University.

Robin “Bunny” Alden had an enormous innate sense of fun, the 1965 photograph with me in the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley says it all about ‘The Two Robins’, when the shutter went down and Bunny’s ice cream

actually broke, in hindsight reflecting a very poignant moment in his life to come. A wonderful raconteur, he had my family in fits over dinner with his story of his climb of Henley Church with a saucepan on his head, after the 1955 Regatta Ball. According to Worcester College, this is not one of their regular “rites of passage”. 

The Two Robins, Robin Alden and Robin Dodd (author’s photo)

Captain of Boats, Worcester College 1954

In 1965, Robin Alden returned to Teddies, teaching English and coaching rowing under the legendary Cambridge Blue, John Vernon, who retired in 1968. Robin took over and Teddies reached the 1969 National Schools’ Final. In the months before, I met with Robin and Christine before the roaring fire of an Oxfordshire inn; it was like a scene from Falstaff We were lucky to finish our excellent dinner before the arrival of the Bullingdon Club. That evening, Robin told me of the turning point he faced, having achieved as much as he could as a coach in school rowing.

Robin was greatly interested in my pastures new at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, high in the hills, away from rowing. Listening carefully for my response, he told me he had the chance of Head of English at non-rowing Rugby School. I recall telling him: “It doesn’t matter what the rest say, you’re bound to leave them far behind.” which is from the famous song, Old Father Thames. We all agreed, particularly Christine, on the pressures faced in school rowing, by coaches and oarsmen alike, having to be totally focused to the exclusion of everything else.

In hindsight, our conversation exactly fits with a letter Robin wrote to the Provost of Worcester College in 1954, “The results could have been better, and probably they should have, but I knew the gamble when I took on Captain of Boats in October, I think it was worth it and I hope you do not disagree”. As a fresher in 1952, his boat came second in Torpids. He graduated with Third Class Honours, English Language and Literature, and qualified for his MA in August 1958.

He knew the gamble as before, this time he was married, older and wiser, he knew he had to put his growing family and academic career first. The letter to the Provost, I believe, holds the key to the puzzle which I understand has perplexed many of the staff and pupils where he had taught, namely, why such an outstanding school rowing coach turned away from rowing in sight of the summit of his school coaching career.

Teaching history to the Lower Eighth in 1964, Dr Brooks, bizarre as ever, used to eulogise over Renaissance reformers ending up in a “cold douche” for ardent zealots. Like a more practical zealot, Robin decided to get his teeth

“Bound upon the old ways, Splendour of the past comes shining in the spray.”

Songs of the Fleet, Sir Henry Newbolt, 1910.

into something without getting wet.

The Wind in the Willows and The Teddy Bears’ Picnic were over for him. In the same year as his friend and colleague, David Porteus, became SPSBC President, for 20 years, Robin took Rugby School by storm in 1970, as Head of English and Drama, revolutionising the department, leaving a huge impact on the school where he stayed for 24 years. Ever challenging conventional values with his pupils, Robin was true to form in his arrival interview at Rugby School in 1970. “If you’re not going to have a syllabus made up of prescribed texts and dates, and I don’t want syllabus of this sort, then the man teaching becomes more important than what is covered”.

Robin had an expression “However quixotic this might seem”, which he used in a letter to my parents dated 7 March 1963. Like the hero of Cervantes, Robin Alden was an enthusiastic visionary inspired by lofty and chivalrous ideals, but with a difference. Many of his ideals were realisable and not just impossible dreams. The proof of the pudding is Anthony Horowitz, well-known author and screen writer (Series I and II, Midsomer Murders and Foyles War), who was one of Robin’s first pupils, 1970 to 1973 and who was greatly inspired by him.

In 1983, Robin became a House Master at Rugby School, the school magazine The Meteor recorded: “Christine brought to the House a gentleness of spirit and unassuming good sense, recognised by all who knew her.” Robin’s sons joined Town House, as did daughter Philippa in the Sixth Form; the happy photograph of Robin and Christine at their son Jonathan’s wedding was taken two years before she died of cancer in 1993.

Robin at son Jonathan’s wedding, August 1991

Robin sang Floreat Rugbeia for the last time in 1994. He planned to settle back in Oxford, perhaps coaching for Teddies again or Leander, according to The Meteor. His life had turned full circle, a “Dance to the Music of Time” to quote the novelist, Anthony Powell. As the Summer Term ended, Robin announced his engagement to Mrs Anne Carstairs, who had been a bridesmaid at Robin and Christine’s wedding in April 1956 and widow of one of Robin’s oldest friends. They married in September 1994 and The Meteor reported they would be living in Oxford and wished them every happiness.

Robin also taught and coached at King's Chester from 1955 to 1961, before coming to St Paul's. Three days after Robin’s funeral in 2014, the King’s Chester boat which carried his name competed with a black silk ribbon on her bow in the Northern Schools’ Head, as did the other King’s Chester boats, all bearing a black ribbon, and their boathouse flag in Chester, fluttered at half-mast. 

His cross training was a tense, fast boot camp – press-ups, vigorous exercise against the clock, weights, isometrics and skipping ropes

Acknowledgement: Thanks are extended to the archivists of the following institutions for kindly supplying material and information: Worcester College, Oxford; St Edward’s School, Oxford; King’s School, Chester; St Paul's School and Rugby School.

Page 2 of Robin Alden’s letter to author’s parents

Blue and green back on the Dee, Robin, May 1991

The Trophy Cupboard

Old Pauline Club Archivist, Kelly Strickland, has raided the Club’s trophy cupboard and made some fascinating discoveries.

1. This mug was won by the Science Form in 1899 in a Tug of War competition between Science and Classics. The competition was started in 1877 between current Paulines and Old Paulines with the boys winning. In later years, the competition was between the Science, Mathematics and Classics streams in various combinations. The clipping from The Pauline shows the results from 1877 to 1891.

2. The SPS Cadet Corps Lloyd-Lindsay Competition Trophy was first awarded in 1897 to R Sprague (1892-98). The trophy was awarded until 1919 to TH Just, I Mavor (later School Chaplain), SJ Fisher, W Rowe, CS Wink, CH Evans, M Webb, C Sprague, and TC Hunt. The Lloyd-Lindsay Competition was started in Britain by Colonel Sir James Lloyd-Lindsay around 1873. The Pauline (July 1891) describes the competition as “A half-mile race in uniform over several obstacles, three volleys being fired at each of four halts”.

3. This trophy with amazing dragon detailing was given to the School by the Association of Old Paulines in China in commemoration of the School’s fourth Centenary in 1909. It is currently being used as the House Cup.

5. This SPS Boat Club Senior Sculling mug was awarded to SH Peploe (1934-38) in 1937. Peploe was then entered in the Junior Sculls at the Richmond and Twickenham Regatta where he unfortunately lost in the final by half a length. Peploe was in the 1st VIII and a prefect in 1937.

4. The Mid-Day Cricket Cup which was given to the School in 1921 by Percy W B Tippetts (1892-94). He also gave a similar cup for football.

6. The Lambert Cup was given to the School in honour of Lieutenant Cecil JN Lambert (1910-16). Lambert died in World War I on 2 September 1918. The cup was presented by his father in 1919 as a challenge cup for Senior Pairs rowing. Lambert was a Prefect and Captain of the Boat Club in 1916. His picture can be seen here from The Pauline magazine.

Paulines and The SOE

Selwyn Jepson (1913-18) was chief recruiting officer or talent spotter for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) French Section.

He recruited agents such as Francis Cammaerts, Violette Szarbo, Noor Khan and Odette Churchill. After service in the Tank Corps in the First World War, he attended the Sorbonne “to improve his French”, travelled extensively in Europe, was involved in film and theatre, and wrote adventure and romance books.

When interviewed after the Second World War he stated: “I was responsible for recruiting women for the work, in the face of a good deal of opposition, I may say, from the powers that be. In my view, women were very much better than men for the work. Women, as you must know, have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men. Men usually want a mate with them. Men don't work alone; their lives tend to be always in company with other men. There was opposition from most quarters until it went up to Churchill, whom I had met before the war. He growled at me, “What are you doing?” I told him and he said, “I see you are using women to do this,” and I said, “Yes, don't you think it is a very sensible thing to do?” and he said, “Yes, good luck to you.” That was my authority”!

High Master John Bell, when he heard that Lewis Hodges (1931-33), later Air Chief Marshall Sir Lewis Hodges KCB DSO DFC, had been accepted at RAF College at Cranwell said, “they seem to be taking anyone these days.” Hodges joined Bomber Command in 1938. Two years later he crashed landed in Brittany and was imprisoned near Nimes, and then in Spain, before being repatriated. From 1941 Hodges commanded 161 Squadron tasked with

flying the SOE agents into and out of occupied France in short take-off and landing Lysanders. Among his passengers back to England were two future French Presidents, Vincent Auriol and Francois Mitterand. He finished the war based in Calcutta, flying clandestine missions over Japanese occupied territory.

Leopold Marks (1934-37) was chief cryptographer of Special Operations Executive and also briefed agents such as Violette Szarbo. Agents were given poems for cypher purposes and he wrote the famous poem The Life that I Have for Violette Szarbo and it is used in the film Carve her name with Pride (1958). In later life he was a habitué of the Special Forces Club. 

The Life That I Have by Leo Marks

The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours

The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours.

Pauline Gallantry

Captain Jenkin R O Thompson (1926-28) RAMC was awarded the George Cross when he was killed in action while serving on HM Hospital Carrier St David.

The ship was repeatedly dive-bombed and ultimately received a direct hit off Anzio in January 1944. He organised parties to carry the seriously wounded patients to safety in lifeboats, inspiring all to prompt and efficient action by his coolness and resource, and was thus instrumental in saving many lives. However, when the ship was obviously about to founder and all were ordered to save themselves, he returned alone to the ship in a last effort to save the one remaining helpless patient still lying trapped below decks and selflessly remained with him when the ship sank.

Thompson had previously served on HM Hospital Carrier Paris at Dunkirk in May 1940.

Citation

The King has been graciously pleased to approve the posthumous award of the George Cross, in recognition of most conspicuous gallantry in carrying out hazardous work in a very brave manner, to: Captain Jenkin Robert Oswald Thompson (115213), Royal Army Medical Corps (Claygate, Surrey). 

Paulines and The Mighty Hood

On 24 May 1941 HMS Hood, nicknamed The Mighty Hood, and The Prince of Wales intercepted the German battleship Bismark and battle cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Straits between Greenland and Iceland.

At around 6am HMS Hood exchanged fire with Prinz Eugen and, after six salvoes, a hit from the Bismark caused a massive explosion that sank the Hood in three minutes with only three of its 1,418 crew surviving.

Able Seaman Neil Hamilton Douglas (1935-39), aged 19, was one of those who died and whose name is on the Portsmouth War Memorial. His entry in the St Paul’s School Register 1905-1985 shows he was born in 1921, son of W E Douglas, Civil Engineer. He was Captain of Boats.

Another Old Pauline, Commander Douglas Hunt (1929-34) DSC* RNVR was due to join the Hood but had caught measles and was recuperating at home when the Hood was lost. Douglas had been the Old Pauline squash champion in 1939, and regained his title in 1947, holding it again from 1951 to 1957; he was the Old Pauline Squash Club’s honorary secretary from 1938 to 1973. His obituary in The Daily Telegraph concludes, “Duggie Hunt never married; but while some foxes got away from him in the field, few pretty riders escaped his clutches”. 

Pauline in Paris

At the last Paris Olympics in 1924, an OP represented Great Britain at tennis, Jack Gilbert (1901-03).

He lost in the last 16 to Harada of Japan in four sets. Jack did not play tennis at St Paul’s but learnt the game from a French intern (along with seven other OPs) at Ruhblen near Berlin during World War 1. In the same year as the Olympics, Jack won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon, partnered by Kitty McKane (later Godfree) who was briefly at St Paul’s Girls’ School. 

The Pauline, July 1924

HMS Hood

Pauline Books

Atrium (unless otherwise described) uses reviews provided by authors or their publishers.

Peter Pomerantsev

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

David Herman (1973-75) reviews a new biography of Sefton Delmer (1917-23)

Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist and author. His latest book, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (2024), is about Sefton Delmer, a British propagandist during World War II.

Delmer, known as “Tom”, to his friends and family, was born in Berlin in 1904, the only son of Professor Frederick Sefton Delmer (an Australian lecturer in English at Berlin University) and his wife, Mabel Hook. In 1914 his father was arrested and interned by the Germans. He was released in 1915. In May 1917 the family moved to Britain, but his father returned to Germany after World War I.

Sefton was educated at St Paul’s where he made the rowing team and won a scholarship to Oxford. He later wrote, “I can … look back on my time at Oxford and St Paul’s as a very happy period in my life.” In 1928 he became the Berlin correspondent for The Daily Express. He was the first British reporter to interview Hitler. He then became the Paris correspondent and from 1936 he covered the Spanish Civil War.

In 1940 Delmer’s career took a dramatic turn. From 1940 for five years, Delmer became the Head of Special Operations for Britain’s Political Warfare Executive, making “black propaganda” radio broadcasts to Germany. As Pomersantsev writes, “He edited a daily newspaper and oversaw a whole industry of leaflets stimulating desertion and surrender, fake letters, fake stamps, and a vast array of rumours, gossip… all intended to break the spell cast by the Nazis.”

Many of Delmer’s team were Germanspeaking Jewish refugees. One of their most intriguing radio characters was der Chef, a character who loved the German army but hated the Nazis. He was played by Peter Hans Seckelmann, a mild-mannered German novelist of Jewish descent. There was a strange civil war between Delmer’s team and the worthy intellectual emigres who worked for the BBC German Service and wanted to convert ordinary Germans to their high liberal or socialist ideals. Listening to them, Delmer later wrote in his memoirs, was like “Maida Vale calling Hampstead”. This, Delmer thought, would never work. This antagonism was reciprocated by refugees like Karl Otten. “Everyone at the BBC knows that Sefton Delmer is a fifth columnist”, Otten wrote. But Delmer used the testimony of other refugees to give authentic details to his broadcasts.

Others recruited by Delmer included Peter Wykeman (née Weichmann), Rene Halkett (née Freiherr von Fritsch), Father Elmar Eisenberger, an Austrian priest, and Agnes Bernelle, and the writers, Muriel Spark and David Garnett.

Delmer wanted broadcasts that would speak to ordinary Germans and undermine their faith in Nazism, building a divide between them and the party. He believed that many Germans were not idealists or passionate Nazis and he wanted to tap into this lack of idealism. It worked. Delmer’s broadcasts later moved to the BBC. “The estimated audience for the BBC German broadcasts,” Pomerantsev writes, “was now [in

1945] between ten and 15 million a day – up from one million in 1941.”

After the war Delmer returned to The Daily Express, published two volumes of memoirs, Trail Sinister (1961) and Black Boomerang (1962), and wrote two other books, Weimar Germany (1972) and The Counterfeit Spy (1973). He died in 1979.

Delmer will be remembered for his contribution to the war effort. He and his unlikely team helped break the hold of Goebbels’ propaganda machine and played an important part in helping Britain win the Information War. 

Richard Davenport-Hines (1967-71)

History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft

Richard Davenport-Hines is the author of biographies of Dudley Docker, W. H. Auden, Marcel Proust, Lady Desborough and Maynard Keynes. He has written histories of sex, drugs, arms-dealing, the sinking of the Titanic and the Profumo Affair, as well as editing three volumes of correspondence and journals of Hugh Trevor-Roper.

History in the House pulls back the curtains on Christ Church, Oxford and reveals its great and lasting historical significance. This is an historiographical study. It shows the evolution of historical ideas, purposes and methods in a clerisy that has enjoyed conspicuous influence in England for six centuries. There was growing recognition in Tudor England that the study of history especially improved the minds, enlarged the imaginations and broadened the vicarious experience of princes, noblemen and administrators. History showed, by precept and example, good government and bad, virtue and vice in rulers, and the reasons for the success or failure of states.

History in the House looks at the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, JC Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, and Hugh Trevor-Roper: a Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the protestant settlement, a conservative, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist and a contrarian.

Nikhil Krishan reviewing in The Spectator writes, “And what of the anecdotes? Here, the author delivers the goods on nearly every page. ‘Jumping your full-stops – that is the Oxford accent,’ one don is quoted as saying. ‘Do it well and you will be able to talk forever’”. 

Giovanni Montanaro

The Bookseller of Venice

Translated by Edward Williams (Modern Languages and Creative Arts departments 1983-2020)

In Venice’s Campo San Giacomo you’ll find Moby Dick, one of those bookshops “you’re always surprised to discover still exist …” The bookseller is Vittorio, he’s just over 40, lives for his books and fights to be able to go on selling them. One day he meets Sofia, bright-eyed and quick-witted, who makes a habit of going to see him there.

On 12 November 2019, however, 187 centimetres of an exceptional acqua alta, flood the houses and shops, and submerge Vittorio’s bookshelves. The books drown “and the whole of Campo San Giacomo is full of lost books, and at that moment it seems as if everything is lost”.

Giovanni Montanaro experienced first-hand the tragic days of the flood that shook the world. But he also tells another story, not only describing the anxiety of the rising water, but revealing another Venice: the young people, the Venetians, the joy which won out amid the devastation, springing from people’s ability to help each other. And most of all the booksellers, the love of books and the love which books engender, the determination to salvage at all costs the things that are most dear.

Readers and booksellers have been moved by this story, which evokes Venice and its magnificent uniqueness but becoming, at the same time, a symbol for every tragic emergency and every human rebirth.

Giovanni Montanaro (Venice, 1983) is a writer and lawyer. He is the author of Il libraio di Venezia (Feltrinelli, 2020) and also La croce Honninfjord (Marsilio, 2007), Le conseguenze (Marsilio, 2009), Tutti i colori del mondo (Feltrinelli, 2012, Premio Selezione Campiello), Tommaso sa le stelle (Feltrinelli, 2014), Guardami negli occhi (Feltrinelli, 2017), Le ultime lezioni (Feltrinelli, 2019) and Come una sirena (Feltrinelli, 2023). He has been translated into French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. This is the first translation of his work into English. 

Hugh Wilford (1978-82)

The CIA: An Imperial History

Hugh Wilford, an historian of US intelligence explores how the CIA was born in anti-imperialist idealism but swiftly became an instrument of a new covert empire both in America and overseas.

As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering proAmerican governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters in the US.

The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation – but not the only one. In The CIA, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of the Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike. Even the CIA’s post-9/11 global hunt for terrorists was haunted by the ghosts of empires past.

Comprehensive, original, and gripping, The CIA is the story of the birth of a new imperial order in the shadows. It offers the most complete account yet of how America adopted unaccountable power and secrecy, both at home and abroad. 

Alex Paseau (1988–93) co-authored with Wesley Wrigley The Euclidean Programme

Alex Paseau is Professor of Mathematical Philosophy at Oxford University. His latest academic book, The Euclidean Programme, co-authored with Wes Wrigley, examines Euclid’s philosophical legacy.

Euclid’s Elements, written in about 300 BC, is a famous textbook of ancient Greek geometry. Over the course of 13 books, Euclid derived the geometry of his day theorem by theorem, in a cumulative manner. The Elements took pride of place in at least three brilliant mathematical cultures – ancient Greek, mediaeval Arabic, and early modern European – and was a cornerstone of the school curriculum in the West from the Renaissance until the 20th century.

The Elements embodies a certain vision of the highest form of human knowledge – especially mathematical knowledge – as obtained by deduction from self-evident first principles. Paseau and Wrigley explain how this vision evolved over the millennia, from antiquity to the early modern period and into the twentieth century. They then assess its philosophical merits. Overall, the book offers a superb combined historical and philosophical analysis of the ideal Euclid’s Elements inspired. 

Aron Goldin (2014-16)

Murder in Constantinople

Graham Greene meets David Lean in Murder in Constantinople – an historical murder mystery in which a wayward boy from London’s East End is pulled into the hunt for a serial killer on the eve of the Crimean War in London, 1854.

Twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the ‘Good-for-Nothings’, just want adventure. Then the discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman offer an escapade more dangerous than anything he’d imagined. Suddenly Ben is thrown into a mystery that takes him all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war. His only clue is three words: ‘The White Death’. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through kingmaking and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal.

In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe – and one wrong step could cost Ben his life. 

David Arrowsmith (1993-98)

Narcoball: Love, Death and Football in Escobar’s Colombia

David Arrowsmith is proudly half-Colombian. In fact, he is the great-grandson of a former President and directly descended from four more. He now lives in Hove with his family, where his paternal great-grandfather worked in a butcher’s shop. He has played football for over 35 years and has no plans to stop just yet. David worked in the television industry for over 20 years – originating, developing and producing documentaries and unscripted programming for companies such as October Films, DSP, OSF, Zig Zag, Channel 5, Granada Television and the BBC.

Narcoball uncovers the incredible story of Colombian football during the early 1990s – shaped by drug lords, rivalries, and ambition. It uncovers a football empire backed by cartels where victory was a currency of its own, and defeat, a matter of life and death.

This is a different story of Pablo Escobar and his rivals. A tale of clandestine deals that reshaped Medellin’s football clubs, where fortunes were won and lost. It unveils the extraordinary bonds that Escobar forged with football’s luminaries and why his influence reached unprecedented heights, leading to the astonishing 5-0 victory over Argentina in Buenos Aires, the murder of referees, and the ruthless coercion of officials culminating in the killing of Andrés Escobar – the Colombian defender who paid the ultimate price for an own goal in the 1994 World Cup. It is also an examination of a people’s relationship with both the sport and the nefarious leaders that brought both pride and terror to their communities. Set against the US War on Drugs, international threats, and government clampdowns, this is a gripping exploration of Colombian club football under Escobar’s rise and fall. 

Ammar Kalia (2007-12) A PERSON IS A PRAYER

Ammar Kalia is a writer, musician and journalist living in London. Since 2019, he has been The Guardian’s Global Music Critic and he has written for publications including The Observer, BBC, Dazed, Mixmag, Economist, Downbeat and Crack Magazine

A PERSON IS A PRAYER is an intensely moving, lyrical and often funny novel about a family whose story of migration from Kenya and India to England is told over three separate days, across six decades.

Bedi and Sushma’s marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching.

Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father’s ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope.

A PERSON IS A PRAYER plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.

“An exquisitely written, incisive and evocative family saga. Kalia explores cultural complexity and human frailty with compassion, wit and generosity of spirit” – Jake Lamar, author of Viper’s Dream 

Nick Brooks (1965-70) Revenge

Nick Brooks spent 40 years working in the City of London as a chartered accountant. When he retired in 2018, he wrote and published his first novel, Betrayed His second novel, Revenge, is a sequel. Nick is the OPC Treasurer and a Vice President of the Club. He lives in Chiswick and is the fourth generation of his family to live in this leafy suburb.

In Revenge, a London lawyer is under suspicion from both the police and SO15 for two murders and running a business of supplying arms to terrorists. Will Slater had hoped that the terrifying experience in helping to break up a terrorist arms gang was buried in the past. However, a newspaper article questioning the disappearance of the terrorist money awakened old memories and hatred. Hiding in a remote Scottish glen in an ancient mansion with his wife Jay, Will discovers that the house also has secrets that he must unravel.

Unaware that a contract has been placed on his life from inside prison, he has become the target of ruthless killers once again. Convinced that he is being constantly watched and fearful for his family’s life, Will realises that he must act himself if they are to survive. Unwittingly helped by his old adversary Inspector Dawkin, both men converge on the truth that will finally reveal who is seeking revenge. 

Pauline Appointments

Sam Grabiner (2007-12) is the 2024/25 Writerin-Residence at The National Theatre Studio and is under commission at Manhattan Theatre Club. He is a MacDowell Fellow, and a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. Sam’s play, Boys on the Verge of Tears was the 2024 Stage Debut Award winner for Best Writer, the 2022 winner of the Verity Bargate Award, and has been performed at the Soho Theatre. Alongside his theatre work, Sam is under commission at the BBC and is developing his debut feature with 2AM.

Ollie Madden (1990-95), Director of Film4, is expanding his role to encompass TV drama commissioning as part of the ongoing restructuring at the UK broadcaster. “Ollie is a creative powerhouse who has been at the heart of Film4’s extraordinary success and has a bold and ambitious vision for what Channel 4 drama can be,” said Ian Katz, Channel 4’s Chief Content Officer. There were six Oscar wins for Film4-backed features at this year’s ceremony, including Poor Things and The Zone Of Interest. Further Film4 productions are BAFTA-winners Earth Mama and All Of Us Strangers. Madden became Director of Film4 in May 2022 having been appointed Head of Creative there in 2016. He had previously worked extensively throughout the UK film and TV sector, including at Miramax and Warner Bros, and as Head of Film at Shine Pictures.

Lord Terence Etherton (1963-68) was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in the recent Honours list. A retired judge and member of the House of Lords, he was Chair of the Law Commission of England and Wales, Chancellor of the High Court and Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales. In 2022, he was appointed Chair of the LGBT Veterans Independent Review, published in July 2023.

Louis Wilson (2017-22) was Oxford Union President for Trinity Term in 2024. Louis had been elected Librarian but, following a decision by an Appellate Board, he became President.

James Small-Edwards (2010-15), representing Labour, took the West Central London Assembly seat for the first ever time in the election in May winning by just over 4,000 votes. Small-Edwards promised continued support for the cost-of-living crisis, alongside more affordable and social housing and action to combat climate change.

Adam Jacobs (198892) has become Chair of the National Association of Jewellers. After graduating from Bath University with a degree in Business Administration, he worked between 1997 and 2003 for Marks & Spencer on their graduate training scheme, as well as a marketing agency in Clerkenwell. Joining the family jewellery business in 2003, he grew the business into an award-winning, nationally-recognised independent retailer. Supporting fledgling gold and silversmiths, he founded an Emerging Designers competition, now in its tenth year. He is also a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and serves on the advisory panel to the Court of Wardens.

Floyd Steadman OBE has been appointed as one of five new Deputy Lieutenants for Cornwall. Floyd’s careers have spanned elite rugby, as captain of Saracens, and education as Headmaster at several prep schools after his time at St Paul’s. Amongst his other commitments, Floyd, now travels the length and breadth of the country to talk to people and students about unconscious bias. He was awarded an OBE in the King’s first New Year’s Honours in 2023 for services to rugby, education and charity. Peter King (1967-71), Classics Department and non-academic staff since 1976, writes “Floyd was the first black teacher at St Paul’s and a superb colleague. He remains incredibly proud of his status as an Honorary Old Pauline”.

The recent General Election saw several OPs elected as Members of Parliament. James Murray (1996-2001) continues as MP for Ealing North. He was appointed Parliamentary Secretary (Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury) at HM Treasury on 9 July 2024. For the Conservative Party Tom Tugendhat (1986-91) retained his Tonbridge seat and Lincoln Jopp (1981-86) was voted in as the new MP for Spelthorne.

John Venning

(Head of English 1989-2014)

leads OP Pride members in discussion about their experiences at and after School

In December 2023, the Old Pauline Club convened the first online meeting of an LGBTQ+ discussion group. There have been three meetings so far of gay and transgender Old Paulines and allies, and the group has been named Old Pauline Pride with a mission to support the network, promote itself to the community, and to socialise.

As part of the promotion, Atrium asked me to coordinate a conversation with some members of the group, and a wide cross-section of ages, from a 1968 leaver to the current OPC Secretary who left in 2016, has participated.

I think some initial contextualisation is important as the unanimity with which our contributors declare that the School, across five decades, did nothing to support their development as gay people needs some explanation.

My own experience and perspective as a member of staff is perhaps helpful here. In 1967, the year I went to Cambridge, private homosexual acts between two consenting males aged 21 or over were decriminalised. In 1994 the age of consent was lowered to 18, and to 16 in 2001. I taught at St Paul’s from 1989-2014. From 1988-2003, Section 28 of the Local Government Act prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools. The negative atmosphere that generated permeated most of my career at the School. It meant that one High Master vetoed an article for the School newspaper in which a Pauline wished to explain how difficult it was for him to be gay in a school with a prevailing homophobic culture. It meant that when a tutor pupil asked me about my sexuality, I felt obliged to prevaricate, compromising a relationship which should have been founded on trust and truthfulness.

In 2007, when I entered a civil partnership (the first in the Common Room), I informed the next High Master

and he offered to announce it to the CR. That brave new world did not last long because accusations of historic sex abuse were levelled against the School. In the press and in the Serious Case Review at the end of Operation Winthorpe, the disgraceful elision of homosexuality and paedophilia was all too readily made. One positive outcome of the safeguarding provisions subsequently introduced is that the School has a Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): Tyler John has contributed an afterword to our conversation.

Let me introduce our participants.

Lord Etherton (1963-68) has had a most distinguished legal career culminating in the office of Master of the Rolls. Terence met his husband, Andrew, 45 years ago and has been openly gay since being sworn in as a High Court judge. After a civil partnership in 2006, he was married in December 2014 on the first day on which this was possible. The majority of the senior judiciary attended the ceremony. He became a peer in 2020 and, in 2022, was commissioned to conduct a review of the official policy of HM Armed Forces between 19672000 to ban LGBT people from military service. All 49 recommendations of his report, published in 2023, have been accepted in principle.

Tim Cohen (1974-79) is a Chartered Accountant and is in a professional and personal partnership with his husband, the sculptor Bruce Denny. They have two children. He is the coordinating chair of OP Pride.

James Croft (1997-2001) had a distinguished academic career at both Cambridges, with a D.Ed from Harvard where he was a Teaching Fellow. He

became Senior Leader at the Ethical Society of St Louis and is now University Chaplain and Lead Faith Adviser at the University of Sussex, the first Humanist Lead Chaplain of any UK university. He is married to Kolten.

Joe Mathewson (1998-2003) created the Firefly Learning Platform with a Pauline contemporary while at the School and after Oxford grew the business to serve 900 schools in 50 countries. He is currently a selfemployed Strategic Adviser. He is married to Jim.

Adam Swersky (1998-2003) is the CEO of Social Finance, a not-for-profit organisation tackling social problems in the UK and globally. After Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group and was for eight years a Harrow councillor.

Sam Turner (2011-16) is on the OPC Executive Committee. He graduated from Buckinghamshire New University and is a First Officer at British Airways. He has worked part-time at the School in various roles, including as a rowing coach. He married Finlay in September 2024.

John Venning (JV): What was your experience of growing up gay at St Paul’s?

Terence Etherton (TE): I was certainly aware by that time that I was sexually attracted to other boys and men. My parents, however, were traditional Jews and my father was quite a strict person. I went to a youth group in our synagogue, which included several Paulines. I wanted to fit in and so I had girlfriends. The constraint on any gay activity was reinforced when, in the early part of my time at St Paul’s, I became aware of a rumour that a boy had been expelled for sending a love letter to another boy.

Tim Cohen (TC): At 13 I was aware of my attraction to other males and had quiet crushes on a number of boys at School, mainly older ones as they seemed more manly than my age group. I didn’t act on any desire and it was a very frustrating time. I was dating girls of my age during my teenage years, as that was what was expected. There was nothing for me to read about or explore or to talk to anyone about. I didn’t really mind as it was all taboo anyway, so I wasn’t missing out (as I saw it).

James Croft (JC): I was 17 when I first tried to tell my parents that I’m gay. The signs were all there. I’d never had a girlfriend. I spent all my free time performing in the theatre and singing in the choir, and for years I’d studied ballet. Boys at Colet Court used to make fun of me for dancing. This was compounded by insensitive teachers, including a woman. One PE teacher was the first person to call me a ‘fag’ – which I didn’t really understand, but I knew it wasn’t good. The teasing and taunts and jokes continued throughout my time at the School until one

I must say there were some positive experiences. Having been involved at the school for eight years since leaving, I have seen positive change and I hope that the change continues.

morning in a School assembly, the then High Master intoned: ‘Homosexuals deserve our pity and our prayers.’ [He used the same formula when refusing permission for the newspaper article. JV] I was sitting among my friends, but I felt totally alone.

Joe Mathewson (JM): Despite a generally excellent education, St Paul’s classroom coverage of sexuality was woefully inadequate. The only reference I can remember was: ‘Sometimes boys have unusual urges but they pass, so don’t worry too much about them.’ Outside the classroom we just didn’t discuss it.

Adam Swersky (AS): I didn’t feel it was a particularly hostile environment, although homophobic slang was common as a form of abuse. I didn’t perceive this to be actively intended to be homophobic – mostly just the vernacular of the time.

Sam Turner (ST): The age-old insult of being ‘gay’ was bandied about regularly, but not being ‘out’ meant that others weren’t to know the full impact of their words on me. It was used as a derogatory term amongst my peers up to when I left; used outside teachers’ hearing, but I am sure it was widely known to be happening. I had a torrid time at St Paul’s. I did not feel comfortable in the macho, repressive culture of my peers. I saw how someone in my year who was ‘out’ was ostracised, made fun of and insulted. The biggest omission was the lack of non-heterosexual sex education in School. I think it says a lot that I learned more from TV programmes than I did at School. 

OP Pride members

JV: When did you come out? And was this an easy process?

TE: It was not until I was 27, a very junior barrister, that I stopped dating women and met my partner, Andrew. From the time I met him I became comfortable with my sexuality and had many gay friends.

TC: The summer after I left School, I was on a naturist beach in San Diego, California with some gay men. I was chatting to an American who said his boyfriend had just left school in Britain. He was a Pauline in the year below me. I wasn’t aware of him at School. He told me all sorts of things that went on at School of which I was unaware, even some of the boys in my year.

After leaving School I trained as a Chartered Accountant. In those days there were no DEI departments, no LGBTQ+ groups in the workforce and it was as closeted as it was at School. I don’t think that my experience at St Paul’s affected me negatively: we were living in a time when things were different so we kept quiet. It didn’t stop me exploring from the age of 19 to see how life might be, even if it was far less open than now.

JC: I didn’t hate St Paul’s – in many ways I thrived there. I’m enormously grateful for the life the School made possible. But it was not a welcoming or safe space to be LGBTQ+. I sometimes wonder about the experiences I missed out on because I went to a School with a homophobic atmosphere. But now, being a proudly out gay person with a public-facing role in an educational institution, I hope to show young queer people that they can live successful, fulfilled and public lives while being entirely themselves. For me that feels like a moral responsibility and a way to honour the ballet-dancing, choralsinging, scruffy-haired ‘fag’ I used to be.

AS: There was, to my knowledge, no one ‘out’ at St Paul’s during my time there, including me! Ironic given that I found out my best friend (JM) is gay a few months after I left. I felt that being outed at School would be a source of enormous interest and gossip: a disincentive to telling others.

JM: Trying to think back to what it was like being a gay Pauline feels like a strange mixing together of two completely unrelated worlds. Perhaps it’s telling that I came out to my fellow students very early at university having never done so at School. Outside the classroom we just didn’t discuss it despite in retrospect half of my closest friends being gay. I was clearly still figuring out my sexuality and that is fundamentally a personal thing rather than a School responsibility.

ST: Whilst I was not ‘out’ at School, I certainly knew myself. I only told one person at School, someone I trusted, and the huge sense of relief was astonishing. I am proud to say he is still my best friend and my best man at my upcoming wedding. I would never have dreamt of coming out publicly. The full realisation of the repressive, macho culture at the School amongst my peers came the moment I left and started my first job: I had no problem being myself and out to people.

JV: Based on your experience, what would you say to the School and current Paulines?

JM: I do think that talking about LGBTQ+ issues more would help young people as they go through that self-discovery.

ST: I must say there were some positive experiences. Having been involved at the School for eight years since leaving, I have seen positive change and I hope that the change continues.

I’m happy now, more than I ever was at School, but St Paul’s is mostly not to blame. The macho culture set by peers might be natural in a boys’ school, which the School will have to work tirelessly to counteract. Is the School a safe place to be gay? I hope so, I think so.

TC: How times have changed. Old Pauline Pride is a healthy way for the openly gay and those who are less open to have a forum to come together and share experiences.

For those at School these days, and leaving School for university and beyond, the world is so different and it is wonderful to see teenagers being able to express themselves with confidence and without fear.

Tyler John (Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at St Paul’s) reflects on In Conversation

On reading the reflections from Old Paulines on their experiences of being LGBTQ+ at School, it is difficult not to feel a sense of discomfort. Like all schools, one can guarantee a reflection of society within its walls to varying degrees, so whilst it is unsurprising that homophobia has played a part in our history (as it has in British history), it is saddening to be confronted by the reality. However, as disheartening as these accounts may be, for us they serve an additional purpose – they remind us that the situation at St Paul’s now is very different.

In the years since the above OPs left St Paul’s, the School has been working hard to ensure that all aspects

Terence Etherton

of diversity, equality and inclusion, including LGBTQ+ experiences, are considered across the interdisciplinary fabric of the School.

In our academic curriculum, LGBTQ+ inclusion is considered with sensitivity and maturity, most notably in Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), where across all five years of study, our pupils are given opportunities to learn about and critically engage with real-life LGBTQ+ experiences. In addition, the SPS Values Committee has extended this to the Juniors, where they deliver PSHE lessons on topics such as LGBTQ+ inclusion and masculinity to the younger pupils.

It is our co-curricular and student voice opportunities where LGBTQ+ inclusion at the School really thrives, though. For example, PrideSoc, which holds student-led meetings dedicated to discussing and celebrating LGBTQ+ topics, plays a key role in advancing

LGBTQ+ inclusion at the School. In addition, every year, the School celebrates LGBTQ+ History Week, and both academic departments and societies, from the rugby pitch to the French department, are encouraged to dedicate time to discussing LGBTQ+ inclusion within their spaces.

Student voice is a key element of this work too. Spaces such as the Inclusion Alliance often discuss LGBTQ+ inclusion at the School and have contributed to conversations on procedure and policy which serve to benefit our LGBTQ+ community.

Outside of this, our tri-annual Inclusion Survey gives LGBTQ+ pupils and staff an opportunity to share their thoughts on their experiences at the School and provide us with valuable data so we can make effective and impactful change.

No school is perfect, and there is still much work to be done. However, as our most recent Inclusion Survey

suggests, there is huge support for LGBTQ+ inclusion across the School, both in terms of infrastructure and celebration. This conversation, whilst troubling, reminds us of the importance of this work, and pushes us to ensure that current and future students belong to a school where they feel safe, welcome, and that they belong. 

How times have changed. Old Pauline Pride is a healthy way for the openly gay and those who are less open to have a forum to come together and share experiences.

Sam Turner's wedding, photographed by Tom Bradley (1999-2004)

Jonathan Miller

The Road Not Taken

David Herman (1973-75) profiles one of the most gifted and versatile figures in post-war British culture

O21 July this year, July Jonathan Miller (1947-53) would have been 90. He was one of the most astonishingly gifted and versatile figures in post-war British culture and certainly one of the most famous Old Paulines of the post-war period.

Miller had an astonishing career, from Footlights and Beyond the Fringe to writing about Darwin and Freud. He wrote for the first issue of The New York Review of Books, edited the BBC’s pioneering arts series, Monitor, and presented acclaimed BBC series about psychology and the history of medicine. One of the most distinguished theatre and opera directors of his time, he directed Gielgud and Olivier, John Cleese and Placido Domingo, Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon. Eric Idle and Dudley Moore appeared in different productions of his Mikado, which became a regular fixture at the ENO for years. Peter Sellers, Alan Bennett and Michael Redgrave appeared in his TV production of Alice in Wonderland Miller won international acclaim, honorary fellowships and a knighthood.

He also had his critics. ITV’s Spitting Image and Private Eye made fun of his range of talents. In one TV sketch, he was shown performing a liver transplant while simultaneously making calls to the ‘National Opera’ and managing a minicab service on the side.

Miller had at least three different careers. First, as a performer: a young comedian and later chat-show raconteur. He was a dazzling conversationalist. Alan Bennett once said that his first experience of interviews had meant ‘being in the shadow of Jonathan,’ witnessing his verbal fireworks ‘and never being able to do it.’ Second, as a broadcaster, popularising science, medicine, psychology and philosophy in studio interviews like States of Mind, documentary series like The Body in Question and one-off documentaries about how neurological damage destroys human lives, such as Ivan and Prisoner of Consciousness. And, thirdly, as a director in television drama, theatre and opera. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to bring together his different interests, using his passion for science, medicine

and art to illuminate his theatre and opera productions.

What is most striking about Miller’s career is not just the achievement, but the tensions between success and failure. The most fluent of conversationalists and performers, he struggled with a stammer from his schooldays onwards and with writer’s block through much of his adult life. His career was full of books never completed, lectures never given, research never completed. Miller had a three-year fellowship at UCL to write a book about mesmerism, the spiritualist movement and the development of neuropsychological theories. It was never finished. ‘It seems’, said his lifelong friend Oliver Sacks (1946-51), ‘that major ambivalences were involved.’

There was something manic about Miller’s astonishing creative energy. He once worked on six new international opera productions in the first seven months of 1991. At the same time, he presented two BBC series: Who Cares Now? and a five-part BBC 2 series on the history of madness – and managed to fit in a lecture tour of American colleges. And yet he was always haunted by his father’s deep sense of underachievement. A distinguished analyst and psychiatrist, Emanuel Miller reared up on his deathbed and pronounced his last words: ‘I’m a flop!’ Despite all the achievements in so many fields, his famous son had the same enduring sense of failure.

This was linked to a third tension: between Miller’s passion for medicine and science and his career in the arts. When he was interviewed by Jeremy Isaacs on BBC2’s interview series, Face to Face, Isaacs asked him how he would like to be remembered. Miller answered: for one worthwhile scientific article. However much he achieved in the arts, he felt that he never made it as a great scientist. That was his true vocation; the path not taken.

Jonathan Miller

Miller was born on 21 July 1934, the son of Emanuel Miller (1892-1970) and his wife Betty Miller (1910-65) (née Spiro) who married the year before. Emanuel Miller was a distinguished paediatric psychiatrist. Betty Miller was a novelist and biographer, but of her seven novels, only Farewell, Leicester Square is still in print, published by Persephone Books in 2000. Her two brothers were educated at St Paul’s and she went to St Paul’s Girls’ School. Jonathan grew up in St John’s Wood but had an unhappy childhood. ‘Those memories I have of childhood are mostly wretched and miserable,’ he told one biographer. ‘I was an anxious child. It just all seemed incoherent and I couldn’t make my way and I wet my bed and shat myself and did all sorts of things.’ ‘I was never kissed by either of my parents as a child, never embraced,’ he told Anthony Clare in In The Psychiatrist’s Chair. He attended eight or more schools between Dunkirk and D-Day but St Paul’s was a major turning point.

First, Miller developed an early (and lifelong) interest in the biological sciences. He later said that the biology teacher, Mr Pask (1928-66), was the strongest influence in his life. He was involved in debating at the Chesterton Society (the minutes book called him ‘the Clown Prince of the Chesterton’), drama and comedy at St Paul’s. He was a regular in the Colet Clubs revues. The Pauline praised his ‘inspired buffoonery and sheer intelligence.’ One Old Pauline told his future biographer, ‘It was a lot of fun having him around but he just couldn’t conform. He stood out so, being tall like a bird, with that red hair, and doing impressions of the masters’ walks…’

What is most striking about Miller’s career is not just the achievement, but the tensions between success and failure.

renowned neurologist and writer, best known for Awakenings and his book of essays, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Korn became a leading antiquarian bookseller and was a long-time contributor to The TLS The three co-founded the Literary Society. In his last term he met his future wife, Rachel. They married in 1956 and remained married until his death in 2019.

A second turning point came when he went to St John’s College, Cambridge (1953-56). Miller was part of a golden generation that included Michael Frayn, Frederic Raphael, Michael Winner, Claire and Nick Tomalin, John Bird and John Fortune, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He became a member of the Apostles, a prestigious intellectual discussion group, edited the first issue of Granta, which became a well-known student magazine, acted in a Marlowe Society production and most important of all, performed in Footlights. He went on to study medicine, but his appearances in Footlights led to Beyond the Fringe, with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The timing was perfect. It was the height of the satire boom and it made them all household names.

The 1960s were a golden time for Miller: Beyond the Fringe (1960-64), presenting and editing Monitor for the BBC in 1965, and then directing famous BBC dramas including The Drinking Party (1965), The Death of Socrates and Alice in Wonderland (1966) and Whistle and I'll Come to You, a ghost story with Michael Hordern (1968). It was a time when the BBC was more open to experimental ideas.

He also made his debut as a theatre director at the then-famous Royal Court and moved on to spend five years directing at the Nottingham Playhouse. Again, his timing was perfect. Attitudes towards the classics were changing from actors’ theatre (Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson) to a new generation of young directors like Peter Brook, Peter Hall, John Barton and Miller. There was a new focus on intelligent character analysis and a new kind of psychological turn which suited Miller perfectly.

as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew). But his relationship with the British theatre more or less came to a halt except for his brief tenure as Artistic Director at The Old Vic (1988-90).

Instead, he became more interested in medical history (The Body in Question, 1978-79, and Madness, 1991) and presented several brilliant observational TV documentaries about neurological diseases (Ivan, 1984, Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness, 1986).

But perhaps most important of all, he became involved in directing operas, particularly with Kent Opera and the English National Opera. Miller became one of the world's leading opera directors famous for updating classic operas such as his Mafia Rigoletto (1975 and 1982), Tosca (1986-7) and The Mikado (1987), throwing out the traditional fauxJapanese setting and placing it in a dazzling white Grand Hotel on the south coast.

Throughout this period, he was an odd mix of insider-outsider. He was knighted in 2002, directed in the most prestigious opera houses, was a familiar face on television, from chat shows to arts programmes like The South Bank Show and medical documentaries. It was an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging career which owed so much to those crucial early years at St Paul’s and Cambridge. 

Miller also formed two lifelong friendships, with Oliver Sacks and Eric Korn (1946-52), both in the year above. Sacks later became a

He continued to direct plays during the 1970s, including a famous production with Olivier as Shylock, and first worked at the National Theatre and the Chichester Festival (where he directed Anthony Hopkins

A younger Jonathan

Woolf’s Progress

Theo Hobson (1985-90) describes Leonard Woolf’s (1894-99) life after leaving St Paul’s

For some, the friends one makes at university are life-defining. It was certainly the making of Leonard Woolf, when he fell in with Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen and a couple of others, at Trinity College Cambridge, and a few more at King’s: Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and E M Forster. How were they different from any other circle of brainy young men?

There was a will to challenge all traditional assumptions, including about sexual morality – and here Strachey’s edgy camp persona was perhaps the key factor. Most of the friends were Apostles – members of the uber-elite debating society, whose leading thinker was the young philosophy don, G E Moore. His book of 1903, Principia Ethica, expressed the group’s bold secular rationalism. There were no female students at these colleges (not for another sixty years or so), which did not bother them much. But Woolf, never very drawn to homosexuality, was intrigued by Thoby’s bright, edgy sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, who sometimes visited.

Woolf was less rich than the others: after graduating he needed a job. It is a little surprising that he opted for the imperial civil service, but at this time even radical freethinkers mainly accepted the Empire’s inevitability. He went to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1904, where he took on huge responsibilities in his mid-twenties, governing an entire province. He later wrote that he became ‘politically schizophrenic, an anti-imperialist who enjoyed the fleshpots of imperialism.’ Fleshpots literally: his first sexual experiences were with local prostitutes. Back in England on leave, his worldly aura impressed Virginia Stephen (whose brother had recently died), and they

fell in love. Sort of. It was more cerebral than physical: her mental fragility and her idiosyncratic brand of feminism led her to reject that aspect of marital duty. Revering her as a writer, Leonard consented (he may have sought consolation with domestic staff). Perhaps he was in love with the gang, soon known as the Bloomsbury Group, and this trumped any problems in the marriage. His Jewish background seemingly heightened his desire to be an insider, of this particularly elitist sort. Virginia enjoyed defying the assumption that aristocrats did not marry Jews, but also retained the right to denigrate his background.

He resigned from imperial service and became a writer and professional left-winger. He wrote a novel about Ceylon, then moved into political activism and journalism. He worked with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the great architects of democratic socialism. After the First World War he wrote an influential defence of the League of Nations. He was also a literary impresario: he and his wife set up a small publishing house, the Hogarth Press, whose authors included their friend, T S Eliot.

For a few decades he was the consummate public intellectual: sitting on committees, backing progressive causes (including decolonisation and anti-racism), writing journalism and giving radio broadcasts. He was also a new sort of man, who allowed his wife’s fame to burgeon ahead of his own, and during her bouts of mental illness he devoted himself to caring for her. But some critics feel that he failed to seek proper psychological treatment for her, on the grounds that it might dampen her creative life.

In 1969, the year of his death, he wrote that the world ‘would be exactly the same if I had played ping pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda’.

After her suicide in 1941 he became an avuncular cultural figure and keeper of her flame – think Melvyn Bragg with a touch of Ted Hughes – and also a touch of David Attenborough and Monty Don, because he loved animals and gardening (he had a pet marmoset).

His political work continued: he was in charge of educating new Labour MPs in the ways of Westminster – he would be very useful in this election year.

His secular Judaism remained low-key. He disapproved of Zionism, but seldom addressed the issue.

‘From the first moment of the Balfour Declaration I was against Zionism’, he wrote, ‘on the grounds that to introduce Jews into an Arab occupied territory with the ultimate prospect of establishing an independent Jewish state would lead to racial trouble.’

Visiting Israel in the 1950s he was partly

won over by the new land’s vitality but found the religious element troubling. He was also reticent about the persistence of antisemitism in British culture. He did not want to seem like a chippy troublemaker – by today’s standards he failed to call out the prejudices of his peers, including Tom Eliot and in fact, his wife, whose novels have a few antisemitic touches.

His main role in the 1960s was co-editor of the New Statesman. He criticised the hard-left stance of some of his colleagues, one of whom defended the Chinese Communist Party. ‘It is never right’, he wrote, ‘for an individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to a hypothetical good…I believe I know what is good and that some of things which I believe are true, but I don’t think my knowledge is so certain that it justifies me in injuring, torturing or killing other people. So, although up to a point I am a Marxist, I do not think that justifies me in harming in any way even a non-Marxist flea’.

His worldview was strikingly modern on one hand – the frankness, the commitment to racial and sexual equality, the critique of imperial machismo – but also oddly oldfashioned. His core creed of individual liberty and rational progress now has a Victorian feel. He was not only horrified but somewhat baffled by the return of dark political passions in the twentieth century.

He was not an important thinker: his books on international relations gained only moderate attention; he was mainly a high priest of the Bloomsbury cult, which he fed with a series of memoirs. In 1969, the year of his death, he wrote that the world ‘would be exactly the same if I had played ping pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda’. Self-deprecating, but not too inaccurate.

What was it about, that cult of Bloomsbury? Obviously, it involved a handful of major thinkers and writers and artists. But also, it modelled a new frankness about sex and a new irreverence about tradition and a new brisk secularism. It also modelled the arty intellectual lifestyle to which many of us aspire. In a sense, we are all Woolf cubs. 

Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia Woolf in 1912

From the Trombone Section to Rural Uganda

Two OPs establish the Chrysalis Secondary School in Uganda

Ben Parkinson (1978-82) and Norton York (1978-82) were contemporaries at St Paul’s and both played trombone in the School orchestra. They went their separate ways after School, though kept in touch.

Since St Paul’s, Norton has been a pioneer in modernising music education around the globe. He is best known for founding RSL Awards, the leading UK awarding body for popular music and performing arts, receiving the Queen’s Award for Export in 2018. He was also Headmaster at Broomfield House School in Kew for a number of years. After running his own business, Choice Music, a unique music agency, Ben was appointed CEO of Jericho Foundation, a social enterprise in Birmingham,that supports disadvantaged people back into work, providing them with training, work experience and job advice. He expanded the operation threefold through judicious fundraising and developed partnerships with the Public Sector, including DWP, LSC and Birmingham City Council.

In 2009, Ben went to Uganda and established a training project, the Butterfly Project, for children (12-14 years) living in the slums or in rural poverty. It taught them to become social entrepreneurs and changemakers, as well as providing sponsored secondary education (which is not free in Uganda). The first cohort of children recruited to the project are now in their mid-late 20s; most of them went on to a university education and are now establishing their own projects and businesses as changemakers. One has set up an agricultural business that helps farming co-operatives to maximise their income, another trained as a doctor and is currently establishing a clinic for rural communities, another has set up an NGO to help children living in poverty in the slums. Several

© Geoff Walker, Photographer

The building of the school is virtually complete and it currently has 170 pupils, together with 24 teachers.

have won national awards for their achievements. The project is now on its seventh cohort of trainees and there are currently over 60 children being trained in this way. Further details of the Butterfly Project –and successes – can be found on www.cyen.online, which also gives details of the UK charity which funds the work in Uganda.

Over the last eight years it became apparent that it was necessary to establish a secondary school in Uganda based on visionary and progressive global thinking. It was at this point that Norton became involved in supporting the work in Uganda. He was able to source capital funding to build a secondary school at Lagwe Dola, in rural northern Uganda. The vision for the school can be found at www.chrysalisschool.org, which states, “The Chrysalis Secondary School… takes the best of the Ugandan national curriculum and supplements it with training in social entrepreneurship, current affairs and global challenges such as climate change and international relations. Through a unique focus on board gaming, athletics and music, we

provide children in the region with a modern, rounded education, teaching them that anyone can become a change maker if they are given the opportunity.”

The building of the school is virtually complete and it currently has 170 pupils, together with 24 teachers. Pupils at the school include 60 Butterfly trainees, alongside local children and those with specific ability in athletics.

As well as focusing on athletics, music and board games, the school is currently seeking support and advice from scientific St Paul’s alumni, to help build and equip a modern science block on the 12-acre site, that can aid rural students in competing as international scientists.

There is also a 400-metre running track on the school site and, at a recent competition against 13 other schools, Chrysalis School achieved the winning trophies for boys, girls and for the overall team. They also won a recent rugby competition. All this when the school has only been open for just over a year.

Having been established by two Old Pauline musicians, it is not surprising that the Chrysalis School has a special

focus on music. Norton was able to source a number of colourful brass instruments (trombones and trumpets) and the school is now developing a brass band, together with the NGO, Brass For Africa.

Ben recently stated that, “We are very much a grassroots organisation and don’t take a white saviour approach. This is proved by the successes of our beneficiaries and a strategy to incorporate them in senior roles within the organisation, so that they gain work experience before they become social entrepreneurs.”

Any OP who would like to know more about the Ugandan school and Butterfly Project, to sponsor a child through school, to help with advice and support for the science block at Chrysalis School, or to give a donation towards the running costs of the school, can contact Ben on socentafrica@gmail.com 

chrysalisschool.org

© Geoff Walker, Photographer

The Chrysalis Brass Band

Jonathan Foreman (1979-83) profiles the remarkable

Edward Behr

(1940-44)

During its five centuries, St Paul’s has produced many notable writers of all kinds: playwrights, diarists, novelists, historians, philosophers, poets, travel writers, and also journalists. Of the latter, none have been as intrepid, as accomplished or as prominent in their day – which in his case was the global heyday of magazine journalism – as Edward Behr.

The ‘consummate foreign correspondent of his time’, he also wrote what is by far the best memoir of that profession – a mordant, often very funny behind-the-scenes chronicle rightly likened to Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. In America it was titled Bearings – A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines, but in Britain and everywhere else it bore the moniker Anyone here been raped and speaks English? – a question that Behr heard a BBC TV reporter calling out to a group of bedraggled European civilians and nuns who had survived the 1964 siege of Stanleyville in eastern Congo.

Today, Behr’s 1978 triumph is bafflingly out of print. It is not only the best insider account of foreign reporting in the decades when media organisations had the money and will to do it properly, but provides a unique recollection of some of the 20th century’s most dramatic events by an eyewitness with a talent for language, an eye for the telling detail, a grim sense of humour,

Edward Behr

and a humanity that never curdled into callousness despite the horrors that he saw.

Like many Old Paulines who achieved prominence in the last hundred and fifty years, Edward Samuel Behr was a cosmopolitan figure, born abroad and comfortable in many worlds. He was born in Paris in 1926 to parents who had grown up in the Jewish community of what is now Latvia but was then part of the Tsarist Russian empire. His father Felix Behr came from Riga, emigrating some time before the Revolution. His mother, Eugenia Kadinski, came from Dvinsk – now Daugavpils –Latvia’s second city, whose population had been almost 50% Jewish since the late 18th century. She fled only in 1922.

Eugenia had been one of Russia’s first female medical students, served in the Red Army as a medical officer and, according to Behr’s memoir, which otherwise offers scant details about his family, may well have had an affair with Trotsky. Eugenia ended up in Brussels where she met and married Felix, an intermittently successful jewellery designer and amateur archaeologist. Those family members who did not leave Latvia were all killed by the Nazis and their Latvian allies during the Second World War – Behr’s maternal grandmother was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

Edward Behr as a boy certainly spoke English, had English citizenship and referred later to suffering from both anti-English and anti-Jewish prejudice while at school in France in the 1930s.

Behr’s father died when he was ten and the family then depended on the generosity of Behr’s two maternal uncles, one of whom who had emigrated to South Africa and the other to England. Behr attended the prestigious Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in the 16th arrondissement – then and later the alma mater of a vast host of prominent Frenchmen. There his schoolmates included Valery Giscard d’Estaing, but ‘my Englishness stood out like a sore thumb’.

When the Third Reich invaded France in 1940, Behr, his mother and brother made their way through the panic and chaos to Bordeaux where they took a boat to England. Fortunately for the family, Behr’s ‘Uncle Zama’ who had changed his name from Samuel Kadinsky to Stanford Cade after migrating from Latvia, had long been one of Britain’s most celebrated cancer surgeons, and was a chief medical officer in the RAF. He later became an Air Vice Marshal and was knighted, having invented new life-saving cockpit designs.

Fourteen-year-old Edward went to St Paul’s after a successful interview with the High Master, Walter Oakeshott, who was impressed by his linguistic abilities – he was bilingual in English and French and spoke good German. Edward tried to leave School early. He made his way up to London (the School had already relocated from West Kensington to Crowthorne) and tried to volunteer for the Free French Army. Though impressed with his ardour, the officer he spoke to persuaded him to go back to school until he was of proper age.

There is little in Behr’s celebrated memoir about his time at St Paul’s, other than a recollection of the intimate relationship the School had with nearby Broadmoor, the famous high security hospital for the criminally insane. School teams played rugby against Broadmoor inmates and guards, and Behr and other boys would also go to theatre evenings put on by the former.

On the other hand, Behr dated his conviction that the human condition was characterised more by folly, injustice and cruelty rather than constant progress, to a moment at School when he complained to his housemaster about being given an undeserved punishment. The housemaster said to him ‘but Edward, the world is a very unfair place.’

‘Folly, greed and hypocrisy seemed to me, at a very early age, to be fairy godmothers presiding over the destinies of our planet, and little has occurred to me since to make me change my mind’

The war was still raging as Behr went into the Eighth Form and he recalled in his memoirs how the country’s most senior military officers – among them ‘Bomber’ Harris – visited the School urging boys to join their branch of the armed service. He himself had by then fallen in love with Kipling’s works and chose to volunteer for the Indian army. (Behr noted that his contemporaries Peter and Anthony Schaffer, later prominent as playwrights and screenwriters, failed to volunteer for military service and were therefore conscripted as ‘Bevin boys’ working in the mines.)

After training in England, during which he quickly added Urdu to his collection of languages, Behr sailed with other cadets in the overstuffed, reeking lower decks of a steam ship to India where he joined the Royal Garhwal Rifles, an elite infantry regiment that recruited from the tough Himalayan people of Uttaranchal on the borders of Nepal and Tibet.

As an eighteen-year-old lieutenant –required now to speak and understand Garhwali – Behr took part in two of the more bizarre episodes of the end of the war in the Pacific theatre: the formal 

liberations by small British-led forces of the Dutch East Indies and then French Indochina, both of which had been conquered and occupied by Japan. In the Dutch East Indies, Behr and his Indian troops found themselves fighting Indonesian nationalists who had embarked on a brutal campaign of torture, murder and rape against the mixed race and Dutch civilian population. During that bloody, all-but-forgotten conflict, British commanders requested the help of Japanese POWs, whom they rearmed to fight the nationalists. Behr’s Garwhalis and the other Indian troops all had extensive experience of jungle warfare in Burma and proved more than a match for the guerrillas in both places.

Behr remained in the army for another three years, much of it posted to Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province as a brigade intelligence officer. It meant that the young man met the extraordinary ‘Frontier Gandhi’ Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an early advocate of Pushtunistan – and that he saw at first hand the disaster of India’s partition. His powerful account of it in Anyone here been raped and speaks English? is essential reading for anyone interested in how it took place.

When Pakistan became independent in August 1947 at least a third of Peshawar’s population were Hindu and Sikh. Pathan raiders came into the city and attacked them in an orgy of murder, looting and rape that was brutal even by the standards of that time. Behr himself shot three of them as they were dragging out nurses from the city’s hospital, and played a key, heroic role in the restoration of order. Like many officers in the military and police, Behr could not forgive Lord Mountbatten for bringing Indian and Pakistani independence forward by a year, thereby making it impossible for the authorities to prepare for the inevitable population movements and ethnic cleansing that resulted. By the time he went up to Magdalene, Cambridge in 1948 to read history, the recently demobbed Major Behr had seen enough violence, chaos and human folly for a lifetime. Nevertheless, he was to witness a great deal more.

Behr’s first foray into journalism was as a trainee at the Reuters news service. After three dull, miserable years there he fled to become a spokesman for Jean Monnet, the head of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of what would evolve into the European Union. He went as a freelancer to Algeria,

School teams played rugby against Broadmoor inmates and guards, and Behr and other boys would also go to theatre evenings put on by the former.

and was recruited by Time Life, then the publisher of the world’s most successful magazines. They brought him to the New York HQ to learn to write in the house style. During his first weeks there, he found an elderly man sitting in his cubicle tapping away at his typewriter. Behr kicked him out, only to find out later that it was the proprietor, Henry Luce. Once in the field and based in Paris, Behr and the photographers he worked with were able to make full use of Time Life’s resources and contacts –hiring planes and cars to take them to the most remote places in Africa and Asia.

Behr spent much time in North Africa covering the war in Algeria and quickly became a key figure in the ‘Maghreb Circus’, a group of tough, hard-drinking, mostly French and mostly male war correspondents. His 1958 book The Algerian Problem, is still one of the best analyses of the origins of that conflict.

Behr also witnessed the India-China war of 1962, arriving on the North East Frontier to find his old regiment guarding the passes against the Chinese, whose invasion proved devastatingly successful but was overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis – which he also covered.

In 1965 he joined Newsweek and remained at the magazine for the next 23 years – the period when the magazine was in its prestigious heyday. He was bureau chief in Paris, Hong Kong, Saigon and New Delhi, and then European editor. All these postings coincided with wars and great upheavals, and Behr covered them all. In 1968 he covered the Tet offensive, the May riots in Paris, the Prague Spring and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He knew Kim Philby and Patrick Lumumba, spent time with De Gaulle in Djibouti while high as a kite on Qat, had intimate conversations with Chairman Mao, saw action with Algerian FLN guerrillas, and was in the thick of the American fight for Hill 875 in the famous, ferocious battle for Dak To in Vietnam.

While with Newsweek and then afterwards, he made documentaries for French and later British TV and became a prolific author of books (publishing 19 in total), including a number of successful biographies, and a rather good spy novel, Getting Even, which enabled him to make more use of the massive store of inside information he had accumulated as a top reporter who had been everywhere and met everyone, including many spies.

Behr’s best books include The Last Emperor, a biography of Pu Yi, the peculiar man who was enthroned as emperor of

China as a three-year-old in 1908, deposed four years later, and who after years of dissipation was installed as a puppet ruler of Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1931. Captured by the Soviets in 1945, he was imprisoned for five years, then handed over to Mao’s regime. After a decade of ‘re-educational’ imprisonment, he spent the last years of his life as a gardener in Beijing where Behr caught sight of him bent over a hoe. The book was conceived as a tie-in with the Oscar-winning 1987 Anglo-Italian film of the same name, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, but it was very much not based on the film or the screenplay by Bertolucci and Mark Peploe. Behr’s biography is racy stuff – full of detail about Pu Yi’s sadistic proclivities – yet more nuanced and historically accurate than the glossy Bertolucci film. Researching Pu Yi’s story inspired Behr to research and write Hirohito: Behind the Myth (1989), a controversial revisionist biography of the Emperor of Japan from 1928 to 1986. Behr argued that Hirohito was not the quasi-pacifist portrayed by post-war image-makers but an active and informed war leader who “escaped the consequences of his actions with total impunity”.

Behr as a biographer seems to have been fascinated by prominent men who made troubling moral compromises. In 1993 he published Thank Heaven For Little Girls – The True Story of Maurice Chevalier’s Life and Times. Chevalier had risen from the slums to become a celebrated singerdancer in the interwar years, and then a Hollywood star (thanks largely to the musical Gigi ) in the 1950s. For millions of people around the world he epitomised an idealised Gallic type of elegant, jaunty, boulevardier sophistication. Behr himself idolised him as a boy in pre-war Paris, and much later used him as the basis of a character in a screenplay. Behr’s biography, though sympathetic, exposed Chevalier’s many unattractive qualities, including his collaboration with France’s Nazi occupiers. What makes the book (out of print, like almost all his works) fascinating today, is that Chevalier’s lifespan “encompassed the Belle Epoque, the two World Wars, and the May 1968 social upheaval”. Recounting his story enabled Behr to tell the story of France during those decades from a fresh and often troubling perspective.

Behr married twice. It was characteristic of the man and of his profession at the time, that there is very little in his great memoir about his relationships, his family

or his internal life. His Jewish background is mentioned just once, when he reflected on the anti-British and anti-Semitic sentiments that affected his schooldays in 1930s Paris. The lack of solipsism in his work contrasts strongly with the tendency of today’s star reporters to write in selfindulgent detail about themselves. It would never have occurred to Behr to pose for publicity photos in a flak jacket or boast about his very considerable courage.

I recently met a glamorous Canadian woman who had worked with Edward at Newsweek in the late 1960s. She remembers him as elegant, professional, charming, and kind to an apprentice though irritated when she naively turned up in conservative Algiers with a wardrobe consisting entirely of mini skirts. She also said that he was moody, and wondered, looking back, if he might have been a manic depressive. Given all the horrors he had witnessed, the dangers he had braved, the colleagues that he lost to bombs and gunfire, it is just as likely that Behr suffered from what would now be called Post Traumatic Stress – an affliction that in his heyday as a reporter went unmentioned and undiagnosed and often led to very heavy drinking. 

JAZZ, ST PAUL’S AND ME

Michael Simmons (1946-52) shares his life of jazz

Lost tourist in New York:

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

Veteran jazz player, passing by:

“Practise, man.”

Iwas exposed to the Great American Songbook as a toddler. My mother was a singer and she sang the latest hits from the Broadway shows as she worked around the house. Regretfully, I had no musical education whatsoever at St Paul’s. It was an extra which had to be paid for and there was no spare money around. When I went up to Cambridge, my grandmother gave me a portable radio. My college believed that we benefited from being dispersed into digs in our first year, so I enjoyed the late night music in the silence of my lonely room near the station. I was permanently tuned to AFN, American Forces Network, and overdosed on the big bands: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and others.

Another name which may not be known to many is Leonard Feather (1927-31). He is probably the OP who contributed more to jazz than anyone as a player, composer, broadcaster, promoter but most of all as a critic.

I was discovering classical music as well and was spending far too many hours in other people’s rooms catching up. I bought a cheap record player and calculated that if I took all my meals in Hall, I could afford to buy two long playing records each week of term time. My grant would just about stretch to it. My first purchases were Beethoven’s Seventh and Billy May. But then came the invitation that was to change my life: “Come along with me to the Cambridge Jazz Club.” A friend of mine who was a medical student at Trinity asked me. I had no idea what to expect. As soon as the door of the Masonic Hall opened, I knew I was being sucked in to an entirely new world. The noise, the heat, the dancing and the incessant rhythm overwhelmed me. Maurice went off to dance, leaving me by the band to absorb like blotting paper what they were playing. The band was led by Dick Heckstall-Smith, then on soprano sax playing in the style of Sidney Bechet. Dick went on to have a distinguished career as a professional jazz player but died young. He was accompanied by Derek Moore on clarinet playing like Mez Mezzrow. I was captivated by the way they played off each other, as well as together. They seemed to have a telepathic

understanding of each other’s moves. Maurice persuaded me to try my hand at jiving and that was fun too. I found that I clung naturally to the rhythm and was able to interpret the music while keeping my partner spinning in constant motion.

I still bought my weekly classical record but jazz took over from the swing bands. I was catching up on Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Bechet. The rest of my time at Cambridge passed in a constant blur of jazz. In 1955, the annual jazz band ball at the Rex Ballroom featured the Chris Barber Jazz Band. I remember to this day the shock of three blonde and pallid, fronting musicians dressed alike in pale blue suits. The clarinet player was called Monty Sunshine but he always looked as if he needed a strong dose of that commodity. Chris Barber (1946-47) on trombone was the undoubted leader and set the tone. After St Paul’s, he studied trombone and double bass at the Guildhall School of Music. These were the days “before the rock set in” and his records often made the Hit Parade; Petit Fleur and Hushaby to name but two. Towards the end of his career, a group of us attended a concert of his band in the Wathen Hall. We reminded him of that early gig at the Rex Ballroom in 

Michael and his wife Maggie at the Highgate Society Ball

Cambridge. He had total recall of it even though he was approaching 90. He continued playing almost to the end of his life through managing his workload cleverly and adding an extra trombone player.

Alexis Korner (1941-43) is another Old Pauline who needs a mention but he fits into the category of Blues rather than Jazz. We jazz enthusiasts are such purists. Another name which may not be known to many is Leonard Feather (1927-31). He is probably the OP who contributed more to jazz than anyone as a player, composer, broadcaster, promoter but most of all as a critic. He obviously became hooked on jazz at School in the 1920s. After attending University College London, he worked as a jazz critic for the BBC in London but the USA provided him with a far larger canvas. He emigrated to New York and ultimately to the West Coast. He promoted the first two jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall and has an extensive entry in Wikipedia. There are even some videos of him on the internet and it is interesting to hear how faint his English accent had become. If I had been born in 1914 like Leonard Feather, I fancy thinking that I would have followed a similar career path but probably prudence would have prevailed and my acquaintance with the greats of jazz would still have been as their lawyer!

The definition of a jazz musician: someone who loads £2,000 worth of instruments into a car worth £500, drives 100 miles up the motorway to play in a gig and gets paid £50 for his trouble.

I also need to mention Basil Moss (1948-53). Though an almost exact contemporary, our paths rarely crossed and I never heard him playing trumpet with his Chicago Jazzmen. Sadly, he is no longer with us. Simon Mulligan (1986-91) is famous as a

classical pianist but he also plays jazz with a quartet in London and a trio in New York. I hope he soon brings his jazz to a concert at the School. More recently, St Paul’s jazz teaching has produced Tom Smith (2009-14). He plays the saxophone and is now well established on the UK and European jazz scene leading his own bands. He has played at Ronnie Scott’s, the mecca of UK jazz. He has also both been shortlisted at least once as young jazz musician of the year and made a number of records. The School thus continues to be a breeding ground for successful jazz musicians.

After Cambridge, I returned to London to do my three years’ articles before qualifying as a solicitor. With virtually no money, we articled clerks had to display great ingenuity to enjoy a rich social life.

Entry to the Hundred Club to hear Humphrey Lyttleton or the Panama Club where Cy Lawrie played required real money so it was always best to meet your date inside. On one occasion at 100 Oxford Street, television cameras were everywhere with cables snaking across the floor and bright lights replacing the usual gloom. We danced wildly in the eye of the cameras. It was only at the end of the evening that I asked the producer what the name of the programme was. “Focus on Juvenile Delinquency,” he replied.

A clip of me dancing wantonly with Jenny became staple fare at the BBC when they wanted to depict a scene of contemporary debauchery. My maiden aunts were not amused. King’s, Queen Mary’s and University College had great and inexpensive jazz clubs and there was always St Martin’s School of Art on a Saturday evening. Existing without a union card became a way of life. We jazz club denizens were all stick thin with extreme pallor and fingernail nicks covering our hands. We rarely saw the sun and jiving was a very energetic activity. Catching your partner’s hand at high speed was an art and mistakes happened particularly with a girl who was not your regular partner.

Jazz at lunchtime on a Friday in the basement of some Scottish insurance company in Fetter Lane became a fixture in our calendars. Throughout

Simon Mulligan

Basil Moss (OP Club President 1991-93)

and

My first attempt at publishing a novel, Low Life Lawyer, was about a jazz-clarinet playing lawyer: pure wish fulfilment as I cannot play a note. He meets a sticky end.

my professional career in London, I tried always to make time to attend those ongoing lunchtime events in various locations. Now that I am fully retired, it is much easier to keep Mondays free for the Spice of Life at Cambridge Circus or the first Tuesday of the month at the Tattershall Castle on the Embankment. As I look round the room, I half recognise far too many. We have grown old together enjoying our jazz. Inevitably, as I became more senior in my profession, I was asked to chair various organisations. It was said of me that I tried to turn them all, whatever their original purpose, into jazz clubs. I do not think that was a bad thing. At least I was giving work to my friends. My

first attempt at publishing a novel, Low Life Lawyer, was about a jazzclarinet playing lawyer: pure wish fulfilment as I cannot play a note. He meets a sticky end.

By sheer chance, my wife and I established a holiday home in a remote village on a hilltop in Tuscany. I suppose that it was inevitable that I would suggest to the local mayor that we should run an international music festival: by music, of course I meant jazz. As we had no money, musicians had to pay their own fares but once arrived they would be fed and housed by the villagers. The musicians could use the opportunity for family holidays. The first year was such a success that I was getting calls from other players to be invited for the second year. This was even better but was followed by a confrontational “High Noon” between the mayor and me. My punishment was no more music festivals which was more a pity for the village than me as I had become an almost full-time administrator and the holiday element was over.

Turning now to the present day, there is no doubt that jazz is alive and well at St Paul’s. Under the dedicated tuition of Jez Laing and Gareth Hunt, following in the footsteps of Katie Brown and George Adie, it becomes a question of how many boys can be accommodated in the Big Band and the Swing Band. It is fine in the Wathen Hall but it hardly replicates the atmosphere of the typical jazz club. The Music department is arranging regular gigs now for the boys at the 606 Club and the Pheasantry in Chelsea as well as the Bull’s Head in Barnes. Jez and Gareth are limited by the relatively small size of their stages. It is fine for the smaller combos but so much of the essence of jazz is contained in the creativity and playing of the big bands where there is great enthusiasm for the boys to join. The opportunity to play in some of the top jazz venues is something special. My own 14-year-old grandson, Harry Simmons, plays second trombone in the Swing Band. He enjoys it greatly but whether he becomes a second Chris Barber remains to be seen. 

Michael

his grandson

Stay Curious

Jamie Priestley (1975-80) reflects on getting a PhD and a Senior Railcard

Following a recent chance encounter in a supermarket, a member of Atrium’s Editorial Board asked me to write about doing a PhD in my autumn years, though his language was more tactful than that. I had just finished my thesis about a global technology firm and its leaders, in which I borrowed from psychoanalytic theory to claim that culture eats strategy for breakfast and management control is a bit of a fantasy. Most mortals get their PhD out of the way in their 20s – in part so their career can benefit from it. In my case the benefit has mostly flowed the other way, from career to doctorate, and I believe I would have written something very different and maybe less rich without decades of experience to inform it.

My background is marketing to consumers and businesses. I worked first at Shell and then in the creative services sector. I became ever more interested in what must happen inside the organisation for its external brands to be credible long term. I became the ‘Dr of DNA’ on the board of a London agency, a job with a tongue-in-cheek title but serious intent – to safeguard the firm’s culture as it expanded. The story found its way into management books and a case study taught by Harvard professors. I then went independent and have since worked with boards on communication and corporate culture.

A thinker named Žižek is fond of a joke from the 1939 film Ninotchka He tells it to explain what he sees as the advantage that psychoanalytic theory still enjoys over the cognitive sciences, which dominate the study of organisations and management. A customer calls a waiter over and says: “I’d like some coffee but without cream.” The waiter replies: “I’m so sorry, sir. I can offer you only coffee without milk. I’m afraid we’re out of cream.” The waiter’s answer is funny because the distinction he makes is absurd: absent milk is the same to the customer as absent cream. So it is with the cognitive sciences, Žižek argues.

For all its achievements, neuroscience cannot tell the difference between black coffee, coffee without cream and coffee without milk. Nor does it care. In psychoanalytic theory, by contrast, what is missing is central.

Of course, organisations constantly think about what is missing at surface level (and in the conscious mind) and seem to solve every presenting problem. If they lack the liquidity to grow, they find new funding. They cure lapses in performance by crafting better goals, use people analytics to fix poor motivation, and so on. At the time I joined Shell in the 1980s, two McKinsey consultants published the bestseller In Search of Excellence. They presented an ever-expanding universe of what management could control: “All that stuff you have been dismissing for so long as the intractable, irrational, intuitive, informal organisation can be managed”. Organisations were already measuring sales, costs, earnings per share. Now they could also track everything subjective. The book became a reference point for managers and its ideas are still influential. The maxim of choice at Shell and elsewhere was: “If you want to manage something you have to measure it”.

But what should an organisation do if something important does not yield to measurement, like feelings or culture?

The stock answer is that everything is manageable because everything can be codified. Yet this is a tall order: as the world becomes more complex and unpredictable, managers are finding it ever more ambiguous and contradictory. And might you not miss important nuances when you treat what is subjective as a source of error, reducing it to numbers to make it ‘true’? “How are you feeling today?” “2.37 out of 5.” “I’m sorry to hear that.” This silly exchange is not so far from the truth. In the wrong hands, staff engagement surveys become incontrovertible, yet many factors prevent them from being no more than a crude guide to the actual people who completed the survey, or the mood of the organisation. Good data help managers make good decisions, obviously. But not if objective evidence is given religious status.

The rationalist view of work is over 100 years old. It claims, rightly, that rational thinking is a prerequisite for success, but its perspective on emotions has always been ambivalent. Staff who disliked their job a century ago were thought to have “nonadjustive emotional tendencies.” Employers are more understanding now – but with the proviso that emotions should be managed. It is a view supported by psychologists, like the late Daniel

Kahneman, who tend to argue that the unconscious mind is accessible to and run by the rational mind, the ego. The alternative, psychoanalytic view is the opposite: the conscious mind only thinks it is in charge. Curiously, both originate with Freud; the second, radical one emerging when he wrote about his interviews with traumatised survivors of the First World War. He described something missing that could not be fixed, not even by the most brilliant positivist interventions. I began to investigate this perspective as a new way to look at organisations and the people who run them.

In the tech firm I studied for my thesis, the senior managers personified rationality. They were decisive, certain, consistent, and every problem was “manageable”, they said. But occasionally all this would be undermined by little linguistic slips which inadvertently pointed to an internal reality that contradicted what they said when they were on-message. Chief among the firm’s rational successes was its notorious performance management system. It appeared to embody the best of goal setting theory, which is universally revered. I found it depended just as much on unconscious fantasy – what might be called a psychical reality that overwrites the rational one but is overlooked because we want the rational story to explain everything.

All this may leave the reader cold, particularly as most products of St Paul’s have been very successful without the help of psychobabble. I do not set out this perspective to convince, but rather to chart a train of thought which evolved over five decades because, for me at least, it took that long to build my argument against the prevailing one.

Rationality is compelling well before we start our careers. To know the

I became the ‘Dr of DNA’ on the board of a London agency, a job with a tongue-in-cheek title but serious intent – to safeguard the firm’s culture as it expanded.

answer to a problem is to show one is clever, and ignorance is dangerous because it might prove the opposite. We learn all this at school, and the rational ideal seduces at work because it offers an answer to every problem.

“Grow the firm and do it sustainably?

Of course.” “Anxiety? Yep, we can fix that too.” “Unconscious bias? Easy, although we prefer the word ‘implicit’, because that allows us to surface the bigotry, label it and then remove it.” (But not really: the evidence that implicit bias training works is shoddy). There are many excellent reasons to find the right answer. The psychoanalytic point is that success spares us from facing a universal lack which we all have in the unconscious. In a sense, our achievements are evidence of a lifelong project to deny it.

What I saw among the leaders of the tech firm – all objectively high performers – was a debilitating estrangement from themselves. The psychoanalyst I drew on for my thesis (Jacques Lacan) would say that their endless talk of manageability also pointed to its opposite, what they could not talk about: a fundamental (unconscious) feeling of incompleteness they were powerless to solve, with only managerial language at their disposal to express it.

So what? I now know less than I once thought and paradoxically that feels like progress. In my practical work I do not promise miracle cures, but my clients are wary of them anyway. It is always tempting to channel this perspective into a weary critique of capitalism and many Lacanians do. More valuable, I think, is to see that managerialism, the ideology, benefits managers but also entraps them. Understanding how it does that can help them make management better.

The other reason for my late-onset scholarship was to stay alive. “We

don’t grow white or black, but we all grow old”, said Robert Butler who coined the term ‘ageism’. Most aspects of ageing are subjective, and there is no consensus about when old age starts. In the UK male workers can start to draw their state pension at 66. For a Hollywood actress, 30 is the new 50. When I was 10, I watched my neighbour paint the outside of his house. I found it a touching display of optimism in someone so close to the end. (He had just celebrated his 39th birthday but was otherwise healthy). In fact, no objective factor makes a sixty-year-old predictably less ambitious than someone in their 20s. But look at the growing market for anti-ageing products ($77 billion this year). The stereotypes are lazy but all-pervading, so my PhD is also an act of resistance. Old people are not wise because they have spent longer on the planet. They are wise because they have lost more. And if they stay curious, and generous, their knowledge might be worth something. 

Jamie Priestley

Jamie's PhD

Josh Hawley –putting the OP in GOP

Neil Wates (1999-2004) asks:

‘Isn’t this the American dude that taught us Politics’?

Late 2018 and I was sitting at the back of a down-at-heel pub in Battersea with a fellow Old Pauline, waiting for a comedy show to start. Preferable to talking to each other, we had been mindlessly scrolling our phones while the rest of the audience filed in, pints in hand. The defeat of the two-term incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in the 2018 election in Missouri had just been announced on some US political Twitter channels. My friend was right. The new senator, Josh Hawley, was newsworthy several times over. He was strikingly young for his new position, an erudite example of a new wave of Christian nationalism and – of note to us at least – a former Colet Fellow at St Paul’s. It was one of the more curious manifestations of my schooling that a former teacher of ours was now in the US Senate. Senator Hawley quickly established himself as an outspoken member on the right of the Republican Party, virulently pro Trump. His term as a freshman senator made it all too easy for the press to paint a 2D picture of a right-wing nut job; he opposes abortion entirely, he is on record for his belief that human trafficking is the result of the American sexual revolution in the 1960s (because of the social encouragement of premarital sex and the use of contraception, you see) and he uses the same PR company as the National Rifle Association with whom he has particularly close ties. This narrative culminated in December 2020 when he became the first senator to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 United States Presidential Election. “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard,” Mr Hawley said. “I will object

Josh Hawley

The trouble was that I struggled to remember much about Mr Hawley. Other than ‘this dude used to teach me politics’, I did not really have anything to offer on the man. What little I do remember is him being very well put together, playing right along with the preppy American college stereotype.

on January 6 on their behalf.” He led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count and rallied supporters under the notion that the 2020 US Presidential Election was stolen. All but the most right-wing US press vilified him. At best, this was deliberately divisive showboating. At worst, an attack on democracy. He did not directly encourage the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol but he played a role in it, albeit unwittingly. Footage of him sprinting away from the crowd of would-be insurrectionists went viral and led to widespread laughs of derision on both sides of the aisle when replayed at the January 6 investigation committee. This was the same mob to which he had raised a fist in solemn salute not 30 minutes prior. It led to one of my favourite satirical news headlines: Hawley Concerned That Being a Coward Is Overshadowing His Work as a Fascist.

In late January 2021, Hawley denied trying to overturn the election results.

In 2002 Josh Hawley came to School as the Colet Fellow. A 24-year-old recent graduate of Stanford, Mr Hawley had been selected from a small pool of potential candidates based, that year, in the west coast of America. Each year the Colet Foundation selects a new graduate from a pool of approved US colleges. In exchange for an academic year’s worth of teaching, the new import has board, lodging and stipend in the UK for 10 months.

The Colet Foundation was formed in 1991 as the US arm for fundraising for the School. St Paul’s has a significant American and America-situated alumni base. This has been steadily increasing, too – more and more leavers now head stateside for education and the

I don’t buy the media caricature of him as this right-wing nut job, partly because he didn’t seem like that at School and partly because I’ve been following him on the socials for a while and he’s clearly a smart guy.

Colet Foundation, an important part of the wider Old Pauline Club, ensures that any donations to the School from the US are both tax efficient and legitimate internationally. It was set up under Peter Pilkington (High Master 1986-92) but made real strides under Stephen Baldock (High Master 1992-2004), who took the relationship with the US educational establishments very seriously. He particularly liked the idea of a reciprocal relationship with some of the more active Ivy League schools, and the Colet Fellowship was born.

For the American university offices, this was an outlet for bright students to go and spend an improving year, whether they were thinking of becoming a teacher or thinking of doing something else. Obviously, Josh Hawley was not thinking of becoming a teacher since he went to Yale Law School after he came back from his year spent at St Paul’s. But the Colet Fellowship remains a highly attractive and much subscribed opportunity

for recent high achieving graduates and we have it to thank for the curious delivery of a future senator. What effect, if any, it had on the aspiring politician remains to be seen. Following his election, I was delighted to boast of my connection to American politics to those who would listen. Frankly, I thought there was something funny about being taught at a school with a centuries-old liberal social tradition by a man who has a 93% NRA approval rating and who once rejected Obamacare as ‘a Marxist threat to the American Dream’. The trouble was that I struggled to remember much about Mr Hawley. Other than ‘this dude used to teach me politics’, I did not really have anything to offer on the man. What little I do remember is him being very well put together, playing right along with the preppy American college stereotype. All penny loafers, J.Crew shirts, double Windsor knots and sports coats. Mr Hawley was clean

cut to a fault. So much so that we nicknamed him – imaginatively –Captain America. I remember a man who carried a well-thumbed Bible, an evangelical version swollen by index tabs. Most of all though, I remember someone absolutely obsessed with American election logistics. It was right after the 2002 midterms in the USA, an election dominated by the War on Terror. The Republicans had broken new ground – the only election in history where the President's party gained a chamber of Congress in a midterm election. It was also the most recent midterm in which the President’s party did not lose control of at least one house of Congress, and the most recent midterm election in which a political party maintained a trifecta on the government (Senate, House of Representatives and Presidency). Josh Hawley voted by post in that election and he brought his postal vote, ‘hanging’ chads and all, to form the basis of a lesson. We nerds lapped it up.

After St Paul’s, Josh Hawley studied law at Yale, then clerked in Washington for some pretty impressive legal minds – a 10th circuit judge and then an incumbent of the Supreme Court. He returned to Kansas City working at a private law firm before a period of employment at The University of Missouri law faculty, where he lectured in constitutional law. If St Paul’s had inspired him to be an educator, this was the only iteration of it, for not 18 months later he began a political career that would meet, initially, with unbridled success.

As early as 2012, he has said, Republicans had approached him about running for Attorney General, but he demurred. By 2016, however, he knew he wanted to do it. “I’m a constitutional lawyer who wants to make a difference,” he told The National Review (a right leaning journal). He felt another motive, too: “The weight of the Obama years finally had set in, and attorneys general from around the country had been the most effective resisters of Obama’s agenda.” He captured the GOP nomination for Attorney General and went on to a big victory in November, becoming the first Republican to hold the office since 1993 and earning more votes than anybody else in the state, including Trump. Before completing a single term as Attorney General he ran for, and won, the Senate race. An astonishing rise that made him newsworthy – particularly so in South West London.

In researching Mr Hawley’s time at School, I have spoken with some of his former pupils and colleagues. I stressed this was all under the condition of anonymity when I approached each one. If I was searching for some kind of juicy anecdote, I did not find one. There is no proleptic irony, no origin story. This was a slightly boring, slightly intense young American, teaching a slightly intense subject (for the most part) in a slightly boring way. One of his former colleagues told me that he is asked about Josh Hawley more than anything else about his career. He, like me, remembers little. Hawley made the odd polite appearance at the pub for departmental drinks but with a sense of obligation rather than a willingness to socialise.

This was a slightly boring,

slightly intense

young American, teaching a slightly intense

subject

(for the most part) in a slightly boring

way.

One of his former colleagues told me that he is asked about Josh Hawley more than anything else about his career. He, like me, remembers little.

Frankly, I do not remember a single interaction with him other than his postal ballot. I wonder what that says about him, although he would have been easily overshadowed in a department rich with charisma. Marwan Mikdadi (now teaching at Westminster) and Eugene Du Toit (who recently left Wellington School having been Headmaster) both taught economics and coached recordbreaking rugby teams with elan. Were it not for a last-minute drop goal in contentious circumstances allowing Wellington College a 1-point win, Marwan Mikdadi’s Colts C’s would have had a season unbeaten in 2001/02. I still think about that match.

I remember Head of Department Rob Jones, ex-policeman and a liberal to his core, with his stern but nonjudgemental style and his profound respect for the importance of the source material. I remember particularly well Andrew Ellams’ infectious intellectual curiosity; a man so energised by his subject matter that his Upper Eighth set broke into spontaneous applause after a lesson on – of all things – gerrymandering.

One former pupil, who now works in politics here in the UK, recalled Josh Hawley as “a very stereotypical overachieving young American. My memory of him was as quite an intellectual guy, which one wouldn’t usually associate with Trumpian politics. But I’ve been reading/listening to some stuff about Hawley and JD Vance recently and it seems like they are part of a new generation of Republicans who are providing a more substantive, intellectual underpinning to the MAGA movement. I don’t buy the media caricature of him as this right-wing nut job, partly because he didn’t seem like that at School and partly because I’ve been following him on the socials for a while and he’s clearly a smart guy.”

He is clearly a smart guy. His academic record is proof enough of that. Three years after leaving his post at School he published Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness, an intellectual biography of the president. It is heady stuff. Not so much his most recent book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, which, after his actions on 6 January, has been panned. Maybe it was an

unwise title for a man associated with running away.

There is an intriguing contradiction here. Despite his obvious intelligence, you might be forgiven for thinking that his political career and integrity took a fundamental blow after his actions on 6 January. As some Capitol Hill wonk said of him at the time, “He runs pretty good for a man without a spine.” But politics does not follow logic and there has in fact been an interesting groundswell. What Mr Hawley is selling, vast swathes of America is buying. He is almost single handedly driving the debate on Artificial Intelligence at Senate level. Together with JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elbridge Colby (amongst others), Josh Hawley’s political outlook has found a home. Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as Vice-President candidate was seen as a breakthrough for the young conservative movement, the rise of a ‘new right’, which blames elite institutions for the destruction of the American working class.

One reason Hawley’s brainysounding rhetoric about ‘ending neoliberalism’ has appealed to rankand-file Republicans is that most of its proponents have paired it with an exacting social conservatism. Vance, for instance, implied in a 2021 interview that victims of rape and incest should be required to carry pregnancies to term, but he has softened his position more recently to match Trump’s. Josh Hawley’s politics are similar to Vance’s. He told interviewer Benjamin Wallace-Wells at the recent Republican convention that Republicans needed to shed their affiliation with corporate interests and Wall Street. “I mean, there’s just no future there.’ He maintains that religious voters are the ‘true base’ of the Party. Working-class voters, he told the interviewer, whether or not they go to church, consider themselves religious and “associate religion with a form of nationalism. It’s sort of, like, ‘America is a country blessed by God.’”

I wanted to know how much effect School had on him, but as far as I can tell he has not spoken about St Paul’s by name at all. I wonder why this is the case. Obviously, it could be because it had no effect on him whatsoever. But

that contradicts much of the ‘official’ biographical material about him, which cites St Paul’s to a varying degree and is included more often than it is not. I wonder if there are some optics at play here. When Josh Hawley tells his story on the stump — he talks about growing up in a small town, where he learned small-town values: hard work, honesty, and so forth. “In time,” he continues, “I would go off to college, then law school and other places.”

Those ‘other places’ (Stanford, teaching at St Paul’s, Yale, clerking at the Supreme Court) become named when the occasion demands it. A press release from his own website: “At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Josh Hawley – a graduate of Stanford and Yale and a former instructor at an English private school – warned the attendees gathered...”

Atrium contacted Mr Hawley’s office asking for an interview but the request was declined.

Following the attack on the Capitol on 6 January, an article in The Guardian focused on Josh Hawley’s time at School. At that time, a St Paul’s spokesperson made the following statement:

“Like people the world over St Paul’s has been shocked by the scenes taking place in America and those resisting the delivery of the legitimate election process. Our records show Josh Hawley came over from the United States for 10 months as a postgraduate intern 18 years ago. We are relieved that democratic process is now prevailing in the US Capitol.” 

Josh Hawley on the campaign trail. Photograph by Natureofthought

THE MISCONCEPTION ABOUT SALES

Michael Hanson (2002-07) explains why ‘spray and pray’ does not work

The concept of ‘sales’ is a lie.

The more people try to sell, the more they put off buyers. Tactics like fake discounts, hidden lines in contracts and made-up case studies give salespeople a bad name and it is why

only 18% of buyers trust salespeople (the RAIN group, training and consulting organisation).

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” is not just a useful life lesson for alcoholics. Sellers also can only control what they say and how they act. Buyers are 100% in control of their decision and hate being cornered and pushed. So, what is the alternative? Elite salespeople guide customers to make decisions in their best interest to help them solve critical problems. Think about this: Would you rather close a £50k deal that is not in your customer’s best interest so they do not renew next year? Or would you turn a customer down, send them to a competitor and make a friend for life who two years later gets promoted and buys a £300k contract off you?

Seems like a rhetorical question but many sellers are taught to lie and take the first deal.

Before diving more into more sales advice, here is a bit about me. I am hugely grateful for my time at St Paul’s, and even more grateful for the friends I made. Even now at 35, there are dozens of OPs I see every year.

Most of my OP friends would never have imagined I would run a sales training business as I was never a materialistic person. I had no aspirations to go down the investment banking route. I thought that the economic reward was not worth working until 11pm at night, and the effect on my mental health and social life.

I was always more interested in making a long-term impact on people’s lives. After studying politics in Nottingham, I did an internship in Berlin and I was fortunate enough to book Roy Bennett as a speaker for one of our events. Roy was the Treasurer for the Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai, the main opposition party trying to take down Robert Mugabe. During the event, Roy and I got on like a house on fire.

Eventually Roy invited me to work with him on the 2013 Zimbabwean election. I was based in South Africa, as it was not safe for any of Roy’s team to be in Zimbabwe. To understand why, check Roy Bennett’s Wikipedia entry and you will learn about the torture he faced.

Of course, the election was rigged, but I learned a lot. I was responsible for writing Roy’s speeches and managing all of his social media content. Nowadays, you will see I am very active on LinkedIn, and those 6 months working for Roy influenced my writing style today. Roy and his wife died in a helicopter crash in 2018. Apart from my father, Roy has been the most inspirational male figure in my life.

Michael Hanson

During the election, I helped implement Ushahidi, a “crowdsourcing” platform that Zimbabweans could text to report incidences of violence which were then shown on a map. In 2013, after returning to London, I interviewed for an Account Manager role at InnoCentive. Even though I had no experience in tech, I fluked my way in as they were also a “crowdsourcing” platform. This was the start of my B2B commercial career.

In 2017, I made the crazy decision to move to Medellin, Colombia. At the time, I was doing some content marketing projects remotely with some US clients, so Medellin was perfect for the time zone. I thought I would be there for 3 months but ended up living there for two and half years.

While I was there, I started working full-time for the US sales outsourcing company, CloudTask. I was one of their first employees, helped the company grow to 200+ people, and ran the sales and marketing team, reporting to the co-founders directly.

Through my role at CloudTask, I had built up a large network of CEOs, sales leaders and marketing leaders, and was constantly hearing the same thing over and over from them. Sales was becoming a spam game or what I call “spray and pray”. Automation tools meant salespeople were sending the same prospecting email to hundreds of people and using the same generic demo that was never tailored to clients.

I realised there was a huge gap in the market for teaching salespeople that they needed to understand that buyers’ inboxes were flooded with hundreds of spam messages. To stand out, they needed to get creative and show they cared about their customers more than their commission checks. The first thing I say in training is “everyone hates salespeople, so how are you going to differentiate from the sleazy stereotype”.

Initially it was just a side hustle with a couple of consulting clients, and eventually my daily posting on LinkedIn had sourced enough clients for me to start a company in late 2019. Almost five years later, we have worked with 60 plus customers and I have a great team across four continents.

My journey in African politics was inspired by a desire to help change lives. Although I failed on that front, I feel I am now able to do that. I may be teaching people how to make more money through sales, but ultimately, I want to teach them how to positively impact other people’s lives in the long term, as when you do that money is just one of many benefits that you will reap.

If you want to learn more about Growth Genie, feel free to contact me at mhanson@growthgenie.com, connect on LinkedIn or give me a call on 0795831534 

The first thing I say in training is “everyone hates salespeople, so how are you going to differentiate from the sleazy stereotype”.

Growth Genie’s underground advert

Michael on a panel

A PERSON IS A PRAYER

Ammar Kalia (2007-12) shares his journey to his first novel

Two years into my time at St Paul’s, my mother grew seriously ill. She discovered a lump in her abdomen on her 53rd birthday in 2009 and following a gruelling surgery, the biopsy revealed it was cancerous. Ensuing scans found metastasis and quickly produced a terminal diagnosis. By 2010, as I celebrated my 15th birthday and approached my GCSE exams, the doctors gave her six months to live.

Up to that point, my time at St Paul’s had been a confounding experience. My parents were first-generation immigrants, moving from Kenya and Uganda to England in the mid-1960s as children before becoming the first members of both their respective families to attend university. They broke new ground and assimilated into a new culture, meaning that when their two children, myself and my older brother Amun (2001-06), went on to gain entry into one of the most prestigious schools in the country, it became an enormous source of pride.

To them, we had shed the signifiers of our immigrant roots – we had made it. We were part of the establishment. Yet, the reality was more mixed than our ascent on paper might imply. When I joined St Paul’s in 2007, I was marked out in two ways: I was one of a minority of students of colour, meaning that teachers would often confuse me with my South Asian best friend (who wore a turban while I had my hair cropped short) and I lived in a modest home in Hounslow, a world away from the Kensington townhouses and Surrey McMansions where many

of my classmates lived. Still, I was thrilled by the attention and quality of education I was receiving, allowing me to delve deeper into literature, music and art. I spent those early years attempting to carve out a pubescent identity among books and new discoveries while pretending to be richer and more worldly than I was. When my mum’s death moved from a far-off consideration to an imminent reality, I listened to my father’s explanation of the terminal diagnosis, nodded and went off to school as usual. I was too busy trying to fit in, trying to get the attention of the SPGS and Godolphin girls, and trying to do well in my exams to begin to fathom what was going on. As the months passed and her experimental chemotherapy began, I leaned into the rhythms of school life as a sustaining structure. There were English classes to look forward to, Latin tests to cheat on and Games afternoons to avoid entirely. I was too busy and too young to understand.

Fortunately, the chemotherapy had an unexpected effect and my mum went into remission after her first round of treatment. A year later, however, the cancer reappeared and we endured the same cycle of surgery, chemotherapy, remission and fear. I spent the remainder of my time at St Paul’s living in this state of uncertainty, balancing the transition into young adulthood and my life as a student with an increasingly caretaking, parental role with my own parents. By the time I left School in

Ammar Kalia

A

PERSON

IS A

PRAYER is highlighted in Pauline Books and published by Oldcastle Books

2012 to study English Literature at the University of Bristol, I had no clearer a sense of who I was than when I had started as a nervous 13-year-old. It felt like I had spent my five years at St Paul’s passing through and simply trying to stay afloat, rather than taking in what was happening around me.

Then, one week into my first year at Bristol, while I was trying to embody the spirit of the fresher by getting apocalyptically drunk as often as possible, my mum’s cancer returned for what would become the final time. Over the next nine months, surgery and treatments failed to take hold and her body began to shut down. On 2 August 2013, she died in hospice care with me, my brother and my father by her side.

The chaos and complexity of grief ensued. I cried so hard I thought I would never stop – and then I did. I returned to university, resenting how everyone around me could carry on with their lives in the midst of my suffering. My brother returned to his training as a doctor, trying to help others after he had just watched his mother die. We called our dad every day as he sat in our empty house, sorting through my mum’s belongings, now only able to experience her life through the objects she had left behind.

And I began to write. Following a love of literature that had been ignited in me while at St Paul’s, I began to write through my grief, jotting down notes, dreams and diary entries in an effort to try and make sense of it all. It was cathartic and painful to make what I was feeling concrete through the act of writing but as the intense bereavement of the weeks following my mum’s death turned into months of sadness and years of muted remembrance, these notes became a means of keeping track of the whirlwind I was going through – a constant in the chaos.

And I began to write. Following a love of literature that had been ignited in me while at St Paul’s, I began to write through my grief, jotting down notes, dreams and diary entries in an effort to try and make sense of it all.

I graduated, settled into a new family dynamic with just my father and brother and began a job as a journalist at The Guardian. The more time that passed since she died, the more I realised all the questions I had never had the chance to ask my mum when she was alive: the details about her childhood, memories of her migration and the facts of her life before I was born. I tried to get those answers from her father but being in his late eighties and with English as his second language, his details regularly became muddled and as he repeated the same stories, he would include different endings. More often than not, he just wanted to know how my job was going and if I was ready to get married yet.

When he died in 2021, with no one older in the family left to help fill in the gaps, I decided to take things into my own hands. I realised that since the act of migration often leaves no paper trail, our family history had been reduced to stories passed down from generation to generation, lives transformed into whispers and anecdotes. I decided to add to this oral history with my own entry, a novel that would imagine what my family’s life was like – how my grandparents met and decided to move from Africa to England, how my parents experienced London as migrants, and how we each navigated the pressures of identity as the idea of what constituted our home shifted.

Now that novel, A PERSON IS A PRAYER, has been released and this imagined history is out in the world, ready for readers to make sense of it themselves, I think back to my teenage self and those years at St Paul’s. I am proud of myself for surviving adversity and for creating something (hopefully) meaningful from it. I am not much closer to understanding who I am but I do know it is in these messy, unexpected and often deeply difficult experiences of life that we can find our strengths, building the foundations for the twists and turns of our future. Fifteen-year-old me, two years into his time at School, would have no idea what I am going on about, but that is fine. Those years are for living – the narration can come later. 

PAULINES PROTEST

Omar Burhanuddin (2017-22) meets Pauline protesters across campuses and generations

On 6 May this year, I finished my morning walk through Cambridge before turning towards the city centre for groceries. Turning down Trumpington Street onto King’s Parade, I made my way past the familiar swathes of tourists. Gradually, above their heads, the tents came into view. Orange, green, red – dozens of them had sprung up overnight on the front lawn of King’s College. Large banners protesting Israel’s ‘genocide’ and calling for the University to ‘divest’ from all arms companies had been plastered over the ancient college gates.

Abandoning my plans, I entered the lawn and approached various protesters, to conduct several whistle-stop interviews and to photograph the scene. Before midday, I had broken the story for Varsity, Cambridge’s student newspaper, for which I sit on the editorial team. National media attention followed, with camera crews flanking King’s Parade by the evening.

Demonstrations at Cambridge

For all the initial rush of it all, the construction of an encampment at Cambridge was not particularly surprising. Pro-Palestinian sit-ins had already begun at Columbia University in New York City in April, as University President Minouche Shafik was set to testify before Congress on the spread of antisemitism across elite American campuses. Among my more politically minded friends (and certainly within the Varsity newsroom), we felt that it was only a matter of time before Cambridge would follow suit. Since 6 May, encampments, occupations and sit-ins of every variety have spread across many American and British universities, throwing recent Old Paulines into the largest radical student protest movement in decades.

Over the last few months, I have spent much of my time reporting on the Cambridge protests. Beyond the hysterics of live coverage, however, I became keen to capture a broader picture. In recent weeks, I have spoken to OPs across our alumni community, old and young, to discuss this latest movement of student radicalism. How has it changed over the decades, from the events of 1968 and anti-apartheid action, through Iraq protests to the present day? What continuities, and what changes, can be identified? How much, if at all, does student protest really matter?

A perennial criticism conservatives make of student protest is the ineffectiveness of it all. One can scoff at an image of self-indulgent, middleclass hippies painfully out of touch with the causes they espouse, masquerading their provincialism as internationalism. David Abulafia (1963-67), Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, recalls the King’s Junior Combination Room sending Ho Chi Minh a telegram in support of his campaign, speculating that “it must have been read with bewildered puzzlement – who were these people far away in Cambridge?” Such assessments are echoed across the generations. Matthew (not his real name), an OP currently studying at the University of Chicago who has been involved in pro-Israeli “counterprotests”, describes the pro-Palestinian protesters on his campus as “misguided individuals who are being manipulated by foreign

One OP studying at Imperial, whose coursework required other people to test a smartphone application he developed, found the protesting squatters outside the lab made “excellent guinea pigs”.

agents”. Allegedly receiving funds from sources that “mean nothing but harm to our democracies”, he views the protesters as hopelessly impressionable.

But are student protesters really nothing more than the useful idiots of foreign tyrants? Other OPs, presented with this question, argued that it misses the point of what protests are for. Of course, student radicalism cannot have a practical effect on the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. It can, however, raise awareness and put Western governments into an unsustainable position regarding their financial support for Israel. Isaac (not his real name), a Jewish OP who attended St Paul’s in the 1960s, puts this point in historical perspective, stating that “the reason Kissinger went to Paris was not because he wanted to put up his hands and admit defeat, but because it was unsustainable domestically to keep the war going. F W de Klerk didn’t suddenly put his hands up and recognise that Mandela was a great guy, but acted as he did because apartheid was unsustainable economically and unsustainable with the sports boycott”.

That student protests succeed in raising awareness was a sentiment shared by Paulines across the political spectrum. An OP currently studying at Yale, who attended a pro-Palestinian demonstration the night before campus police arrested forty-seven protesters and closed off the main plaza, described the encampment as one of the “most inclusive and educational spaces on campus”. An OP at Imperial College London echoed this sentiment, describing how they had been inspired to “read more about [the Israel-Hamas conflict] and discuss it with friends”.

Having reported on the community gatherings and ‘teach-ins’ at the Cambridge encampment, I have personally borne witness to the efforts of many protesters to inform others peaceably. Those I spoke to noted,

however, where these initiatives crossed over into gratuitous attention-seeking. Matthew suspected that protesters, through such devices as a ‘poop tent’ and likening campus police to the Ku Klux Klan, “wanted the police to be as violent as possible […] to create a media circus”.

Even those OPs more sympathetic to the protesters were not naïve as to how these demonstrations could be weaponised. Many testified to how radical protest has acted as cover for bad actors. Another OP at Yale described the risk of members of the public joining student demonstrations, an escalation that forces the hand of otherwise tolerant campus administrations. Isaac, who otherwise “applauds” the actions of student protesters and expressed “horror” at the military campaign of the Netanyahu government, cautioned that it was “not very clever to talk in short aphorisms”. He singled out the notorious line ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ in particular, a phrase that leaves enough unsaid about the implications for Israel and its Jewish inhabitants to mean radically different things to different people. 

Demonstrations at Cambridge

In my own experience reporting for Varsity, I too have recognised when a line – however invisible and contested – has unmistakably been crossed. For full disclosure, I am generally sympathetic to the proPalestinian protesters and abhor the disproportionate Israeli response to the despicable attack by Hamas on 7 October. It is disturbing, however, when dog-whistles are mixed into the messaging of noble causes. I covered a vigil outside the Senate House in Cambridge following the entrance of Israeli forces into Rafah, where an organiser, speaking through a megaphone to the gathered attendees, dismissed Hamas’ actions on 7 October as “rumours”. Noxious extremism is not a problem unique to pro-Palestine protest by any means, but it is no less important to call it out.

On the flip side, any protest can fall from earnestness into absurdity. One OP studying at Imperial, whose coursework required other people to test a smartphone application he developed, found the protesting squatters outside the lab made “excellent guinea pigs”. But it is all too easy for nostalgic soixante-huitards to retrospectively glorify the urgency of their ‘authentic’ student protest, compared to the uninspired ‘copycats’ of today’s youthful radicals. In truth, youth activism has never been entirely serious. Abulafia recounts attending an occupation of the Old Schools at Cambridge (the university headquarters) in his student days. Professor Joan Robinson, a “celebrated Maoist” on the Economics faculty, was holding forth to a crowd of supporters on the moral and scientific imperative of revolution in the University Combination Room, a “grand salon” dating back to the fourteenth century: “I rather suspect no one was listening”, he noted. Irony has been lost on privileged placard-wielders both past and present.

Almost all OPs I spoke to were keen to stress the implications student upheaval had not only within the cloistered walls of university campuses, but on national and international life. What, if anything, do encampments at Oxford and Harvard reveal about the political cultures and influence of the UK and US? Do they tell us anything

about these countries’ place in the world today? 2024 is a year of elections across the democratic world, with nearly half of the global population expected to elect new leaders to govern their various nations, from the UK and France to the US and India. In a time when the roles of Western states on the world stage appear to be in tremendous flux – from the rise of the far-right in Europe, to the prospect of a second Trump presidency and its implications for NATO – these questions are growing more urgent than ever. Through my discussions with OPs, it became clear that student encampments offer one frame through which to view the complex, changing position of the West in the world.

causes, “trying to be like the US is not necessarily a bad thing”. The reason why the derivativeness of British protest matters is an entirely different one: it speaks to the declining influence of the UK in the world. Pro-Palestinian protesters miss the mark not because their position is morally wrong, but because they drastically overestimate the power of the Western institutions and governments, they are pressuring to have a decisive impact on this war. In the 1960s, South Vietnam needed America to prop it up against its northern neighbour. In the 1980s, American aid and investment was economically critical to South Africa, which was why the threat to withhold it in the face of apartheid proved so

“When a group of students protest – at Columbia, or Cambridge, or wherever – that allows the people who are on the raw end of the bombs and bullets to feel that they’re not alone. If nothing else, that’s important”.

Multiple OPs were quick to highlight how derivative British pro-Palestinian protests have been of those in the US. An OP at Imperial College London sensed “that these protests stem from the same storm cloud, one that has finally made its way across the Atlantic”, while another OP at the same university opined that “protests in the UK are at least in part due to the attention that protests in the US have received”. It is not hard to see why people share this view.

Encampments in the UK were not established during the first seven months of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and only appeared once American students had taken the lead. British activists have adopted the tactics, strategies and demands of their American counterparts at every level, from individual slogans (“Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop We Will Not Rest!”) to occupying central University administration buildings.

This is not to diminish the moral position of British student radicals. As an OP at Durham put it, when students are protesting for the same

potent. The extent to which Israel, a turbo-charged modern economy, needs the West to perpetuate its regime today is far more questionable. Undoubtedly that country needed our support initially, but it is surely not dependent on us to sustain it in the present day. This is precisely why Netanyahu is growing increasingly indifferent to US opinion, and the public statements of the Israeli and American governments have become increasingly discordant in recent years – at least since Obama, and especially since October last year. In all their righteous rage, Western student protesters can forget that we are not as important as we used to be, and certainly not as much as we make ourselves out to be.

That said, “what else can you do?” asks Isaac. We risk again misunderstanding why people, why some OPs, protest – why students leave their rooms to hit the streets, risking not just exam results but their futures should universities punish them (as many in America already have), in order to speak out for a

Even those OPs more sympathetic to the protesters were not naïve as to how these demonstrations could be weaponised.

worthy cause. Maintaining that protests, marches, sit-ins, occupations, and encampments do not matter because of the diminishing influence of the West is fundamentally misguided, Isaac argues. To be sure, today’s Britain and America have lost nearly all of the moral currency they once had in the ‘Global South’. Whether welcoming or bewailing it, anyone from such a background can assure you of that fact. Turning this objection on its head, however, Isaac believes that pro-Palestinian protest can be a way for the West to regain its lost moral power, coming into line with much of the rest of the world.

Appealing to Robert Kennedy’s famous ‘Winds of Change’ speech,

Isaac insists that the young are best placed to make this historic reclamation: “The future of the world lies in your hands, you, the young people. You are not alone, do not despair”. Giving solidarity alone is nowhere near sufficient for us to reach that goal, but it is a first step.

He ends on this note of hope tempered by humility: “When a group of students protest – at Columbia, or Cambridge, or wherever – that allows the people who are on the raw end of the bombs and bullets to feel that they’re not alone. If nothing else, that’s important”. 

Demonstrations at Cambridge

Richard Griffiths (2016-21) discusses

AI, Media and the Law: A Fast Moving Frontier

I was fascinated to read Neil Wates’ (1999-2004) article in the Spring/Summer edition of Atrium in which he discusses all things AI with Professor Stuart Russell (1974-78), fresh from the UK’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. “So much of the rhetoric of Artificial Intelligence is focused on the future,” he writes “but there is a very clear lesson from the past… [the] real risk is from humans knowingly misusing the information technology gives us”.

As a history student, I absolutely subscribe to learning lessons from the past. But Neil’s prescription of humans misusing information is also relevant to other interests of mine: media and the law. Since leaving St Paul’s three years ago I have been lucky enough to work at the House of Commons and then the Times, so the intersection of media and the law is something which particularly intrigues me. Unfortunately, however, it is also an area where the prognosis for the impact of AI is pretty gloomy.

Few are unaware of the perils of online media. I remember frequent (and necessary) assemblies at School reminding us how to stay safe and use social media responsibly. We all know how it polarises, misinforms and encourages us to make extreme snap judgements, only to completely forget about them when the next sensational event occurs. Having grown up with social media, I am excited to see what the next transformative technology to come and shake it up will be. Most people seem to agree that it is AI but how will this affect the pre-existing online landscape, and will UK law be able to deal with it appropriately? Are there any lessons from how we have already approached online safety legislation in the past?

When we talk about “media law” we tend to mean deciding what newspapers can and cannot publish, and what tools celebrities can use

to challenge them. However, the complete dominance of social media (56.2 million active users in the UK) makes these issues far more relevant to every single one of us. The “democratisation” of media brings with it a democratisation of its risks; now private individuals, not just newspapers, have a platform from which they can potentially cause serious harm to another’s reputation at any moment. The ongoing defamation claim brought by Andrew Bridgen against Matt Hancock has come about because of a single tweet in which the former Health Secretary described the views of his parliamentary colleague as “antisemitic”.

Reputation is just one facet of the law regarding online media, however, and protecting our privacy and understanding where our data is held have also never been more important. The advancement of AI technology touches on all of these issues. ‘Deepfakes’ abound and we should count ourselves lucky that, so far, they are generally used to create skits of Trump, Obama and Biden playing video games – look up “US Presidents play…” on YouTube if you are not sure what I’m talking about. Recently, a friend and fellow OP showed me how he could use open-source AI-powered code to create a chatbot with my own voice. Fortunately, we have the kind of lifelong bond forged by 13 years

at St Paul’s and St Paul’s Juniors together so I can sleep relatively easily knowing he has that power, and my reputation remains (mostly) intact. Others may not be so relaxed. Martin Lewis sued Facebook for defamation in 2018 when they failed to take down fake adverts which used a picture of him to promote financial scams. He eventually settled for £3 million to be spent by Facebook on anti-fraud measures but imagine how much greater the damages could be in 2024 when AI can be used to recreate people’s voices and make fake videos of them.

President Putin was confronted by a particularly accurate deepfake of himself at a press conference last year which asked him what he thought about the dangers of generative AI. “Yes…” he said slowly, sounding uncomfortable, taking a long pause and looking at the ground; “Well I see you can look like me and talk in my voice, but I thought and decided that only one person should look like myself and talk in my voice. That person is going to be me’.

Regardless of Putin’s desires, the fact remains that this technology is already out there and even AI companies are not blind to its dangers. OpenAI, the originator of ChatGPT has created its own voicerecreation software, VoiceEngine, but stopped short of releasing it to the general public.

So, is the UK well equipped to produce such legislation? There are a couple of pitfalls – and lessons from the past – to consider here. The first of which is time; parliamentary politics can be a slow process, as I saw first-hand. Since 2022, Dr Luke Evans, Conservative MP for Bosworth, has been trying to introduce the Body Image Bill which legally requires a logo to be shown when a body has been digitally altered, as is increasingly being done with AI. In both parliamentary sessions he has tried, however, he has run out of time and the parliament has dissolved before it has managed to progress past its first reading. Indeed, given that the advent of social media was in the 1990s it seems extraordinary that we only got an Online Safety Act as recently as 2023. This legislation made it a criminal offence to encourage serious self-harm but that danger was not at all new to 2023 as the tragic suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell showed in 2017.

Looking to our past approach to online matters also reveals another habit of our parliamentary system: reluctance to innovate where it feels the status quo will do. In 2014, the House of Lords communications committee said that it was not persuaded of the necessity “to create a new set of offences specifically for acts committed using the social media and other information technology”. But can we accept this approach in light of such a volatile and unpredictable online landscape, especially given the emergence of AI? Take the legal concept of defamation which is still defined in terms of the Defamation Act 2013. This imposes

a 12-month limitation period which means you can only sue within 12 months of the original publication or the last substantial change to the content. That may have been reasonable for the age of print newspapers where the impact can have been expected to be immediate but in the online world content frequently flies below the radar when it is published only to be promoted by an algorithm years later. If a defamatory article gained traction in those circumstances, it might, according to the law, be too late to do anything about it and so the legislation seems antiquated and the status quo inadequate.

This inadequacy is already apparent when it comes to AI-generated media. The Online Safety Act has made it illegal to create non-consensual sexual deepfakes, but it remains legal to create fake content generally. This has a particular shortcoming in 2024 – the year of elections, and particularly divisive ones at that. The US very recently confronted this problem when Elon Musk re-posted a fake Kamala Harris advert in July citing “parody is legal” as an excuse. Californian Governor Gavin Newsom hit back saying not only that fake political ads should not be legal but also that he would be signing legislation to that effect “within weeks”, presumably by means of an executive order. The UK has no such rapid legal framework but is equally familiar with the issue as a fake video of Keir Starmer “swearing” at his staff went viral on X in the run-up to the General Election.

That particular episode exposes the problems at the heart of our current regulatory framework. At the moment (as per the Online Safety Act) we expect online platforms themselves to be responsible for removing fake AI content but X refused to take down the Starmer video saying it could not confirm whether or not it was legitimate. The Online Safety Act deliberately does not give Ofcom the power to remove content for fear of Government overreach, but this leaves us with an entirely “reactive” approach: waiting for fake content to appear and hoping the relevant

platform will remove it in good time. The election of the Labour Government may provide the opportunity to clarify and innovate AI-related media law but there is little sign of it so far. The phrase “artificial intelligence” appeared just once in the Labour manifesto and then only in terms of “maintaining safeguards” rather than introducing any new ones. Instead, the task of asking some of life’s bigger questions has been adopted by Sir Keir’s Labour predecessor, Tony Blair. Characteristically, Sir Tony seems both optimistic and relaxed.

Last year, as Head of News for PalTV, my university’s student broadcaster, I made a light-hearted video in which I pitted my own A Level Philosophy exam answer against a ChatGPT generated one and had a philosophy undergraduate student, Ben, guess which one was real. Fortunately for me, and the St Paul’s Philosophy department (particular thanks to Phil Gaydon and Rufus Duits), Ben rated the human one better and said it was pretty easy to tell them apart. A brief search online, however, shows that the difference between real and AI audio-visual content is getting much harder to ascertain and it seems that the law is not yet ready to deal with that.

Let us just hope that as Sir Tony’s theme tune promised in 1997 – the same year the first social media platform was created – “Things can only get better”. 

Few are unaware of the perils of online media. I remember frequent (and necessary) assemblies at School reminding us how to stay safe and use social media responsibly.

James Grant (1990-95)

reports from St Paul’s with the latest news on the School’s initiatives

Having worked at St Paul’s for just over a year, I often reflect on what has changed since my day. Much is the same but other things are very different, and not just the buildings. In most cases the significant changes are undoubtedly an improvement, and that includes the School’s work with state schools and charities, its new commercial arm and a renewed focus on Bursaries. Jeremy Withers Green (1975-80) and I talked to Harry Hampson (1978-83), School Governor and Chair of St Paul’s Enterprises; Catherine Bennett, Head of Bursaries; and Stuart Block, Deputy Head of Partnerships and Public Benefit.

Enterprises

Having largely completed the rebuild of the senior school, St Paul’s now has updated modern facilities in an advantageous location. Harry and his fellow Governors feel that it is very important that we use that position to try to raise as much commercial revenue as possible. This might seem odd as a registered charity and non-profit organisation, but there is a very distinct, and admirable reason. “We’re aiming to keep school fees as low as possible, for as long as we can. All of our commercial efforts are being driven by that ‘North Star’. That, alongside our philanthropic efforts, is how we can keep fees down while still employing the very best teachers.”

Those commercial efforts are managed day to day by a lettings team at School and overseen and driven by St Paul’s Enterprises (SPE). SPE is a separate company with its own board, which Harry chairs and which includes Governors, Staff and Stephen Withers Green (1973-78), who for many years was responsible for similar commercial endeavours at St Edward's School, Oxford.

“We’re aiming to build revenue beyond fee income. The need is acute when you consider recent high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis which have made school fees less affordable to many. There is also the threat of VAT being added on by a

Labour Government; all of this will build financial pressure on parents and we want to do everything we can to help.”

Other schools have established satellite schools overseas, effectively licensing their brand, but this is not the preference of the Governors. However, SPE are also looking into developing digital learning opportunities involving St Paul’s teachers. “We’re trying to think about smarter ways, including digital learning initiatives, which could open up global opportunities.” says Harry. A working group for this is being set up, which will include parents and OPs with relevant knowledge and experience.

The commercial focus is on more than just grounds and facilities, although income through hiring of the sports hall, swimming pool, the Wathen Hall and other buildings remains very important. The Old Pauline Club are very grateful to Harry and SPE for recently agreeing to a 50% discount for alumni bookings.

What more can be done? “Partnership schools come in over the summer but could companies rent space during holidays? That could be the future, although one challenge is our lack of boarding space.” There may be an opportunity to build state of the art meeting and conference facilities – at present St Paul’s Juniors are housed in ‘Ichthys’, which many readers will remember as the old Science building. When the SPJ rebuild is complete, Ichthys as the last of the giant CLASP concrete buildings will be replaced with more modern facilities.

Commercial income totalled approximately £250,000 last year and this year will near £1m. Longer term, if digital initiatives in particular work well, then Harry believes that £2m per annum should be achievable. It was interesting to learn while talking to Harry that not all SPE income offsets fees; along with the Old Pauline Club, SPE help to fund ESTER, an incubator programme run by the School for start-up businesses led by young alumni. 

“We’re aiming to keep school fees as low as possible, for as long as we can. All of our commercial efforts are being driven by that ‘North Star’”.

Partnerships

I have seen some of the School’s partnership work in action –witnessing pupils from St Mary’s Ukrainian School, most of whom are refugees who have fled the war, celebrating their national day by dancing around with Lower Eighth Paulines in the School’s courtyard was a particular highlight in my early weeks. I was not expecting it and was quite overwhelmed. The summer school provision has won awards, and those as well as Saturday morning classes provide huge opportunity for state school pupils to access not just the world-class facilities at the School, but also the teachers themselves.

Stuart Block is Deputy Head, Partnerships and Public Benefit at St Paul’s. This is a wide brief; partnerships include the West London Schools Partnership with local schools, as well as partner charities both international and local. It is a busy role too, as Stuart teaches Economics as well. The first employee in the partnerships team under Mark Bailey as High Master was Janet Mee, who is still working at the School, and Stuart took up his post six years ago having previously been Lower Eighth Undermaster.

“Some of the most powerful partnerships work we do is student to student; for example, Paulines working with state school students on sustainable development initiatives. On a staff level, we currently have St Paul’s staff members seconded to posts at Fulham Boys and Christ’s Schools.”

Each year, Lower Eighth and Fourth Form students have the chance to switch places with partner schools as part of a broader teaching and learning initiative to share best practice and understand how different schools work, bringing new ideas back into their respective schools.

The School’s partnership work is largely funded by fundraising appeals. Donors to the current Shaping Our Future: Next Steps appeal are offered the chance to fund this work as well as funding the Founder’s Awards bursary appeal.

An important part of partnerships activity within the School is the ‘Pauls4All Thomas Gresham Committee’ of current pupils who work very hard to raise funds for the Thomas Gresham Award, which provides a 100% bursary for the highest performing boy at 11+ who needs financial support.

There is a lot of fundraising for other worthy causes that is generated by the partnerships team and in particular the Pauls4All Charity and Volunteering Committee of Lower Eighth students. Through innovative events and excellent communication, considerable sums are raised for Beyond Ourselves, a Zambian charity which brings education to children. On a local level, three local charities are supported each year.

Stuart and team are busy building links with National Academy Trusts, adding an online element to the summer school offering. On top of all of this there is the Colet Mentoring programme which is designed to provide partnership school students with free one-on-one academic support from Paulines, all via a mobile phone app. The app was, of course, designed by Old Paulines: brothers Phil and Dom Kwok (2010-15 and 2009-13).

Until I started working at the School, I had no idea of how much hard work and time goes into staff and pupils helping others. I think it is the opportunities St Paul’s gives to state school pupils that resonates most with me. In a recent partnerships video, a young Ukrainian girl simply states, unprompted and with a huge smile on her face ‘I love this school’. I cannot think of a better testimonial to the hard work of all those involved in partnerships. 

Pupils from St Mary's Ukrainian School

Founder’s Awards –“Excellence without Exclusivity”

Catherine Bennett joined St Paul’s in November 2023 from City of London Freemen’s School and her role as Head of Bursaries is a new and important one. She is not employed to raise the funds for Bursaries, but ultimately to ensure that the School is finding the right boys and families to offer them to. “I have a background in state schools, which helps me understand the differences – and similarities – between state and independent schools. I’ve also been involved in school partnership work in the past.”

The role of Head of Bursaries is not just new to St Paul’s but also relatively new to the wider independent school sector. It shows a clear commitment by the School.

Catherine’s previous experience is mostly with low-income families and full bursaries. There are varying levels at St Paul’s and the stated aim of the current Shaping our Future: Next Steps is to have 10% of pupils supported by bursaries. Catherine finds joy in the narrow focus of her role – she is able to spend all of her time on bursary work. It is, however, not a lonely role. “There’s a lot of collaboration with the School’s Development team, regular meetings with the Admissions department and Senior Management of both Junior and Senior schools, and a particular emphasis on working with the pastoral and academic teams on how to best support bursary families.”

Much time is spent in identifying potential students who would thrive at the School. This links neatly to the School’s partnerships work; there are

Strictly means-tested, the bursaries target lower-income families, ranging from 5-100% of fees, in addition to extras that ensure the full St Paul’s experience.

some very bright children at partner schools who have the potential to do wonderful things given the chance to access a world-class education. Her office is busy – showcasing the School and its facilities is, Catherine believes, vital as is personalising the process for families. This is no term time only role, with plenty of meetings and school tours during the school holidays and at weekends.

The process does not stop once a bursary pupil starts at the School.

“I’m there to support all the way through their school career. I raise issues and things to look out for, and at all times ensure that the pupil’s needs are considered.”

The School currently supports 138 pupils through its Founder’s Awards (bursary programme), as of September 2024, enabling ambitious and bright boys to attend St Paul’s. Strictly means-tested, the bursaries target lower-income families, ranging from 5-100% of fees, in addition to extras that ensure the full St Paul’s experience.

Ten percent (approximately 151 pupils) is the target for bursary students through the fundraising appeal but there are no specific targets for each entry point, whether that be St Paul’s Juniors entrance at 7 years old, up to 16+ entrance.

The average fee reduction is 81% but this figure varies. One wonders how it might be affected by the application of VAT on school fees under the new Government, which seems almost certain at the time of writing. There may well be more bursaries, at a lower percentage, as a result.

One of the reasons Catherine was so keen to work at St Paul’s is the vision of John Colet, which is as relevant today as it was in 1509. As you walk into the Atrium in the main teaching block, you cannot miss the words set in stone. Colet opened the doors to St Paul’s School in 1509 to educate boys “from all nacions and countres indifferently”. That vision holds true today. 

The Whitting Lecture

The biennial Whitting Lecture took place appropriately in the Montgomery Room in March.

Philip Whitting was a History master and Head of Department from 1929 to 1963. Over those years pupils from St Paul’s were awarded 194 Open Awards in History to Oxford or Cambridge: an average of five a year. On the outbreak of World War II, he became one of the leading figures of the Hammersmith Civil Defence and was awarded the George Cross during the war’s first big blitz. Later in the conflict he joined the RAF and was an Intelligence Staff Officer during the liberation of Italy. He was a Byzantinist and a numismatist of the highest standing.

Current St Paul’s parent, Professor Martin Francis, lectured about the intimate history of Britain’s World War II Commanders. Courts martial, survivor’s guilt, divorce, bereavement, romantic novels and much more was covered. Atrium will of course highlight Professor Francis’ book on the subject when it is published. 

Reunions

Old Paulines who left St Paul’s 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 years ago enjoyed a successful Reunion back at the School in June.

Guests were given a tour of the School site followed by a drinks reception in Founder’s Court. The evening continued until late for many at The Bridge pub on Castelnau. Speeches were made by OPs James Gazet (1981-85) and James Grant (1990-95). Next year’s Reunion will be for those who left in 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015 and 2020. 

University Drinks

For the first time since the COVID pandemic, the OPC and School hosted drinks for Old Paulines currently studying at Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, London and Oxford Universities.

The Edinburgh event was held alongside St Paul’s Girls’ Alumnae and was a great success. Next year’s events will include Cambridge and will be jointly organised between St Paul’s School, St Paul’s Girls’ School and the Old Pauline Club. 

Professor Francis Reunions

Edinburgh Drinks

Summer Drinks and Comedy Night

More than 80 Old Paulines and SPGS Alumnae enjoyed a hilarious evening at George IV in Chiswick in June.

Guests were entertained by MC Oli Gilford (2006-11) and the Rhys & Co Improv group, led by Rhys Collier (2002-07). After the interval, the roof was blown off as ‘West London’s first gangster rapper’ MC Hammersmith (Will Naameh, 2005-10) treated us to his unique improvised freestyle rap. 

Leavers’ Ceremony

This year’s Upper Eighth pupils enjoyed an excellent Leavers’ Ceremony at School on 4 July, departing with happy memories as well as Old Pauline Club laundry bags full of gifts.

A drinks reception in Founder’s Court after the ceremony gave the OPC the chance to engage with the boys and their parents. Simon Hay (1999-2004) gave the guest speech, talking to the Leavers about life beyond St Paul’s and his own career as an entrepreneur. The Old Pauline Shield for International Excellence was presented to the parents of Felix Peerless, who was busy rowing at Henley on the day. We look forward to staying in touch with this year’s School leavers in the future, starting with a ‘First Term Reunion’ event in December. 

Old Paulines and SPGS Alumnae Catch Up in San Francisco

One of our major aims is to set up more social and networking hubs for groups of OPs all over the world.

One of these was very successfully held in San Francisco in June for OPs and SPGS Alumnae. Organised by Nick Josefowitz (1996-01) and Alex LewisOakes (2001-06), a great time was had by all. SPS Teacher of Geography, Head of Entrepreneurship and OPC Executive Committee member, Nick Troen (1998-03), was also able to attend as part of his sabbatical travels.

In San Francisco’s buzzing downtown district, over 25 alumni from across 40 years enjoyed drinks and nibbles at The Cordial. Catching up with SPGS Alumnae Claire Pajot and Olivia Brown, amongst others, further emphasised the strong presence of alumni and alumnae of both schools in the Bay Area.

In Los Angeles, UCLA student Rourke Palmer (2016-21) and UCSB student Adam Rowe (2016-21) outlined their experiences studying in California, both endorsing the benefits of studying in a culture of high academic and wellbeing standards. Both expounded the advantages of the entrepreneurial mindset embedded in university life, with exciting opportunities in tech start-ups proving abundant. 

The OP Shield

Comedy Night

West Coast Alumni and Alumnae

Henley Regatta Reception

The SPS Boat Club hosted an afternoon tea reception for the St Paul’s rowing community on the Wednesday of the Henley Royal Regatta, shortly after the School’s 1st VIII dispatched Westminster in the quarter final of the Princess Elizabeth Cup.

Current pupils including the 1st VIII themselves, staff, former staff, parents and Old Paulines from Henley crews from previous years enjoyed updates on the School’s boathouse appeal and a speech by Andy (Doc) Mayfield, former Master in Charge of Rowing at the School.

Through the Regatta, the St Paul’s 1st VIII swept all before them in winning the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup. This was the eighth victory for the School in their fourth

final in a row, and was delivered very impressively, the crew dealing with stiff headwinds in each round. St Paul’s beat Shiplake College by threequarters of a length in the final, having defeated St Edward’s School in the semi-final. St Paul’s led early off the start and maintained the ⅓ length lead at the Quarter Mile to extend to ¾ of a length at the barrier. Although Shiplake reduced the lead slightly at Remenham, St Paul’s never looked like relinquishing their lead and held off the sprint to win their third Princess Elizabeth Challenge trophy in four years by ¾ of a length at the finish.

St Paul’s, under the expert guidance of coach Bobby Thatcher have therefore won ‘The Triple’, having previously won the National Schools and Schools' Head of the River Regattas, as well as the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston before Christmas. 

Earliest Vintage Lunch

Eighty Old Paulines, who had left School 50 or more years ago, enjoyed catching up with old friends at the Earliest Vintage Lunch in March.

Our thanks go to Graham Seel, former Head of Humanities at St Paul’s who delivered a fascinating talk on the role of Old Paulines during the First World War. Graham’s book Scholars & Soldiers; a history of alumni of St Paul’s School and the 1st World War is available to download at: stpaulsschool.org.uk/about-st-pauls/ history-archives/st-pauls-and-ww1/ 

The Lost Years Apposition Dinner

Prefects and prize winners from the 2020 and 2021 School year groups had been deprived of their traditional Apposition Dinner at Mercers’ Hall, because of the COVID pandemic. It was therefore a wonderful opportunity for the Old Pauline Club to work with the Mercers’ Company and St Paul’s Girls’ School on making sure that they could have their dinner after all, in June. Previous High Master Mark Bailey spoke and the Apposers from each year were able to attend; Professor David Abulafia (1963-67) from 2020 and Professor Richard Serjeantson (1985-90) from 2021.

Most importantly, the young Old Paulines and SPGS Alumnae who attended had a superb evening. Vivek Raman, Vice-Captain of School in 2021, said: “We’re very grateful to the Old Pauline Club and to the Mercers’ Company for putting on this event –the dinner was absolutely electric and was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old friends both from SPS and SPGS, as well as chat to old teachers and hear about life at the school.”

Our thanks go to Chris Vermont (1973-78), former Master Mercer for hosting the event and for funding it through the Mercers’ St Paul’s School Foundation. 

Mercers’ Hall

The 1st VIII

Earliest Vintage Lunch

New OPC Vice Presidents

Matthew Gould CMG MBE (1984-89)

He joined the Foreign Office in 1994 and was in various position before becoming Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary (2007 to 2010). He was British ambassador to Israel from 2010 to 2015. In 2016, he became the Government’s first Director General for Digital and Media and in 2019 was appointed as the chief executive of NHSX, which oversaw digitisation of NHS England. He is currently CEO of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), which includes the management of London and Whipsnade Zoos.

Simon Hardy (1974-79)

After a long career at Nestlé, he is now self-employed promoting Swiss wines. He is a director at Colets, Chairman of the Old Pauline Trust and a member of the OPC Executive Committee responsible for strategy. Simon will be OPC President from June 2025.

Rory Kinnear (1991-96)

He studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, and then Acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He has won two Olivier Awards, both at the National Theatre, in 2008 for his portrayals of Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode, and Iago in Othello in 2014. He has an extensive range of appearances on radio, television and film from 2001, including four Bond films and most recently the film, Bank Of Dave

Michael Modiano (1981-85)

He runs the Modiano Charitable Trust which supports the arts, helps the poor and a few other charitable organisations. Philanthropy includes supporting the Philharmonia Orchestra and St Paul’s School.

James Reed CBE (1976-80)

He is chairman and chief executive of the Reed group of companies Britain’s biggest and best-known recruitment brand and the largest family-owned recruitment company in the world. He is also chairman of The Big Give Trust, a match-funding charity supported in part by the Reed Foundation and the Reed family. The Big Give has raised over £240 million for UK-registered charities and aims to raise £1 billion by 2030.

Sir Bernard Rix (1957-62)

He is a former High Court judge. He became a Queen’s Counsel in 1981, was a member of the Senate of the Inns of Court and Bar between 1981 and 1983, a member of the Bar Council from 1981 to 1983 and was Treasurer of Inner Temple in 2005. He was a Recorder of the Crown Court from 1990 to 1993. In 1993 he was appointed a High Court judge and assigned to the Queen’s Bench Division and from 1998 to 1999 he served as judge in charge of Commercial List. He was made a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2000 before retiring in 2013. He was appointed as an International Judge of the Singapore International Commercial Court in 2015. 

Old Pauline Club

St Paul’s Alumni Association Autumn 2024

President J Withers Green

Past Presidents

C D L Hogbin, C J W Madge, F W Neate, Sir Alexander Graham GBE DCL, R C Cunis, Professor the Rt Hon the Lord McColl of Dulwich, The Rt Hon the Lord Baker of Dorking CH, J M Dennis, J H M East, Sir Nigel Thompson KCMG CBE, R J Smith, B M Jones, The Rt Hon the Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Vice Presidents

Professor D S H Abulafia CBE, T M Adeyoola, Rt Revd R W B Atkinson OBE, Professor M D Bailey, P R A Baker, R S Baldock, S C H Bishop, J R Blair CBE, N St J Brooks, R D Burton, W M A Carroll, Professor P A Cartledge, M A Colato, R K Compton, T J D Cunis, A C Day, S J Dennis MBE, Sir Lloyd Dorfman CVO, CBE, C G Duckworth, A R Duncan, J A H Ellis, R A Engel, D H P Etherton, The Rt Hon the Lord Etherton of Marylebone GBE PC,, Sir Brian Fall GCVO KCMG, N J Fitch, Sir Simon Fraser CMG, KCMG, GCMG, B R Girvan, The Rt Hon the Lord Godson of Thorney Island, T J R Goode, D J Gordon-Smith, M S Gould CMG MBE, Lt Gen Sir Peter Graham KCB CBE, The Rt Hon the Lord Greenhalgh of Fulham, Professor F D M Haldane, H A Hampson, S R Harding, S P D Hardy, R J G Holman, J A Howard, S A Hyman, S D Kerrigan, P J King, R M Kinnear, T G Knight, J W S Lyons, I C MacDougall, G C Matthews, Professor C P Mayer CBE, R G McIntosh, A R M McLean CLH, M H Modiano, J D Morgan, A K Nigam, N H Norgren, The Rt Hon George Osborne, Sir Mene Pangalos FRS, T B Peters, D M Porteus, R M Rayner, The Rt Hon the Lord Razzall of Mortlake CBE, J A Reed CBE, The Rt Hon the Lord Renwick of Clifton KCMG, Sir Bernard Rix, B M Roberts, J M Robertson, J E Rolfe, Professor S J Russell OBE, M K Seigel, J Sherjan, J C F Simpson CBE, D R Snow MBE, S Strauss, A G Summers, R Summers, R Ticciati OBE, The Rt Hon Tom Tugendhat MBE, VR, Sir Mark Walport FRS, Professor the Lord Winston of Hammersmith

Executive Committee

Jeremy Withers Green (President & Chairman of the Committee), Simon Hardy (Deputy President), Tom Arnold (Secretary), Nick Brooks (Treasurer), Kut Akdogan (US), James Grant (Sports and AROPS), Sam Hyman (Co-Opted, Surveyor), Dave Methuen (40s Decade), Elizabeth MonroDavies (Parent), Nog Norgren (50s Decade, Legal), Ali Palmer (Governor), Rishi Patel-Warr (20s Decade), Ellie Sleeman (SPS Development), Simon Strauss (Overseas), Nick Troen (SPS Staff), Sam Turner (20s Decade), Neil Wates (Communication & Engagement)

Nominations Committee

Jeremy Withers Green (Chairman), John Dennis, Brian Jones, Peter King

Sports Committee

James Grant (Chairman), Ross Compton, Rob Rayner, Jehan Sherjan, Nick Troen, Ian Turley, Jack Turner

Advisory Council

John East (Chairman)

David Abulafia, Richard Atkinson, Peter Baker, Simon Bishop, Jon Blair, Paul Cartledge, Mike Colato, Ross Compton, Richard Cunis, Tim Cunis, Alan Day, John Dennis, John Ellis, Robert Engel, Brian Fall, Dean Godson, Mike Graham, Stephen Greenhalgh, Harry Hampson, Richard Holman, Brian Jones, Peter King, Charles Madge, Alan McLean, Jon Morgan, Francis Neate, Rob Rayner, Tim Razzall, Bernard Rix, James Rolfe, Mike Seigel, Nigel Thompson, Ed Vaizey

Archivist

Kelly Strickland

Accountants

Kreston Reeves LLP

Trustee

OPC Trustee Company Limited

OLD PAULINE SPORT

RUGBY

The 2023/24 league campaign turned out to be a season of two halves for OPFC. In midseason the 1st XV stood third in the league, with two closely contested fixtures already played against the top two clubs. This included an exhilarating 19-19 draw against eventual league winners, Old Hamptonians. That same day featured a double header with the 2nd XV facing Old Cranleighans, and a celebration of the ‘Global Ball Pass’ initiative, commemorating 200 years of rugby making its mark in Thames Ditton before being ‘passed’ on to neighbouring clubs.

In December, a £5,000 donation was formally presented to Jason Leonard’s Atlas Foundation, highlighting the club’s dedication to charitable causes away from the pitch.

We also saw an influx of new players joining the ranks with strong representation from recent School

leavers. In total 26 alumni donned the club’s colours this season including 12 players in their debut season. Harry Strauss (2013-18), Josh Thomas (2018-23) and Josh Zillig (2014-19) were amongst those making meaningful contributions under the leadership of Max Hart (2013-18).

The long layoff over Christmas did us no favours. A challenging time in terms of injuries and availability put pressure on playing numbers, and our ability to put out our best 1st XV each week. Having been in the top 3 in January, a faltering display in the latter half of the season meant a mid-table finish of 5th place. It was good to end the league campaign with a positive result against Old Guildfordians.

A mini cup run in the Papa John’s Cup also saw us reach the quarter finals. 

GOLF

The St Paul’s team, captained by Charlie Prior (1995-2000), was unlucky in the Halford Hewitt Public Schools tournament this year, losing in the first round to eventual finalists Bedford, and then in the quarter final of the plate to eventual finalists, Epsom. Charlie and his partner Robbie Lyon (2007-12) continued their outstanding winning record as a pair.

Mike Rowley (1969-74) is this year’s society Captain and hosted a very successful trip to Dorset’s finest courses, before organising an excellent Captain’s Day at Brokenhurst Manor. Nick Cardoza (1983-88) will take over as Captain in 2025.

Members have enjoyed an excellent season so far, with the Spring Meeting at Fulwell seeing Ben Turner (2012-17) win the Haswell Bowl for best scratch score, and Oli Gilford (2006-11) win the Just Cup handicap stableford trophy. The Summer Meeting was once again held at the wonderful Hayling GC. Robert Silverstone (1964-68) won the Mercers’ Cup handicap prize and James Grant (1995-2000) claimed the Sayers Cup for best scratch score. The Autumn Meeting at Brokenhurst saw Toby Bain (1967-72) scoop the Walker Cup and Courlander, while the scratch North Cup was won by Chris Vallender (1960-64). Our matches against alumni associations from other schools have seen mixed results, but without exception wonderful days out on some very high-level courses.

Old Pauline Golf is for all ages and all abilities. We are very pleased to have seen several younger members join the society during the last couple of years and would love to continue that trend. To join, or for more information, please email Hon. Secretary James Grant on jsg@stpaulsschool.org.uk 

Robbie Lyon and Charlie Prior during the Halford Hewitt

OPFC 1st XV

CRICKET

2024 saw an unprecedented three captaincy changes for the league teams and a tough season for the 1st and 2nd XIs, who finished ninth, but success for the 3rd XI who finished third and gained promotion. As ever, we are affected more by our own numbers available than by the strength of any opposition; 107 players took the field in league games between early May and the end of July, across the three teams. In one respect, having such a large pool of players is a huge positive; however, having so many of them as occasional players makes life difficult for the captains. We were, however, able to fulfil all fixtures and thanks go to Captains Chris Berkett (2005-10), Yas Rana (2009-14) and Olly Stoddart for an enormous amount of graft. An honourable mention too for Marton Ribary who has gleefully taken on much of the administration.

The Sunday team had more fixtures than ever this year, despite their ‘we don’t travel’ rule. To be honest, when you have facilities like those we enjoy at Colets and most of the team live locally, why would you travel? Huge credit to Charlie Malston (1995-2000) who leads the team by example but also very shrewdly, making sure that all get a game. A highlight this year was Charlie’s ten-year-old son Al bowling in tandem with OPCC legend Cliff Holland, aged 78.

Fortunes for the 1st and 2nd XI did improve with the return of university students, and the 3rd XI was described at one point as a crèche – Chris Bond (1990-95) making a welcome return to the club and bringing along his two sons and their friends. It is very encouraging to see so many young OPs playing for us and playing well. A word for the old guard however: Chris Bond scored 125* against Weybridge Vandals, while Tom Peters (1989-94) pipped him with 127* against Chessington. 

FOOTBALL

The 2023/24 season ultimately proved to be a very successful campaign for OPAFC. Winning the Spirit of Football award was a fitting way to celebrate two promotions and the launch of a new team.

The 1st XI missed out on glory in the LOB Cup final but secured promotion to the Senior One South Division – just one rung below the Premier League. This is testament to the efforts and commitment the squad has shown over recent seasons, bolstered by recent OP additions including Raef Jackson (2013-18) and Joey Brian (2015-20) – big thanks must go to outgoing captain George Mayo (2010-15) for all his efforts.

With careful shaping of the squad, including Forbes Farlow (2014-19) and Alex Yu (2014-19) back from university, along with Dom Satchell (2016-21) playing in between his university footballing commitments, the 2nd XI also secured promotion to its highest ever position, which sees it playing in Intermediate South Division next season. This was a fitting way for Ciaran Harries (2006-11) to finish his successful tenure as captain, and he will now take over the reins as Chairman. The 2nd XI will be captained by Sam James (2012-17) and Ted James (2014-19) next season.

The 3rd XI finished fifth in Division 5 South, with credit to captain Matt Phillips for assembling a large squad that is committed to playing attacking football.

The Vets secured two victories in their last three matches to end the season on a positive note and look forward to next season's campaign.

The Club continues to go from strength to strength and is delighted to confirm the addition of a fourth Saturday XI from next season, which will be captained by Keir McLain (2014-19) along with help from Harry Cotterell (2014-19).

The footballing season began on 14 September. As always, the club is grateful to be contacted by individuals looking for a team so, please email Ciaran.Harries@ btinternet.com if you are keen to get involved. 

OPCC

OPAFC

In Memoriam

John ‘Roy’ Axon (1941-47)

Nigel B Backhouse (1959-64)

Krishan Nath Bhaskar (1959-63)

Peter T Bulbeck (1953-56)

Geoffrey A J Cameron (1954-59) (Former Old Pauline Lodge Master)

Christopher J A Curtis (1949-55)

Anthony I Cutler (1947-52)

Edward Duckett (1950-54)

John Mark Elvin (1952-55)

Michael ‘Anthony’ Epstein (1937-39)

Mark B Gifford-Gifford (1950-55)

Andrew Goodfellow (1953-58)

Andrea Greystoke, née Friedman (Former Teacher)

Peter M Kraushar (1947-53)

Jeremy P F Mew (1956-62)

Brian R P Murray (1946-51)

Geoffrey Nolan LVO (1946-51)

Clive Oatley (1951-56)

Geoffrey R O’Connell (1953-58)

David Y Prichard (1950-54)

Geoffrey James Samuel (1944-49)

Anthony F Sherlock (1951-56)

Aubrey P Silverstone (1954-57)

A M ‘Sandy’ Stagg (1957-62)

John H A Sterling (1948-52)

Clive N B Walton-Evans (1949-53)

John ‘Rodney’ White (1956-61)

Alexander G Wilson

(Teacher of Classics, Associate Director of Pauline Relations 1998-2022)

Alan J Winter (1947-51)

John Roy Axon (1941-47)

Dr John Roy Axon was born 15 May 1929 to Dr and Mrs Frederick Axon, a GP in Wembley. He went to Colet Court and then onto St Paul’s from 1941-47. He was evacuated to Crowthorne, Berkshire, during the war. He boxed and played rugby and cricket for the School, earning his cricket colours.

His two years National Service were with the Royal Signals, where he boxed for the army, before being accepted as a medical student to St Thomas’ Hospital. He moved to Colchester, where he became a General Practitioner in 1960.

His knowledge of amateur boxing and understanding of the injuries involved was recognised in the North Essex and then East Anglian region, where he became doctor for various competitions.

Roy became the medical officer to the British Amateur Boxing Association in the early 1980s which took him on trips across Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain. He was asked to be the team doctor for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, before being promoted to British Olympic Association Chief Medical Officer which required preparation of the medical backup for both the 1988 Seoul and 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, as well as representing athletes in positive drug cases.

Roy was also appointed Chief Medical Officer for the 1988 Calgary and 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, as well as the 1986 Edinburgh and 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games. He was appointed President of the Colchester Medical Society in 1990.

His hobbies included motor racing in the 1960s, followed by sailing based at West Mersea, which became his main passion. He took up golf in his 60s at Colchester Golf Club.

Roy died of dementia on 8 April 2024 leaving his wife, Sarah, two daughters, Susan and Joanna, and two sons, both Old Paulines, Jeremy (1975-79) and Simon (1984-89).

Jeremy Axon (1975-79), son

Krishan Nath Bhaskar (1959-63)

Krishan Nath Bhaskar was born of an Indian father and an English/South African white mother in Hampton Court. He studied at LSE, where he obtained first-class honours and higher degrees. He then taught at LSE, University of Bristol and was appointed to a founding Chair at the University of East Anglia. His subject area was Economics/Finance, specialising in the use of computers in accountancy, finance decision-making and business. He published 56 books and wrote several hundred articles, papers and monographs.

His professional interest in the motor industry started with a research grant given by the Joseph Rowntree Social Trust to study what to do with the then stalled British Leyland – a former automotive engineering and manufacturing conglomerate. At various stages in his career he worked closely with GM, Ford, Jaguar, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Fiat, VW Group, as well as a variety of agencies and banks.

After his divorce in 1994, he moved to Nice and Monaco before working from Luxembourg and then the French Riviera. He liked the slightly warmer climate there, though missed the camaraderie and friendship of the UK.

Krish met Lindy in late 2011 and they married some years later. They enjoyed their time and travels together, particularly to Paphos in Cyprus.

Krish continued to be involved in many sectors and disciplines right up to his passing. He had only completed his last client report four days before he died and had not long completed what would be his final book. In his later years, Krish had returned to his academic roots, helping to support schools with their marketingbased challenges. He had also crossed into supporting food and drink brands and in the past year had enjoyed working with a UK-based wine client specialising in fine wine from California and France –possibly his dream job as he got to try some of the wines too.

Krish leaves behind his wife Lindy, daughter Carol, son Michael, and the grandchildren.

Lindy Barnes, widow

Geoffrey Allister John Cameron (1954-59)

Geoffrey Allister John Cameron, who died on 1 April 2024, was Bursar at St George’s School, Windsor Castle from 1995 to 2009. He was 82 years old.

Geoffrey was born in Egham and was educated at Staines Prep and then followed his father and brother to St Paul’s. With his father, Douglas Cameron, he was a long serving member of the Old Pauline Lodge.

When he left School, he joined Barclays Bank where he worked for 32 years before taking an early retirement. This was his first retirement! He saw an advertisement for the position of School Bursar at St George’s School (the choir school of St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle), applied for it and was delighted to get the job. When he joined the school, there were just 65 pupils, the swimming pool was outside and green, and there was no pre-prep. By the time he left in 2009, there were over 300 pupils, the swimming pool was enclosed and the pre-prep was built and thriving. He loved the school and was very proud of his achievements improving its fabric.

His second retirement came when he was aged 69. He then went on to become Financial Director of St George’s House in Windsor Castle for the next three years before his third and final retirement in 2012.

He was also a steward at St George’s Chapel and supported a number of local charities and voluntary organisations for many years.

Geoffrey leaves his wife Jean, son Nicholas, daughter Lucy and four grandchildren. His son Alexander pre-deceased him in 2014. The Cameron family

John Mark Elvin (1952-55)

Mark Elvin was born in Cambridge in 1938 to Mona (née Dutton), a psychologist from California, and Lionel Elvin, a professor of English at Trinity Hall. The family had a socialist background: Lionel’s father, Herbert, was the general secretary of the National Union of Clerks and in 1937 was president of the Trades Union Congress.

Nonetheless, when Mark returned from his wartime childhood evacuation to California, Lionel sent him to the feecharging Dragon School in Oxford. When the headmaster raised an eyebrow, Lionel is said to have replied: “For some boys I can make an exception.”

For Mark it was then on to St Paul’s and King’s College, Cambridge, to read history. His PhD was The Gentry, Democracy and Shanghai 1905-1914 and he taught at Harvard before lecturing at the University of Glasgow in Chinese economic history. In 1973 he moved to Oxford to teach Chinese history at the university with a fellowship at St Antony’s College.

Lionel Elvin had known the philosopher Charles Stevenson at Cambridge, and through him Mark met his daughter, the poet Anne Stevenson. They married in 1962 and had John, a scientist, now at the Royal Society, and Charles, a businessman who died in 2022. The couple divorced amicably in 1984.

By the late 1980s Mark wanted to free up more time for research. He took a position at the Australian National University in Canberra, as well as a second wife, Dian Brooks, an administrator. Never happier than living in the bush surrounded by wallabies, wombats and eucalyptus, he stayed until he retired in 2006. A renowned sinologist in Britain, the US and China –where he was known as Yi Maoke – Mark was fluent in French and classical Chinese and Japanese.

Alongside chess, he loved – and wrote – poetry and left behind a haiku for his wife, To Dian: “Mourn not. Your smile alone/ makes life worth having lived. I’m gone./ Go on.”

Adapted from the obituary published in The Times on 20 April 2024

Michael Anthony Epstein (1937-39)

Michael Anthony Epstein was born in 1921, the younger son of Mortimer Epstein and his wife Olga. At St Paul’s he developed an interest in biology and won an exhibition to read medicine on a wartime shortened course at Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed his clinical training at Middlesex Hospital medical school during the Blitz.

Called up in 1945, he served for two years in India with the Royal Army Medical Corps, reaching the rank of captain, before joining the Bland-Sutton Institute in 1948 as an assistant pathologist, having realised that his interests lay in laboratory rather than clinical medicine.

For several years he worked on Rous sarcoma, a little-known virus that causes cancer in chickens, in the belief that lessons could be learnt that would eventually be relevant to human cancer. He was at a lecture on children’s cancers in tropical Africa by the Irish ‘bush surgeon’, Denis Burkitt, in 1961 when he had his Eureka moment. After barely ten minutes, he realised that a tumour affected by climate must have a biological cause. “From that moment in the talk I decided to stop what I was doing and only work on that,” he told the authors of Cancer Virus: The Story of Epstein-Barr Virus (2014).

In 1950, Epstein married Lisbeth Knight although they separated in 1965. Together they had two sons, Michael and Simon, and a daughter, Susan. All survive him, along with his long-term partner Kate Ward.

He was promoted to reader in experimental pathology in 1965 and three years later became Professor of pathology at the University of Bristol. In 1986 he moved to Wolfson College, Oxford, remaining there until he retired in 2001, having dedicated the rest of his working life to EBV research, particularly production of a vaccine.

Professor Sir Anthony Epstein FRS, pathologist and academic, died aged 102 in February 2024.

Adapted from the obituary published in The Times on 10 February 2024

Peter

Kraushar (1947-53)

Until his fifth birthday on 30 August 1939, Peter lived comfortably in Warsaw. Two days later, the German invasion changed his life forever.

He remained with his grandmother while his parents escorted half the Polish gold reserves out of Poland, expecting to return. The Soviet invasion made that impossible. Peter re-joined his parents eight months later, by which time they had reached Milan. When Italy declared war, the family hid in a remote peasant hut in Tuscany. After Italy’s surrender, a local man killed a German soldier. The reprisals would have been fatal, so we walked 50 kilometres to Florence, hiding until the liberation of Florence a year later.

The family came to England under the Polish Resettlement Act in 1946/47. Our father died soon after, a result of Russian bullet wounds in the 1920 Miracle of the Vistula. Passionate about education, our mother, not knowing how impossible it was, wanted to get Peter into St Paul’s. No money, little English, and a disrupted education leaving him good only at Latin and chess. Fortunately, she found Alan Cook on duty who let him sit the Common Entrance exam, which he failed. To his eternal credit, and that of the School, Cook accepted him, transforming his life. He excelled at Classics, winning a major scholarship to Cambridge.

After National Service, Peter founded KAE, later Mintel, a world-wide marketing consultancy. On retiring, he advised Anglo/American companies on their business ventures in a liberated Poland. His exceptional humanity characterised his life. He helped to found Shelter and the North London Hospice, which he chaired for many years. He was a magistrate, and a mentor for the Prince’s Trust and prisoners. A Roman Catholic, he led numerous worldwide Alpha and prayer groups with his wife. Until three months before his death, he was still helping others and playing bridge, chess and tennis.

He is survived by his wife of 65 years, three sons and a daughter.

Chris Kraushar (1953-58), brother

Jeremy Paul Frederick Mew (1956-62)

I first met Jeremy Mew (known as J P Mew at School) as a speedy winger for the under 14s and D Club. He was then struck down by polio, for which the treatment at that time was being kept immobile in bed. He eventually stayed on an extra year at School to complete his studies. On the rugby pitch, we met up again in the 3rd XV of 1959 and 1960, by which time he had become an open side wing forward, having for good reason lost some of his speed.

We both joined the Boat Club under ‘Fred’ Page and rowed together in the Spring of 1959 for the Colts A crew. He moved through the 3rd and 2nd VIIIs, and we next rowed together in the Henley VIII of 1961. In his ‘extra’ year, he was Captain of Boats.

He went up to St Edmund Hall in 1963 to read Geography, rowing for the college and gaining five oars in the process. He also set up a Saddle Club, riding in the mornings and rowing in the afternoons. He gained a good degree, and then a Dip Ed, after which he joined the Royal Navy before taking up a lectureship at York University. This gave him a base from which to enjoy the Lake District, where he restored a 17th century farmhouse he called home.

In the late 1990s, Jeremy moved down to Sussex to be near his widowed mother. From there, he curated his father’s jewellery designs (some of which were for the Royal Family) and water colours, all now with the V&A. He had only just completed this project when health issues became more of a problem. Despite inheriting the incurable condition known as Huntingdon’s Chorea, his physical decline was not matched by any loss of mind, nor spirit or humour. The bravery he had shown overcoming childhood polio was also there in his final days.

Peter Driscoll (1956-61), friend

Geoffrey Nolan was born in February 1933. He attended St Paul’s just after the war but continued his relationship with the School for many years afterwards, firstly via the Old Pauline Cricket Club and in later days with the Golf Society.

The following stories of his time with the Cricket Club are mostly second-hand. They may not be entirely accurate, but they are entertaining, nonetheless.

The underlying theme was that he was an excellent cricketer. An opening batsman, captain, and wicket keeper at various times. He had a tendency to bark at his teammates, but was remembered by all for his wonderful, and loud, sense of humour.

In the 1960s the team had a two-day match Geoffrey was very keen to attend, but he had been recently posted to New York to live and work. Nonetheless he flew back to London for the weekend just so he could play. He opened the batting on both days and proceeded to be out for a duck in both innings. And then flew back to New York.

More than one person commented on how his arrival at the boundary often seemed to precede an OP disaster. It was great that the dispiriting collapses, dropped catches or whatever it was, did not deter him, and he was always good company in the bar afterwards.

In his final season, before retiring to golf on turning 50, he even managed to score a century in one game; an increasingly confused opposing team watched the OP team play well past the point they should have declared if there was to be any chance of a result in the match.

Geoffrey did not quite make it to his 91st birthday. He leaves his son, Chris (1983-88) and three grandchildren Fin, Theo, and Edie.

Chris Nolan (1983-88), son

Geoffrey Nolan LVO (1946-51)

Geoffrey James Samuel (1944-49)

Geoffrey Samuel had major careers as a teacher, as a JP and as a local councillor. He lived his early life in Chiswick and moved to Twickenham in 1940. He was a classicist at St Paul’s before getting a place at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he studied PPE, chaired the Labour Club and was on the committee of the Union.

He became a teacher, was appointed Deputy Head of Stanmore Sixth Form College in 1969; and then as the first head of Heathland School, Hounslow, where he was from 1973 to 1996.

In 1957, he was elected to Twickenham Council and served until 1978 as a Labour Councillor, after 1964 on the reorganised LB Richmond upon Thames. He became the Leader of the Labour group.

The next 18 years were devoted to making Heathland School outstanding. He also served as a JP and was a demon bridge player.

After retirement in 1997, he was elected to London Borough (LB) Richmond upon Thames in a by-election as a Conservative. We really got to know each other when we were Deputy Leaders of our respective groups. We always got on well. He was immaculate and was a ferocious but fair debater. After 2010 he again become Deputy Leader of the Council until 2017 and retired from this in his late 80s.

He continued as a councillor for Hampton North ward and was the only Tory re-elected in the 2022 local election.

He is survived by his second wife, Lona, whom he met through teaching. I asked her for some thoughts and she wrote:

“He remembered vividly the School being evacuated to Crowthorne during the war years and how he had to ride his bike from Twickenham. It is hard to think of Geoffrey on a bike riding that far.”

When he died, he was the oldest serving councillor in London, and probably in the country.

Serge Lourie (1959-64), Former Leader of Richmond upon Thames Council

Aubrey Silverstone (1954-58)

Aubrey was a war baby born in 1940 in West Hartlepool. He spent the first 12 years of his life there and attended Rosebank School.

On the way down to live in Wimbledon he spent a year or so in Leicester and attended the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys. From there he gained entry to St Paul’s, where he ended up in the Classical VIII forms during the Cotter Cruikshank era. He also played rugby and boxed. He played rugby for the OPFC up to a mature age. He was known as ‘Tiger’ Silverstone, the tiger in the loose. He was so fearless, he often ended up in the hospital in Roehampton after a match with various facial injuries. He also attended a boxing gym into his 60s.

After School, he attended King’s College Durham, which became Newcastle University. He studied primarily Economics with a view to accountancy as a profession. He never completed the course, it was just not for him, and he returned to London to take up articles at Thornton Baker, an accountancy firm. Although he worked as an accountant, he had no passion for it, unlike classics and the arts.

Aubrey was very religious and devoted much time to Jewish studies. He enjoyed playing the piano, where he achieved Grade 8. He loved Grand opera and also had an obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan. He also enjoyed travelling and would often take himself off somewhere, including round the world in 1993 for 10 days just to see an old school friend in New Zealand.

Aubrey was quirky and eccentric. He was a gentle, caring, kind individual who would do anything for anyone. He also had a terrific sense of humour.

Dementia is a terrible disease and Aubrey also lost his younger sister Janet to Alzheimer’s in 2022. He spent his last 18 months in a residential home where he seemed happy.

Robert Silverstone (1964-68), brother

Alexander G Wilson (Teacher of Classics, Associate Director of Pauline Relations 1998-2022)

Alex Wilson, who retired last year, first came on the Pauline scene as a cover teacher in the Classics department in 1991. After his time as a pupil at RGS Newcastle, and a degree course at Exeter, he had been pursuing a career in Law but was looking for a change of direction. He made an immediate impact in the classroom and in his sport coaching, especially Fives, and created a memorable win for the staff cricket team by (despite his known excellence as a wicket-keeper) bowling out the KCS professional.

He found a post teaching at RGS Guildford but continued his connection with St Paul’s by racing up the A3 to help with coaching our Fives teams. When a vacancy occurred in the Classics department in 1998, he was persuaded to apply for a post to which he was eminently suited. He was appointed Undermaster for the Lower Eighth in 2001 and graduated to the Upper Eighth in 2004. Clear-sighted and firm in his dealings with miscreants, he was also noted for his generosity, characterised by the large and colourful collection of ties in his office, available for loan to those who arrived for School sartorially underprepared.

In 2017 he moved to a new role in Alumni relations, building on a number of contacts he had made over the years. He maintained dealings with current pupils by his involvement with the First XI, and in this capacity, he could claim involvement with some very successful tours to Sri Lanka and South Africa. While he was a man of surprises (his office was home to some improbable purchases of antique furniture), he was a schoolmaster dedicated to the well-being, character and success of his pupils.

Alex’s untimely death prompted a mass of tributes from former colleagues, pupils and their parents, all recalling his generous and humane approach, and his commitment to St Paul’s, many saying he was one who made the School such a special place.

There is a fuller obituary in The Pauline 2023/24.

Peter King (1967-71), friend and colleague

Remembering Sydney 2000: Simon Dennis (1989-94) becomes the first Pauline Olympic gold medallist

Team GB Magazine in 2016 wrote: ‘Coming into Sydney 2000, Team GB had not tasted victory in the men’s eight since the Leander crew beat the fellow British boat from New College, Oxford at Stockholm in 1912.

But that all changed on the waters of Penrith Lakes in the closing race of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Regatta. Made up of Andrew Lindsay, Ben Hunt-Davis, Simon Dennis, Louis Attrill, Luka Grubor, Kieran West, Fred Scarlett, Steve Trapmore and Rowley Douglas, the Team GB crew had certainly not had it easy to reach the final, losing to the Australian eight in their opening heat and having to work their way through repechages.

But if they had been caught cold in their heat, there was certainly no repeat in the final as they exacted sweet revenge on the Australians with a performance widely regarded to be one of the most powerful displays of eights rowing of all time.

Having grabbed an early lead, the British crew – world silver medallists the year before – maintained the advantage all the way to the line but they were made to sweat as the chasing pack, led by the Australians, closed in on them.

But hang on they did with Trapmore reliving the golden moment. He said: “We were wound up like a bull before he goes into the ring to meet the matador. As a group, we just decided that this was going to be our day, and that is what happened. Going into the last 500 metres where the public grandstand began, I just

couldn’t believe the noise levels. It was so loud I couldn’t even hear the cox. His face was bright red and his veins were bulging out but I could only see his mouth moving up and down.”

The determination to win was seemingly infectious with Scarlett also revealing the confidence in the boat. He said: “We knew we were in front. We were just going as fast as we could. We knew we’d get it.”

Born appropriately in Henley, Simon started rowing at St Paul’s coached by Michael Streat. His first international appearance was in 1994 in the Great Britain eight at the Junior World Rowing Championships, where he won a bronze medal.

After St Paul’s Simon studied Zoology at Imperial College London followed by Human Evolution and Behaviour at University College, London. After he retired from international rowing he returned to Imperial as Chief Rowing Coach. In 2005 Simon started teaching Biology at Shiplake College before moving to Marlborough College in 2009. At Marlborough he has been Head of Year as well as a Resident House Tutor. He has coached rugby, netball, athletics, tennis and kayaking.

Following the Olympic success, Simon was awarded an MBE and

became a Vice President of the OPC. His father-in-law, father and brothers are Old Paulines. 

Editorial Board: Steve Trapmore coached the 2024 eight to a gold medal in Paris. The evening before the final, the 2000 crew sent a message to this year’s Olympians.

Simon Dennis

Neil Wates (1999-2004) meets

Laurence and Oliver Gilford

“I was at the Old School – just before the move to Barnes. It was a wonderful building and I was really upset that they demolished it. It was a Waterhouse building; he designed the Natural History Museum and many other iconic buildings. But it all ended with a dumb deal with the local council, all very political and a needless loss.”

Looking back on his education, Laurence Gilford (1963-67) values place and situation as much as content and tone.

“I think one of the greatest things about St Paul’s is the tradition. You know you are part of it, this long history of very famous people and of great learning. The School gives you a confidence, I think part of that confidence comes from the tradition, and that is made manifest in the surroundings.”

Oliver (2006-11), Laurence’s son, agrees. “When I used to hear about this, I would feel a little disappointed that I didn’t go to that building as well. Many of the well-known public schools have been in the same place for a long time, and there is a legacy alongside that history which links the generations. I was in the unfortunate ‘gap’ immediately prior to the new development at Barnes. My last year in the Upper Eighth common room was also the last year of the Upper Eighth common room itself. We knew it was being demolished and we may have slightly taken matters into our own hands in terms of getting a head start on the builders. I took a seat home as a souvenir. I have to say I think the School is beautiful now. I wish it had been in my time.”

It is no surprise given his appreciation for the surroundings, that Laurence has fond memories of St Paul’s. “I thoroughly enjoyed my time at School,” Laurence shares, “The teaching was excellent, and the camaraderie was strong. Of course, there were always boys on the fringe, but overall, it was excellent.” The swinging sixties presented both opportunities and distractions. With the vibrancy of the King’s Road just a bus ride away, the allure of the era was irresistible. “I got very poor A Level grades,” Laurence admits with a chuckle, attributing it to the distractions of the time. Too busy partying to read set texts. Despite his B and two Ds at A Level, he managed to secure a place at Birmingham University, where he studied Law.

Laurence’s modest academic record at School belies his career accomplishments. He speaks five languages and, as one professional profile puts it, ‘has a zest for life that is almost palpable’. And with good reason. He completed his legal training – Articles of Clerkship, as was – in London, but prior to taking a place at a commercial litigation firm in the City, he took a trip by sea to Brazil alongside his father’s shipment of whisky. The

Oliver Gilford

Laurence Gilford

son of a wine merchant and whisky broker, he had ideas to follow in his father’s footsteps, but “My father put an end to that; he said a professional career would be more stable.” The next six months were spent in Sao Paulo, where immersion made him fluent in Portuguese. Why a career in law when there was so clearly a polyglottic aptitude? “My best friend at School decided he was going to be a lawyer, so I did the same!” By twenty-six he was a Partner in his firm and represented Selfridges, William Hill, Currys, Dixons and Mappin & Webb in both commercial litigation and employment disputes.

Laurence then decided to set up his own business specialising in insurance litigation. “We started out from scratch, so it was a big risk. We all had business connections, but we were setting out anew, with empty desks and empty filing cabinets,” he remembers. A worrying and stressful time, but Laurence credits St Paul’s with providing him the skillset to cope. “School gave me clarity of thinking but also, I think, the most valuable thing for me – good communication skills. I’m very much a people person. And I think my social skills, which were also honed by St Paul’s, have enabled me to relate to people. There are many very good litigators, and they could all do the job well but in terms of getting clients and developing a business, I think the confidence I got from School gave me an edge.”

Laurence brokered a merger with a rival operation, Kennedys in 1999. He retired as a Partner in 2014 but stayed consulting for two years, then continued with other part-time roles as a Deputy Judge on the South Eastern Circuit (Civil and Family) from 1991 to 2020 and six years as board member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Laurence values his education highly and it was an opportunity he wanted his children to have. His eldest son, Alex, was diagnosed with dyspraxia aged nine. He was undergoing (very successful) occupational therapy during the applications for secondary schools, but the headmaster of the boys’ prep school thought he might struggle with some of the rigour of St Paul’s. Laurence, and particularly Oliver,

fundamentally disagree with this. “I think he actually would have done very well at St Paul’s.”

Oliver’s memories of the School are marked by a modern approach to education that balanced academic rigour with extracurricular activities. “I found it a very modern School,” he notes. “There was an understanding that you would do your best academically, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. They wanted you to do sport, music, drama, and all those other things.” His was a School career that involved sport (1st pair in tennis) as well as the creative arts. He was in an indie band and set up JobSoc, which brought in figures from the world of business to talk. Under his tenure it featured Waheed Ali and David Ross, “and we got Gordon Ramsay because one of the boys lived on the same road as him. What privilege! His talk was very popular.”

“The School gives you a confidence, I think part of that confidence comes from the tradition, and that is made manifest in the surroundings.”

Father and son share a common modesty. “I wasn't the coolest kid in School,” says Oliver “I could get on well with people. I had a great time but I lost my academic vigour after GCSEs. I remember sitting my final chemistry A Level on the same day Glastonbury started. I turned up to the exam in a festival ready outfit and my tent and wellies were in my car. I think looking back I might be guilty of losing focus. But at least it wasn’t a B and two Ds.”

Oliver like his father travelled after School – around South America with two OPs after a gap year scheme at Accenture. A degree from Exeter University, where he set up the Comedy Society, complete with a couple of full runs at the Edinburgh Festival. Comedy is another area in which he flourishes – acting as MC at the Old Pauline Comedy Night earlier this year.

The interest in the performing arts has informed his professional life. After university, he started at Avalon Productions, who make Spitting Image, Taskmaster and 8 out of 10 Cats. Then he went freelance in TV, as a producer on shows like Big Fat Quiz of the Year and A League of Their Own. At present he is making his own comedy films and is a journalist for TV and Radio.

Both are grateful for the influence of their teachers. Laurence has particular admiration for Colin Davis. Oliver fondly remembers Mr Robson, a maths teacher who made the subject engaging and accessible. “He was fantastic,” Oliver recalls. “He got a group of us who were fairly average at maths to get A at GCSE.” The tutor system also left a lasting impression. Laurence’s tutor, ‘Tubby’ Hayes, and Oliver’s Dr Leversha provided guidance and support that they value above all else from their time at School.

Reflecting on their years at School, Oliver says “You know, I think it’s something I’m proud of and it is something we have bonded over. But it also seems kind of absurd. When you tell people that you went to St Paul’s, it has such a reputation it always draws a ‘woah’ or a ‘oh, wow’ – not in an impressed way, necessarily – but it’s a little reminder that I am associated with somewhere of note. I distinguish it from other very old schools because I think it doesn’t have that stereotypical stuffiness. People come out with the right kind of attitude. The teachers are very, very good at going beyond the curriculum and exploring interesting areas.”

The Gilfords’ narrative underscores the importance of tradition, modernity, and the unique blend of both that defines St Paul’s. Oliver’s journey was also shaped by the legacy of his father’s experience. “I think knowing that dad went there added a layer of pride.” It has lasted into later life, too – “We both have our names engraved on the same trophy, which is nice,” Oliver says, highlighting their shared membership of the Old Pauline Golfing Society. 

And some there be…

Malcolm Sturgess (1947-52)

Ialways enjoy reading Atrium

It is well laid out, interesting and (joy, oh joy!) not 50% sport; only four pages last time. I have a pile of several old Atria. After reading each one I have always intended to write to the Editor, but, suffering from the inertia of old age, not got around to it. The urge to write has always been on the same subject: Atrium is mostly filled with the achievements of a variety of successful, and probably rich Old Paulines. One rejoices with them and with the School at their success. But the OP community must also include countless other people who are neither famous nor rich, but who are probably, like me, proud to have been associated with the School. There are no mountain peaks without foothills, and bright lights cannot be recognised without shadows. In 1952 I sat next to Kenneth Baker (1948-53) as we studied A Level English in Mr Longland’s (1944-61) pokey little room. Thirty-four years later he was appointed Minister of Education, while I was teaching eightyear-olds on a Hampshire housing estate how to play B on a recorder. If I and my 625,000 teaching colleagues in the UK had not been doing things like that, Kenneth would have had nothing to be in charge of. We all count.

We who are neither famous nor rich are not necessarily nonentities or failures, and I have often wondered if there is any way the lesser achievements of the “also-rans”, and their value as members of society, could be recorded. I have read, on occasions, that you do not get enough news from Paulines of the mid 20th century (maybe most of us are dead). Well, this submission may help fill the gap, together with the fascinating contributions from Duncan Kelly (1947-52), Michael Simmons (1946-52) and Richard Johns (1941-48) in the Autumn/Winter 2023 issue. It is they who have finally inspired me to put finger to keyboard. Duncan and Michael are my exact contemporaries,

though I regret I do not remember them; Richard is just slightly older. Simmons, of course, was no nonentity; what, with a Club Colours tie? And Duncan Kelly was not the least sporty of Paulines; I claim that title. My only achievement was to hold the finishing tape for Mr Dowswell (1933-61) in athletics competitions. In the Green (Boxing) Cup, which was compulsory for every boy, I arranged with my opponent to lose as painlessly as possible in the first round.

About six years ago I was preparing to lead a special service in church. I wanted someone to do the readings, someone who could read English properly, not making it sound too sanctimonious nor like a rather difficult school exercise. One week an elegant but otherwise normal-looking person, unknown to me, read the lesson; just what I wanted. I asked him to read at my forthcoming service, which he did, beautifully. And he was wearing an OP tie. For the last three years I have found to my surprise and delight that we have both been working for the same organisation, in very different capacities so our paths rarely cross. I was further surprised when, during a shared meal, my new-found friend revealed that he, too, would put himself in the “also-rans category” with me. I would happily defer to him as superior to me in every way apart perhaps from playing the organ! He is the sort of person whom organisations automatically turn to as figureheads.

There are probably more people than one might expect who do not feel they are amongst the great and the good who fill the pages of Atrium. Under Ivor Davies’ (1950-65) baton we sang Vaughan Williams’ anthem about famous men, who had honour in their generations, and others who have no memorial. Let’s give them one in the pages of Atrium!

There is more to a great school than mere academic excellence. It must have a soul. It must cater for body, mind and spirit, not only in the

Approaching 90 I am still playing the organ and reading for Talking Newspapers. Neither rich nor famous, but fulfilled, I think.

brightest students, but perhaps even more in the lesser lights. I was a lesser light, and I know very well which aspects of my time at St Paul’s benefited me and which didn’t.

I was the youngest boy in the School when I joined, and immature even for twelve. I was asthmatic and short-sighted and not particularly good at anything. After I left, Mr Gawne (1947-77) said, “But you always had character”. In the 1980’s a school inspector began his report by saying, “Mr Sturgess is an interesting person”. Sadly, neither character nor interest can count as an achievement, though they may help in gaining achievements. Rather naturally I made very few friends amongst my fellow students, and it is the members of staff whom I remember most clearly.

The ones I wish to mention are those who, like many of their pupils, rarely hit the headlines. They were not autocrats, but were gentler, kinder people who could see in their lessexalted pupils some glimmer of potential which was worth encouraging. Thank you for that, in alphabetical order, Mr Bennett (194872); Mr Burn (1946-72) who, I think served with my Uncle, another art teacher, at Monte Cassino; Mr Davies; Mr Flewett (1921-53); my Tutor Mr Gawne; Mr Heath (1927-56); Mr Monk-Jones (1928-62); Mr Pretty (1946-53); and Mr Strawson (1947-75). There were others on the periphery of my life, like Messrs. RED Brown (1932-64), Lansdowne (1938-64), Moakes (1920-26 & 1931-67) and Russell Davies (1929-59). Even High Master Dr James (1946-53) was a human being. He once told me his handwriting was not very good because his mother had crushed his hand in a mangle. These were the good teachers in my eyes, and their influence must have been there during my own teaching career, which was not a total failure.

Compare them with Pask (1928-66). He only taught me one thing – how to

be devastatingly rude to an insecure 15-year-old boy struggling with poor health and other issues. He told me to buy an ice cream cart and take it to Clacton, where I would make more money than I ever would as a scientist. Jonathan Miller (1947-53) could worship Pask all he liked. I didn’t worship either of them. I once acted in a performance of Julius Caesar for which Jonathan only painted the scenery. I have the programme to prove it. One cannot teach a child, even a rather pathetic 16-year-old one, by scaring them. Quiet order, a relaxed atmosphere plus a bit of idiosyncrasy, if possible, work better. And every pupil, however unpromising, should be treated with respect, Desmond Tutu-style; he is a human being, with thoughts and feelings. Commings (1931-36, 1946-54 and 1964-76) had tense order, Reed (1947-72), brutal order. The latter once caned me with a cricket stump, letter by letter, to try to teach me how to spell nescerserry. (He succeeded, actually). As for Mr Leng (1949-54), who all too clearly despised me, he would not have known what a yellowhammer was (see below) unless some medieval king ate them for breakfast. He lectured rather than taught, in unvarying tones, and I was too immature to be lectured at.

For a while at School I was in the benign care of Mr Flewett in Classical Special in the Hall – what a lovely old man! There’s nobody remotely like him in teaching nowadays. My parents were then informed that I would better try something other than classics before it was too late. I suppose it is a plus that, starting from scratch, I passed A Level geography after five terms. Certainly, a plus for Messrs. Robinson (1947-55) (sorry – Major) and Bennett.

I did a few other odd things, such as singing in the choir and co-conducting E Club in the club music competition with Trevor Astin (1948-52); entering the Hamilton Cup Competition (a younger student borrowed my

“In 1952 I sat next to Kenneth Baker …. Thirty-four years later he was appointed Minister of Education, while I was teaching eight-year-olds on a Hampshire housing estate how to play B on a recorder.”

“commended” script the following year and never returned it). As a Senior Scout I helped guard the King at the Festival of Britain. And I was confirmed in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1951, after Chris Heath’s inspiring instruction. I suppose I was not quite the least of Paulines, but I often felt I was, like Duncan Kelly (1947-52). I would love to meet Duncan, but that seems unlikely. Should have made a friend of him 77 years ago.

In the summer of 1951, like Richard Johns (1941-48), three of us spent part of the summer holidays assisting on a farm. Not a farm camp; we lodged in the farmhouse. One of the three was Peter Kraushar (1947-53) – see recent Atrium and this magazine’s obituaries. Mr Monk-Jones took us down to Kent in his ancient, open car to make the arrangements. On the way back he suddenly swerved to a halt and murmured, “Yellowhammer.” Teaching is not like that nowadays; nor is learning. Like Richard, we too did stooking, starting about 5am when the thistles were still softened by dew, so did not dig into our arms. The summer of 1951 was very wet, and while the grain often languished, unstooked, we excavated several feet of pig manure from a barn and learned equally dirty songs from the regular farm hands.

A word about the School Scout troop, the 5th Hammersmith. I have never yet seen any reference to Scouting in any Pauline obituary, though it must have helped others to find their niche in life, as it did me. Admittedly, Scouting was a bit peripheral to what SPS stood for (any more so than the Corps?), but my membership of the School troop did as much for me as anything else at school, led as it was by those four great schoolmaster/scouters, Messrs Heath, Pretty, Strawson and Bennett. The slightly friendlier way of life in a Scout troop had no deleterious effect on our respect for these men in the classroom. In my case it probably helped. I may well have been the last

OP to see all four of them, possibly excepting Jack. Not long before he died, I took Chris Heath in the car down to Poole Harbour, where we sat in silence looking towards Brownsea Island, where he had been as a pioneer scout before the First World War. In response to a phone call from Maggie Pretty, I spent a day at James’s bedside in Norwich Hospital, the day before he died, in 2003, I think. At one point, as I held his hand, he briefly regained consciousness and said, “Thank you for timing your visit to suit my convenience”. He sounded exactly as he would have done half a century before. He and Maggie had married late and I think they looked on me as a surrogate son.

After School I had three careers: ten years as an aspiring quantity surveyor; 27 as a teacher and four running the recorded music department in an Ottakar’s bookshop. All entirely unplanned but resulting in three lots of friends and three lots of acquired knowledge. Seventeen of my music pupils are still in touch, the earliest from 1961. Since I retired, I have so far had thirty years of active retirement, filled with music, travel and all sorts of activities. Approaching 90 I am still playing the organ and reading for Talking Newspapers. Neither rich nor famous but fulfilled, I think. I wish my Tutor, Ted Gawne, could be reading this, such a nice man. I was lucky to know him.

I and my two great friends of 77 years’ standing, Roger Freathy (1947-53) and Jeremy Fisher (1948-51), were all in the School scouts. We all became teachers and have all, I think, tried to live lives of Christian love and service. None of us is rich or famous. We shall all be 89 this year and time is running out. I would like to feel that when we go, we shall all be leaving the world a marginally better place than it might have been. And like our richer and more famous brethren, we were all, please note, Paulines. 

Perpetual motion by istenem

After solving the crossword, the coloured squares will read a sequence with no beginning or end.

Look to article with blood boiling (6)

Iowa after double aircon for houseplant (6)

Bert or Ernie could be favourite after small dog (6)

His lurgi found in German flugelhorn (3-3)

Italian responsible for the name of the rose ‘Green’ (3)

Spread butter (not English) across old fish (6)

Girl to abseil erratically (6)

Treat made from half nougat and water (6)

Range of Madagascar (3)

Local upset Barney (6)

Take weapon from mad, mad sir (6)

Selectively frugal oregano aplenty (6)

Minus sixteen (6)

Bewitch vamp (6)

Pluto piano piece is heaven (6)

Two little boys ran (6)

monkey set off to time woodchuck (6)

Beginner heading off to become breadwinner (6)

Saudi money to make bridge in Venice (6)

Grain rhymes with uneven (3)

What can tan grape (3)

Witness witnessed pivotal playground mechanism (6) 18 Rice-shaped pasta eaten by bisexual Russian dog (6) 19 Meanly reclassified as males with no expertise (6) 20 Thingummybob tagged wrong (6) 21 Setback on rest for driver, one who is being examined (6)

Region is said to be more breezy (6)

Old Pauline Club

OPC Merchandise

Did you know that Old Paulines probably drank more than 100,000 cups of coffee last week? Time for an upgrade? Or maybe you need some smart new stationery? Check out the latest additions or the old favourites of the OPC merchandise range at opclub.stpaulsschool.org.uk

DIARY 2024/25

NOVEMBER

8 November

Remembrance Service

10.45am, School

11 November

Real Estate Professional Network

6.30pm, CBRE, W1G

12 November

Edinburgh University Drinks

5.30pm, The Three Sisters EH1

21 November

OP London Drinks

7pm, The Ship EC3V

28 November

Oxford University Drinks

7.30pm, The Cape of Good Hope, OX4

DECEMBER

5 December

St Paul’s Carol Service 6pm, School

14 December

Class of 2024 First Term Reunion 7pm, Jack’s Bar, SE1

FEBRUARY

3 February

Feast Service and Supper

5pm, St Paul’s Cathedral and Mercers’ Hall

APRIL

3 April

Earliest Vintage Luncheon 12 noon, School

JUNE

5 June

Old Pauline Reunions 6pm, School

11 June

Summer Drinks and Comedy 6pm, George IV

JULY Leavers’ Ceremony 5pm, School

For more information, please contact James Grant, Associate Director, St Paul’s Community on jsg@stpaulsschool.org.uk

USEFUL CONTACTS

Old Pauline Club: Tom Arnold, Secretary opclubhonsec@gmail.com

Atrium Editorial Board: Jeremy Withers Green jeremy.withersgreen@gmail.com

Old Pauline Cricket Club: Chris Berkett berkettc@gmail.com

Old Pauline Football Club: Ciaran Harries ciaran.harries@btinternet.com

Old Pauline Golfing Society: James Grant jsg@stpaulsschool.org.uk

Old Pauline Rugby Club: Tim Morris tim.morris500@gmail.com

Old Pauline Fives: Sam Roberts sjr@stpaulsschool.org.uk

Old Pauline Squash: Russell Burns rgburns9984@gmail.com

Colet Boat Club: Sam Turner samueltrnr@gmail.com

OVERSEAS BRANCHES AND HUBS:

Australia: Canberra: Nick Bailey nijilb@bigpond.com

Sydney: Freddie Blencke fredrik.blencke@gmail.com

Victoria: Tristan Kitchener tristan@kitchenerpartners.com.au

Canada: Amir Rahemtulla amirhms_@hotmail.com

Greece: Menelaos Pangalos menelaospangalos@hotmail.com

Hong Kong: Arun Nigam anigam@arunnigam.com

Israel: Michael Horesh mshoresh@netvision.net.il

Spain: Murray Grainger Grainger2008@gmail.com

South Africa: Josh Dovey Josh.Dovey@omgsa.co.za

USA:

New York: Kut Akdogan kut.akdogan@gmail.com

San Francisco: Nick Josefowitz nicholas@josefowitz.com

Washington DC: Quentin Fidance qfidance@googlemail.com