The Roll 2011
duties the rather more specialized tasks required in the Mistress’s Flat and she became very friendly with the occupants, especially with Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. In fact Marlene was friendly with everyone who passed her or whose room she cleaned. All ‘her’ students and ‘her’ Fellows on Woodlands, and many a conference guest, will fondly remember those conversations and the accompanying laughter – whilst being updated on the most recent events at home and in College. After a while her enthusiasm for Girton must have rubbed off on the family, for her two daughters joined her here. Marlene was brought up in Foxton by her grandmother, and attended Melbourn Village College. She worked at Spicers Sawston paper mill and for Burlington Press (who now print this Review) before she married David. They moved to Girton when Trudy was a year old. Once the three children were old enough she did some part-time cleaning locally until she started work in the College. After that we would often see them with her at half term and in the school holidays. At home her life, love and considerable energies and determination focused on her family, her garden and her varied pets, even when these gave trouble. Many of us heard the tale of the cockateel that escaped only to be delivered home safely by bus, having been spotted in a tree by an observant, and presumably athletic, bus driver – a story that unsurprisingly led to Marlene appearing on local television. In 2007 she bravely set about tracing the son that she had, as a teenager, given for adoption. Finding him, his wife and two additional grandchildren gave her great pleasure in the final two years through which she fought her cancer doggedly, returning to College whenever she could. She would always say that Girton had made her feel ‘very welcome’. She most certainly was, and all who knew her miss her ever-welcoming smile. Peter Sparks
Colin Slee 1945‒2010 For a period of almost thirty years, Girton College had a succession of Chaplains who were also curates at Great St Mary’s, and Colin Slee was the first of these. The arrangement was not without its occasional difficulties, but Colin certainly got it off to a good start. Colin was ordained in 1970 and his first curacy was at St Francis, Heartsease, Norwich, where he spent three years. He was in Cambridge from 1973 to 1976, then became Chaplain of King’s College, London, his own old college, and a Tutor in its Theology Department. From 1982 to 1994 he was a Canon Residentiary and Sub-Dean of St Alban’s Cathedral, and moved to Southwark Cathedral as Provost in 1994 (in Southwark, as elsewhere, the title of Provost was changed to Dean in 2000). In Girton, Colin enjoyed friendly relations with all sections of the College, and certainly brightened up the SCR, particularly during the Bumps when, as coach of a College boat, he would appear in the purple blazer he had earned for rowing as an undergraduate in London. Several Girton Chaplains have gone on to attain eminence in the Church, but few have been such fighters as Colin Slee. He became widely known as a radical reformer, and strongly objected to the rising tide of conservative evangelicalism which he saw as 143