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Please send correspondence to: Editor, LSE Connect, Press and Information Office, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Email: lsemagazine@lse.ac.uk. The editor reserves the right to cut and edit letters.
Cambridge days I was delighted to receive just now – for the first time – your magazine LSE Connect (winter 2011). I was most interested to read the letter from Joan Julius (BA History 1945) in which she says about the 50 Plus reunion guest list: “… sadly no one from the Cambridge days. I suppose there are not many of us left.” My fiancée Eloise Smyth (BCom 1946) and I were both at LSE’s Grove Lodge, Cambridge, in 1944-45 and we moved to Houghton Street for our final year in 1945-46. I knew Harold Laski, who supported me for fellowships in the USA. Eloise and I were married at Princeton University in February 1947. We both remain in good health – now aged 85.
Breaking the cycle I read with interest the piece by Anne Power, ‘Fearing for the Future’ (LSE Connect, winter 2011). I sit regularly in both the adult Criminal Court and the Family Proceedings Court (FPC), which deals primarily with children at risk. During the “riots” of last August I also twice chaired benches in the Remand Court. My analysis at the time was that, in the vast majority of cases, the motivation was mob criminality based upon greed, a worrying lack of any moral standards, and the belief, mistaken in many cases, that they were going to get away with it. But that same week I also spent a day in the FPC. One of the cases I had to deal with was an application to take into care three young children who had been found stealing food from neighbours’ dustbins. Their mother, a single parent and product of the care system herself, spends all her money on drink and drugs, and the children are growing up feral. If they don’t steal they don’t eat. Sadly, this case was just one amongst many that we encounter every day. Our task is to try to break this cycle. As Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, frequently argues, it is during the first three years of life that a child’s social values and attitudes are “hard wired” in. I’m not suggesting that all, or even the majority, of the offenders we encountered at the time of the riots are from this type of dysfunctional background. Subsequent studies appear to be inconclusive. But what happened should be a wake up call to us all. Anthony Melnikoff (BSc Econ 1968, MSc 1969), Barnet, Herts, UK
ANY ANSWERS? Catching up, rather late, with suggestions on updating the motto (and putting aside the passing thought that, in the last few years, it must have been, at some point, amended to “to seek to find the funders”), I would like to support Tony Taylor’s suggestion [to change the motto to rerum cognoscere causas et meliorem], which conveys the need to use such knowledge for socially valuable purposes – and in admirably concise form!
Some years ago in London I attended an LSE reunion dinner that brought together the eldest alumni then still living – around 50 people. I visit the UK once a year and look forward to the possibility of attending another “oldies” reunion. Anthony Dawson (BSc Econ 1946), Bedford, MA, USA
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Jeanne Downton (BSc Econ 1950), Lichfield, UK 35 35 II LSE LSE Connect Connect II Winter Winter 2010 2010 II