CAM 67

Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 67 Michaelmas 2012

In this issue:

Concrete Cambridge Hot Chip The name game Tragedy for today Of man born

CAM/67

Contents

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 67 Michaelmas Term 2012

Regulars

Satoshi Hashimoto

Letters Don’s diary Update Diary My room, your room The best...

Secret Cambridge Debate

14

University matters My Cambridge Reading list Cambridge soundtrack 10 A sporting life 11 Prize crossword 12 26

41 42 44

02 03 04 08

45 47 48

Features Marcus Ginns

32

Extracurricular

The name game

14

How do scientists go about naming their latest discoveries?

Lucy Jolin finds that the world of nomenclature is as much art as it is science.

Of man born

18

Dr Jens Scherpe says that legal frameworks that permit only binary identities can have devastating consequences.

Hot metal Marcus Ginns

47 CAM is published three times a year, in the Lent, Easter and Michaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni.

It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For further information contact the Alumni Relations Office.

The opinions expressed in CAM are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the University of Cambridge.

Editor Mira Katbamna Managing Editor Morven Knowles Design and Art Direction Smith www.smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar Publisher The University of Cambridge Development Office 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288

This publication contains paper manufactured

by Chain-of-Custody certified suppliers operating within internationally recognised environmental standards in order to ensure sustainable sourcing and production.

Editorial enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Alumni enquiries Tel +44 (0)1223 760149 contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk www.alumni.cam.ac.uk www.facebook.com/ cambridgealumni @CARO1209 #cammag

Cover: Alexis Taylor.

Photo: ©Tom Oxley /NME/ IPC+ Syndication Copyright © 2012 The University of Cambridge.

Before the desktop publishing revolution, producing a student newspaper was a dirty, smelly and sticky business.

William Ham Bevan speaks to those who still remember Cow Gum and linotype.

Tragedy for today

28

Far from being an elite theatrical form, the classical conventions of tragedy still influence the way we interpret personal and public events, says Dr Jennifer Wallace.

Advertising enquiries Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474 landmark@lps.co.uk Services offered by advertisers are not specifically endorsed by the editor or the University of Cambridge. The publisher reserves the right to decline or withdraw advertisements.

22

Gold Award Winner 2010 Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award 2010

Concrete Cambridge

32

In between the medieval arches and soaring spires you can spy the city’s alternative history – one built in concrete.

Fred Lewsey reports.

CAM 67 01

EDITOR’S LETTER

Your letters

Thrill of the new

W

elcome to the Michaelmas edition of CAM. The return to Cambridge, especially after a long vacation, always seems to me to be imbued with a spirit of adventure.

In libraries and common rooms, on staircases and in the archives, conversation buzzes with the thrill of the new and the unexpected.

This issue of CAM is no different, and is perhaps our most wide-ranging yet. On page 18, Dr Jens Scherpe investigates what it is to be a man or a woman, and asks why family law in most jurisdictions still requires individuals to declare their gender.

On page 14, Lucy Jolin hears why it matters that the planet Uranus was almost called George, and why nomenclature is as much an art as a science.

And on page 28, Dr Jennifer Wallace points out that classical notions of tragedy still define the way we interpret public events in the 21st century.

Elsewhere, on page 22, we delve into the archives to uncover the reality of printing a student newspaper before the advent of desktop publishing.

We examine Cambridge’s alternative concrete heritage on page 32, and make the case for a British Europe, rather than a European Britain (page 26).

Finally, you may also notice a change to our back pages, with the introduction of a new section: Extracurricular. Treats this time include an interview with Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, our new books column, Reading List, and of course the ever-popular prize crossword. On these innovations, as on everything else, we look forward to reading your letters.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

02 CAM 67

was taken in and out by a Hornby Dublo locomotive on 00-gauge track! Research into particle physics in those days was carried out rather more cheaply than nowadays at CERN. Richard Wilson (Trinity 1957)

Olympics

Bun of delights What a delight to learn that Fitzbillies continues to treat students to the exquisite joy of Chelsea buns. In 1975, early in our now 41-year marriage, my wife and I spent an unforgettable year in Cambridge as I studied Public International Law. Our flat was on Grange Road, conveniently situated for what became routine visits to Fitzbillies.

Chelsea buns were our particular favourite, though occasionally we would sample some of the other delicious pastries available. So great was our affection for this Cambridge institution that when we purchased a 10-year-old Austin Minor, we dubbed it Fitzbillie!

David Fleming (Queens’ 1976)

Monumental mushrooms I remember seeing the CockcroftWalton generator in its location in the Cavendish Laboratory, having been briefly shown it in 1956

by Dr Crow – who used to work, so I was given to understand, with Rutherford. At the same time, I was shown a cyclotron, surrounded by steel tanks of water.

However, there was a small gap through which a particle collector

I note that of the 19 athletes hoping to compete in the Olympics, six are listed as engineers and six as scientists. What is it about scientists and engineers that makes them top athletes? Given the amount of time that has to be spent in the lab, it seems even more surprising that they find the time for training.

Peter Burrows (Peterhouse 1960)

Sport, luck There is possibly no other sport that combines luck with skill as does cricket (CAM 66). A batsman might get an unplayable ‘jaffa’ first ball; or he might be dropped first ball and go on to score a century. Millimetres and split seconds can determine whether you hit the ball and get a nick, or miss it and survive. And all this without even taking into account the luck of the weather, which can cause the best-prepared players to feel unlucky because their match is rained off!

Rev Bob Short (Emmanuel 1970) Luck is of fundamental importance to all sportspeople.

Take Usain Bolt. It is pure luck that his parents provided him with the genes that built him in the way they did. Bolt himself had absolutely no say in the matter.

Maurice Winter (Downing 1943) Lucy Jolin introduced her interesting interviews relating to Sport and Luck (CAM 66) with

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to: cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Don’s Diary

Write to us at: CAM, Cambridge Alumni Relations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB. Please mark your letter ‘for publication’.

You can read more CAM letters at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.

Letters may be edited for length.

a popular but mistaken attribution.

The golfer Gary Player was not the first to dismiss the element of luck from his successes. The maxim “The harder I work, the luckier I get” is listed in the Yale Book of Quotations as originating with FL Emerson, and elsewhere with Thomas Jefferson.

It certainly predates Mr Player.

Alan Warren (Corpus 1953)

A moving story Professor Wolpert argues: “We have a brain for one reason only: to produce adaptable and complex movements.”

But brains must have evolved to enable an organism to survive.

To do so surely requires more than mere muscle control; a brain must exist to enable the organism to, say, move towards energy such as food or sunlight. I therefore propose that the purpose of a brain is to predict the future: a particular sequence of movements aids survival, whereas other sequences do not, and the organism dies.

Michael Gage (Caius 1961)

The End is Nigh (again) I am surprised by Dr James’s version of Wells’s views on race (Letters, CAM 66). Of course, in his long career he changed his mind on a number of issues; but chapter 9 of Anticipations (1901) makes it clear that – at least at that time – he held racist views and was willing to contemplate their application. There is a list of inferior types, which in his chilling words, “must go”.

Max Hammerton (Churchill 1970)

Michaelmas, Lent, Easter Your excellent Issue 66 reached me here in Versailles last Saturday 28 July. I notice the cover is marked “Easter 2012”. A moveable feast?

John Penhallow (Sidney Sussex 1963)

Dr Peter Wothers is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College.

O

ne thing that upsets an academic is the assumption that, as soon as the term ends and the students leave, we are on holiday.

If only this were so. For many, the ‘vacation’ presents the best time to get down and do some research. And for me, as a teaching fellow, the lectures never stop.

Take the Easter holidays. Before Lent Term even finishes, I am frantically trying to put the final touches to the demonstration lecture we put on as part of the Science Festival in March.

The mild panic as I wait for my laminaria digitata seaweed to arrive is eventually replaced by the rather unpleasant smell of incinerating algae (though it could be worse – who could forget the odour of distilled horsehair?). However, the intense satisfaction when we see the beautiful purple colour of the iodine extracted from the ashes makes it all worthwhile. Even better, the thousands of schoolchildren and members of the public attending the lectures seem to agree.

Or perhaps they just like the exploding (guncotton) chickens?

Easter Term is always relatively quiet, with just a few supervisions to calm down stressed students.

In fact, the exams are just as stressful for us examiners (well, almost) as we first have to hope students won’t find any errors in the paper, and then face hundreds of scripts to mark.

But exams or not, lectures continue – just not in Cambridge. First, I lecture at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington to a group of teachers on behalf of the Prince’s Teaching Institute, and then later at the Royal Institution, in one of their prestigious Friday Evening Discourses.

In between all of this, I manage to fit in rowing for the College second VIII in the May Bumps.

I always relish this opportunity, which brings Fellows, graduates and undergraduates together to compete as a crew. It’s a shame that, this year, we got over-bumped by the First and Third Boat on the last day.

Finally, the exams, Bumps and May balls are over and the proud parents arrive to see their sons and daughters graduate. This is always a fun occasion – often the first chance we dons get to meet the parents. It can be quite an enlightening event!

As the students leave, my Cambridge Chemistry Challenge committee arrives. We spend the weekend checking over 4,300 scripts that have been sent in from schools across the UK. Taken at the end of the school year “just for fun”,

this competition provides students with a more challenging alternative to the AS papers they have just sat. With this year’s modal mark at around 18 out of 60, students certainly did find the paper demanding; but it is impressive to see 40 students with more than 75%. This group is invited to a residential camp in Cambridge over the summer.

Once the 2,500 certificates are printed and sent off and the committee have left, the UK’s Chemistry Olympiad team come up for an intensive week’s training before setting off to compete in the international competition. Our students acquit themselves admirably, winning two silver and two bronze medals, but the event also provides me with a valuable chance to meet talented students from across the world – a number of whom are either holding offers from Cambridge or have questions about admissions.

Then it’s back to the UK, and a week-long residential course for teachers organised by the Goldsmiths’ Guild, followed by a week-long residential course for students organised by the Sutton Trust. Finally, our Cambridge Chemistry Challenge winners arrive for their course. Irrespective of whether they continue with chemistry at university, it is a real pleasure to teach such an enthusiastic, talented group of students from so many different backgrounds. I hope I will have the pleasure of lecturing to some of them again in the future.

As the students leave, I slump, exhausted, and pleased that my flight is not until tomorrow evening. I finally write this article while waiting for the flight to Australia, having arrived in Singapore two days before and spent a day lecturing to a group of very keen students at the Raffles Institution. In a week’s time, I will be returning to the UK with 10 demonstration lectures behind me and a couple of weeks to prepare myself for the beginning of term. I wonder who will be the first student to ask if I had a nice holiday...

Dr Peter Wothers will be giving the 2012 Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution. The series is entitled The Modern Alchemist and will be broadcast on BBC Four at the end of December.

CAM 67 03

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM UNIVERSITY

Vice-Chancellor addresses Regent House

I

04 CAM 67

Alumni Weekend Over three days in September, the University welcomed back almost 800 graduates for the 22nd Alumni Weekend. With an eclectic programme of lectures, talks, tours and social events, it lived up to its billing as a true festival of the mind.

The opening reception took place in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and guests were afterwards able to tour the galleries and see the spectacular Han China exhibition.

Later on Friday, the “Come and Sing” event proved as popular as ever, with an alumni choir – most of whom had only met that morning – raising the fan roof of King’s College Chapel with Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore.

Saturday saw Cambridge bathed in sunshine.

Lecture highlights included Dr Hugh Hunt on how Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb was recreated 60 years after the Dambusters raid, and Prof Tim Crane on the mental lives of animals. In a first for Alumni Weekend, Dr Allan McRobie even enlisted a nude model to show how mathematics informs both engineering and art.

The Chancellor, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, joined the Vice-Chancellor for a lively talk on “Leading a world-class university”, chaired by BBC journalist Stephen Sackur. At Newnham, meanwhile, Clare Balding swapped sporting tales with fellow College alumna Anna Watkins – who brought along her London 2012 gold medal.

The 2013 Alumni Weekend will take place between 27 and 29 September.

For more information visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend

Ben Hawkes

n his annual address, the Vice-Chancellor summoned the spirit of London 2012, telling Regent House on 1 October that “we too are in a global competition of Olympic proportions”.

Entitled “The scale of our ambition”, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz recognised the success of Cambridge’s sportsmen and women at the Olympics and stressed the importance of the University continuing to compete at a similarly high international level, and thus the key significance of the major new development planned for north-west Cambridge.

“Having been selected, we have a responsibility to run the race as well as we can,” he said.

He highlighted three priorities for the University’s continued success.

“First, Cambridge needs to grow,” he said. “Second, we need to change; and third, we need to ensure that growth and change are informed at every step by our values, our principles and by the spirit and ambition that has seen us flourish for our first eight centuries.”

Academic development should be driven by increasing the number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, the Vice-Chancellor said. He lauded the plans for the north-west Cambridge development, but added: “Our success does not depend on buildings and facilities, but on continued growth and change in our academic staff. Here, support from philanthropy will be vital, and this will be a key component of our next campaign, to build on the success of the 800th Anniversary.”

However Cambridge embraces change, it must remain true to its traditional values, he said. “Our relationship with society, our commitment to academic freedom and to nurturing talent have stood the test of time, and changing them is not on the agenda.”

Events: Festival for the mind

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

Open maths journals launched Cambridge University Press is launching two prestigious open-access journals in mathematics.

Its periodicals division, Cambridge Journals, will make Forum of Mathematics, Pi and Forum of Mathematics, Sigma freely available online.

Both publications will maintain the same high level of peer review as a traditional subscription journal, with standards set by an international editorial board of the highest calibre. Pi will publish papers of broad interest, while Sigma will be home to more specialised articles.

The University Press has agreed to waive publication costs for three years, though authors with access to funds for open-access journals will be encouraged to pay £500. Content will be available from the beginning of 2013.

Visit journals.cambridge.org/forumofmathematics for more information.

OLYMPICS

Cambridge athletes triumph

UNIVERSITY

North-west Cambridge development approved

T

he University has received outline planning permission for a major new development in north-west Cambridge.

Under the ambitious scheme, 1,500 homes for University and College staff, 1,500 homes for sale, and accommodation for 2,000 students will be built on the 150-hectare site.

The plans also include 100,000 square metres of space for research facilities, a community centre, a primary school and a GP surgery.

The site also includes an area of open space almost as large as Parker’s Piece – and around one third of the site will be used as public space for sports, informal recreation and ecological use.

“This development is a major part of the University’s long-term future,” said the Registrary, Dr Jonathan Nicholls.

“It will enable us to remain globally competitive in the market for junior researchers and postgraduates by providing much of the residential and research accommodation the University will need as it grows over the next 20 years.”

All parts of the site will be built to high standards of sustainability, including a transport plan to minimise car use.

Subject to Regent House approval, the first phase of the works will begin in 2013, to be completed by mid-2015.

Following Team GB at the Olympics proved to be edge-of-the-seat stuff – and Cambridge students and alumni played a significant role in Britain’s success.

The first Cambridge medal arrived on 1 August, when rower Tom Ransley (Hughes Hall 2007) won bronze in the men’s eight. Two days later, CUBC president George Nash (St Catharine’s 2008) took a bronze in the men’s pair, and Anna Watkins (Newnham 2001) won gold in the women’s double sculls. They were soon joined by Tom James (Trinity Hall 2002), who won his second consecutive Olympic gold in the coxless four.

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “We were delighted to see so many Cambridge students and alumni competing at the Olympics, and thrilled to see them do so well. If Cambridge were a country, we would be in the top 40 in the medals count!

“Sport has always been an important part of the Cambridge experience, and it makes us all the more determined to push forward with fundraising for the Cambridge Sports Centre.

“We hope this will provide a foundation for future sporting success, encourage greater participation at all levels and form part of the University’s unique Olympic engagement in the future.”

CAM 67 05

UPDATE MICHAELMAS TERM

CAMCard discount at Heffers The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discount is going up from 10% to 15% – a perfect incentive to give books as Christmas presents this year. Shop in person with your CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at alumni.cam.ac.uk /benefits/camcard/bookshops.

CARO E: contact@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

ALUMNI

Go global with the alumni groups directory for 2013

GIFTS

A Light Blue Christmas

There are over 52,000 Cambridge graduates living outside the UK – and if you are one of them, tucked into this issue of CAM you should find the 2013 directory of all alumni groups.

The directory lists contact details for over 400 volunteer-led groups around the world. Between them, these groups organise a vast range of events and initiatives – from skiing to campaigning – and all give a warm welcome to new members.

If you are based in Algeria or Egypt, please note that we no longer have active groups in these locations.

For those interested in re-establishing an alumni group, please contact networks@alumni.cam.ac.uk.

Of course, for those of you in the UK there are still plenty of opportunities to join in with your fellow alumni – the London group, for example, is one of the largest of the University’s alumni groups.

To find out more, download the 2013 directory from our website. alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups

R

E S TA B L I S H E D I N E N G L A N D 1 9 0 5

T

urn Christmas Light Blue with our exclusive range of University alumni gifts. From silk ties to ultra-stylish rings from Eva London and University fountain pens from Onoto, there’s something for all the Cambridge people in your life. Whether to mark the start of a student career, as a celebration of graduation or a PhD, or simply as a special gift to another alumnus or yourself, we can help you find the perfect item. Please note that orders need to be placed by 3 December to ensure delivery

by Christmas. Overseas deadlines and prices vary.

For information and to order, go to alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/merchandise.

06 CAM 67

CAM 67 07

DIARY

MICHAELMAS TERM Global Cambridge November 2012 – March 2013

Cambridge is not just a place – it’s also a worldwide network with a presence on almost every continent, which means you don’t need to be in the UK to participate.

In addition to regular events organised by alumni groups across the world – from boat races and dinners to networking and social events – the Vice-Chancellor regularly traverses the globe to promote the University’s education and research agenda. He endeavours to meet as many Cambridge people as possible, and his next major trip will be to Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia in early spring 2013.

Cambridge alumni are also regularly invited to events around the world with alumni who are members of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) or of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU).

Alumni in North America are supported by the Cambridge in America office, based in New York, where Kathy Lord is Alumni Relations Director. “All alumni – whether based in the US or just visiting – are very welcome at our regular social and networking events,” she says.

“Whether it’s our regular monthly gatherings in Washington and San Francisco or talks by illustrious alumni such as Gillian Tett or Howard Jacobson that interest you, we’ll be glad to see you.”

So how can you find out what’s happening near you? First of all, make sure CARO knows where you are based – that way, we can ensure you are invited to local events. Sign up to the e-bulletin for advance notice of what’s going on.

If you are in the US, get in touch with the North American office (cantab.org). And if you’re looking for something super-local, find out what’s happening near you – whether it’s in Bhutan or inside the Beltway – by visiting our website.

David Semple

alumni.cam.ac.uk

08 CAM 67

DIARY MICHAELMAS TERM

Old friends, new friends

Other events

Christmas networking drinks

CU Wine Society and CamSAN Alumni Wine Tasting

Varsity Rugby

Friday 23 November, 7pm London

Watch Cambridge and Oxford fight it out in the fiercely contested Battle of the Blues at Twickenham this December.

This will be the 131st time the opposing teams will have met, with Cambridge traditionally the stronger team (61 wins to Oxford’s 55). So to join those shouting for the Light Blues, visit www.thevarsitymatch.com for booking and more information. thevarsitymatch.com

10 December, London

Network in style at this drinks and canapés reception held in the exclusive surroundings of Sir Paul Judge’s (Trinity 1968) 18th-floor apartment, overlooking the City skyline.

This annual networking event is a unique opportunity to connect with up to 200 fellow alumni – from those with an established career to those who are starting out.

The evening is kindly hosted by Sir Paul and the Alumni Advisory Board, and has become a firm favourite with recent graduates. This event is open to all alumni and their guests. Tickets are £39 per person. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Join CamSAN, the Cambridge Student Alumni Network and the CU Wine Society for an evening of imbibing and networking in the fabulous surroundings of the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

Alumni and current graduate students will be able to sample a fantastic range of wines, with guidance provided by a range of experts. Tickets cost £25. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

The Art of Modern Calligraphy November 2012 – January 2013 Fitzwilliam Museum A remarkable exhibition of contemporary calligraphy will go on display for the first time at the Fitzwilliam this Christmas.

Featuring work from a new collection of modern calligraphy acquired by the Fitzwilliam in 2008, the show includes pieces in stone, carved wood, glass and ceramics as well as works on paper, parchment and papyrus.

A selection of exceptional works from the Museum’s historic collections will be on simultaneous display in adjacent galleries, including medieval illuminated manuscripts and Islamic ceramics. Admission free. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Thursday 6 December, kick-off 2pm, Twickenham

Winifred Nicholson at Kettle’s Yard 29 September – 21 December

The painter Winifred Nicholson was an important influence on Kettle’s Yard’s founder, Jim Ede – her theories on colour and light, set out in a seminal article published in Circle in 1937, were particularly important.

This exhibition will include works not normally on display, and correspondence between Nicholson and Ede. kettlesyard.co.uk

Save the date!

Cambridge 10 Christmas Drinks Thursday 29 November, 7pm The Commander Bar, London. cambridge10.com

CARO events E: events@alumni.cam.ac.uk T: +44 (0)1223 332288 W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

Cambridge Science Festival 11– 24 March 2013 cam.ac.uk/sciencefestival CAM 67 09

MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM ROOM I 08, NEW COURT, CORPUS

Words Stephen Mackey Photograph Charlie Troman Hugh Bonneville (Corpus 1982) is an actor. As well as starring in the ITV series Downton Abbey as the Earl of Grantham, he recently starred as the organisationally challenged Ian Fletcher in the BBC Olympic spoof Twenty Twelve.

10 CAM 67

Sam Dickson is a first year History student who says that because he didn’t have a gap year before Cambridge, he’d like one afterwards – especially if he can go back to South America. “I’ve been a couple of times before and I love it!”

I

t may be 30 years since Hugh Bonneville last sat in room I 08 but he remembers it well. “I know it’s Oxford where they talk about the dreaming spires, but this room has a magical rooftop view. It’s one of my abiding images, along with the lovely evening light and the sunsets,” he says.

Current resident Sam Dickson agrees, and says that he is always impressed by I 08’s dimensions. “My first thought when I came in was how big it was, because on the JCR website it looks absolutely tiny,” he says. “Wait – so you can see the room online before you come up?” asks an astonished Bonneville. “It’s like TripAdvisor!”

Bonneville remembers cavernous washing facilities (known fondly as “the Crystal Palace”), buttery tickets and a huge – and beautiful – roll-top desk. “It’s probably firewood now,” he muses. “But it was one of those big ones with a roller that went up – like an old banker’s desk, with hidden pockets.”

He also has warm memories of an old gas fire with a latticework grille. “It was blooming cold here in the winter, so sometimes I’d snuggle the bed right up against the fire,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why

It was blooming cold here in the winter, so sometimes I’d snuggle the bed right up against the gas fire.

I was getting blinding headaches until someone pointed out that I was inhaling the gas!

The best... library in Cambridge

Oscar Williams-Grut read History at St John’s How do you choose the best library in Cambridge, a city so full of them?

There are seemingly countless types: College, old, departmental, public, museum and, of course, the UL. To begin with, we can discount College libraries. Some are undoubtedly fantastic, like Caius’s Cockerell and Trinity’s Wren libraries; but really, the only College library you can ever truly love is your own.

That leaves faculty and specialist libraries. And for me, the best of the bunch is one you’ve most likely never been to and possibly never even heard of: the Centre of African Studies Library. A single room on the top floor of the new Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site, it has only eight plain white desks, little more than a dozen Homebaseesque metal shelves, a single computer in the corner and a selfcheckout system that is cranky at the best of times.

If that doesn’t sound promising, let me explain. The top-floor location is perfect: raised above the clamour below, this library is a genuinely peaceful place to work. The room

itself, though sparse, is also quite beautiful. Wide windows give a view out over the entire Sidgwick Site, perfect for people-watching, and fill the room with light even on the greyest of days. The chairs look as though they’ve been lifted from a particularly minimalist space station, and the old study-style lamps are an aesthetic treat.

But what really sets it apart is its obscurity. This is a hidden gem of a library among the many over-popular and overpopulated ones that Cambridge has to offer.

The eight desks are never crowded, and those who frequent the library become familiar faces.

The library may lack the traditional grandeur of the Wren, the holdings of the UL or the space of the Seeley, but it has something else: charm. The monthly newsletter displayed at the desk and the branded African Studies tote bags on sale next to them may seem ridiculous for a department so small, but they make me feel part of a tiny but perfectly formed community.

Steve Bond / Nicholas Hare Architects

I suddenly started getting blinding headaches until someone pointed out that I was inhaling the gas!”

Bonneville wants to know whether Dickson still ‘sports the oak’ – a phrase that has to be explained. “When I was here, most of the rooms had a double door. If the oak door – the outside door – was shut, you were sporting the oak and it meant you didn’t want to be disturbed. And when it was open, it meant you could knock and come in.”

Sadly, Dickson doubts that sporting the oak is likely to make a return. “Everything’s on Facebook now,” he says. “Rather than going to people’s rooms, Hall is the big place to see people. Everyone’s off doing their own thing, and then we all come back for lunch or dinner. And then for about an hour afterwards, you go to the bar.”

Students’ social lives are not the only things to be changed by technology. Buttery tickets are ancient history, replaced by a very convenient University card.

“Everything goes on the card now, so getting an email from your tutor about your bill at the end of term is horrendous. I don’t open an email if I think it’s going to be one of those!”

Dickson says he spends several hours in the Taylor Library each day. “I’m on course for a 2.1 – that would be absolutely fine with me. I work mostly from one to six, with lectures in the morning and rugby or something in the evening. It’d be a shame to come here and just do the work – there’s so much more going on.”

Was Bonneville as diligent? “I’m a classic example of someone who, if they had their time again, would do it properly. I really mean that. My brain is in a position where I want to learn the subject, theology, that I neglected because I was doing, as it turned out, something that prepared me for my career.”

Indeed, Bonneville’s first year was mostly taken up with acting. He remembers plays with directors Dominic Dromgoole (now artistic director of The Globe) and Christopher Luscombe, and hours spent rehearsing in the Corpus Playroom. Dickson says he hasn’t tried any acting, but is kept busy with rugby and has just taken up hockey.

“The hockey is quite painful – running around bent over. I must definitely be doing it wrong. I don’t even know how to play really, so I kind of run around mindlessly, not able to do anything very well. It’s great fun, though.”

This, it turns out, is the kind of sporting life Bonneville can relate to. “I was pretty rubbish. But I did end up rowing in the Gentlemen’s Boat. The rule was that we only rowed after lunch in the summer term.

I did most of my exercise going round to see people!”

CAM 67 11

SECRET CAMB RI DG E

ODE TO TOBACCO Words Becky Allen Illustration Jonny Hannah

W

hen Bacon Brothers shut up shop in 1983, after nearly two centuries of service to smokers, news of its demise was greeted with sadness, if not dismay.

According to the Cambridge Evening News, the shop was “a bit like walking into a vast cigar box, with its wood-panelled walls holding the lovely reek of fine tobaccos. Rows of great china jars held stocks of rare and exotic mixtures. White meerschaums carved as skulls glimmered in dim corners. But the 1980s have caught up with Bacon’s at last. You cannot run a business like Bacon’s on stray students coming in for a packet of Camels.”

Bacon’s beginnings were at Star Alley in the City of London – the firm moved to Sidney Street, Cambridge in 1810. Charles Darwin had lodgings above the shop, which neighbour Thomas Hunnybun recalled was a rowdy place. His father visited the Master of Christ’s College regularly to complain about students’ behaviour. “Sporting young gentlemen over Bacon’s 12 CAM 67

Young gentlemen were in the habit of leaning out of the window and, with tandem whips, flicking the passers-by

were in the habit of leaning out of the windows and with tandem whips flicking the passers-by,” Hunnybun told the College’s magazine.

High jinks followed the firm when it moved to Market Square. As the focus of dozens of ‘rags’, Bacon’s shop front saw “many vicissitudes”, according to the Cambridge Daily News. “After more than one of these occasions, the men’s rooms above the shop have been left with scarcely a sound pane in their windows. Such a scene of excitement was the memorable ‘women’s degree day’ rag of May 1897 [when a proposal to admit women to full University degrees was defeated].”

But today, all that remains of the reek and rowdiness are Bacon’s archives at Cambridgeshire County Council, and the Ode to Tobacco. Cast in bronze, the poetic tribute to tobacco and Bacon’s survives at the corner of Rose Crescent and Market Square on the shop that the firm occupied from 1828.

The ode was written by Charles Stuart Calverley, Fellow of Christ’s and one of Cambridge’s most colourful, if lesser-known, literary figures. “Indolently brilliant,” was how Graham Chainey, author of A Literary History of Cambridge, described Calverley. “Scholarly without ever appearing to work, athletic in an uncompetitive manner, a master of gentle irony and studied parody, ‘C.S.C.’ became the archetype for a certain style of Englishness,” Chainey wrote.

As an undergraduate, a contrite Calverley was admitted to Christ’s in 1852 after being sent down from Oxford for what the Master of Balliol described as his “desultory and idle habits, and wicked acts of gross immorality”. Cambridge was more tolerant of his exploits, which included hurdling the railings around Christ’s First Court after nights out, liberating the Green Man’s pub sign and running back from Trumpington to College with it on his head, and leaping over a horse and cart blocking his passage down Green Street – while wearing a cap and gown, and with his hands in his pockets.

Naturally, Calverley was a loyal customer of Bacon’s, whose ledgers read like a roll call of the University’s most famous sons and most enthusiastic smokers. Among their pages are recorded Calverley’s purchases of tobacco jars and meerschaums in 1857. Thirty years earlier, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (whose statue in Trinity Chapel includes a pipe half hidden among its marble laurel wreaths) had an account there, as did Charles Kingsley, who bought Bacon’s Bird’s Eye Mixture by the pound and clay pipes by the dozen. His student, HRH the Prince of Wales, is recorded as having spent 15 shillings on a ‘cigar case with feathers’ in 1861.

Soldiers, too, loved Bacon’s. Fighting far from Cambridge during the First World War, dozens of men sent notes of thanks to the firm for the parcels of tobacco they received at the front. “The cigarettes were as fresh as if they had just been bought at your shop,” W Bavester told Bacon’s in 1916: “I handed one of the tins of cigarettes round the section, and being Cambridge boys, you can guess how delighted they was to have some Cambridge cigarettes.” The postcard letters of thanks are packed in an old blue Player’s Navy Cut box, the troops’ longing for home and tobacco finding echoes in the opening stanza of Calverley’s ode: “Thou, who when fears attack / Bidst them avaunt, and Black / Care, at the horseman’s back / Perching, unseatest; / Sweet when the morn is gray; / Sweet when they’ve cleared away / Lunch; and at close of day / Possibly sweetest!”

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Thename game

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How do scientists go about naming their latest discoveries? Lucy Jolin finds that the world of nomenclature is as much art as it is science.

Illustration Satoshi Hashimoto

M

arch 1781. William Herschel, German musician and amateur astronomer, is at his house in King Street, Bath, sweeping the heavens through his telescope, as he does every night. But tonight he notices something different: a strange moving star in the constellation of Taurus.

Herschel is sure the object must be a comet. He sends a message to his friends in London – Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal – announcing his discovery, and describing its position and the direction of travel. What Herschel had discovered was the planet Uranus. Except, actually, he hadn’t.

“Several people had seen the planet before Herschel,” Professor Simon Schaffer of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science points out. “His description of its direction and movement were wrong.

His assumption that it was a comet was wrong. And once he was finally persuaded that it was in fact a planet, he wanted to call it not Uranus – that name was given several years later, by common consent – but George, because Herschel needed a job and the king would have loved to have had a planet named after him. Unsurprisingly, elsewhere in Europe, George was not considered an appropriate name.”

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Naming scientific discoveries, as Herschel’s story shows, is not a particularly scientific process. So many forces come into play, including the cultural, the political and the practical. A name must fulfil many functions: it needs to be descriptive, predictive or geographical, or all three. It must be unique and accurate, but universally understood. It must help, not hinder, scientific progress. And it is very often dependent on what already exists. Herschel would have been unlikely to see his star as a new planet because at the time, there wasn’t such a thing.

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o how do you name a scientific discovery? First, check that you have the right to name it. In botany, the rule of priority applies: the first published name is the accepted one. “This is a principal applied strictly, particularly in the past, and it is still used today,” says Dr Tim Upson, curator of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

“You might have a plant that has been well known under a particular name, and then someone finds an obscure 17th-century book in German where someone else has published a different name for the same species earlier. According to the rules of priority, we have to change it.”

Upson admits, with considerable understatement, that this can be frustrating. So frustrating, indeed, that plant names as well as the plants themselves can now be subject to conservation. If an earlier name is found for a very well-known species, a botanist can make a case for the betterknown name’s continued use. This, says Upson, helps to ensure stability in the use of names, avoiding unnecessary changes.

Next, check the conventions for your science. Genetics is a relatively young science – the Arthur Balfour Professorship of Genetics will celebrate its very first centenary this year – and consequently, naming conventions are still recent. Where botany has several centuries of Linnaean tradition to call upon, full guidelines on human gene names were not issued until 1979.

Dr Ruth Seal is former literature curator for the FlyBase genetic database at Cambridge. She is now genomenclature advisor to the Human Genome Organisation nomenclature committee at the European Bioinformatics Institute. Dr Seal explains: “Our aim is to give a unique symbol and name to every human gene. Each gene has a full name, which hopefully has a meaning. Ideally within human and other vertebrate species, it should describe the function of the gene. And the symbol is a short-form abbreviation which we encourage researchers to use in their papers so that people can easily search for that gene.”

Whimsical names, she says, are not encouraged, particularly in human genes. “We always imagine that at some point, a clinician may need to discuss this gene with a patient,” she points out. “You have to represent the gene and try to describe its function and also be fairly sensible. For example, one gene symbol is PARN, which stands for poly (A)-specific ribonuclease. Because it chews up the poly (A) tail on mRNAtranscripts.

That describes what it does in a nutshell.”

In other species, however, researchers like to be more descriptive.

The tinman gene in drosophila (fruit flies) denotes an organism which has no heart, while methuselah confers longer life. Tribbles, which indicates uncontrollable cell division, was clearly named by a Star Trek fan.

Do not, under any circumstances, be tempted to name your discovery after yourself. It is not considered good form. “Though there’s nothing to stop you, technically,” Upson admits. “Apart from peer review … and the scorn of your colleagues.”

You may yet achieve immortality through your name, but someone else must confer it. But geographical, predictive and descriptive names, or names that honour someone else, are acceptable. For example, Upson’s team found a new lavender – lavandula – in Morocco. It had divided leaves, so they could have called it pinnata. But that had already been taken. It came from the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco so they could have called it either after Morocco, or after the Anti-Atlas mountains; but these, too, had also already been taken.

“So we chose to name it in honour of Professor Mohammed Rejdali, in recognition of his work as an eminent Moroccan botanist on the flora,” says Upson. “It was named lavandula rejdali. And that was a very appropriate thing to do – it was recognising someone from that country.

We haven’t always been so sensitive.”

Bear in mind that once your chosen name is in the public domain, it is no longer yours. It can be twisted, criticised or simply ignored in favour of a more media-friendly alternative. Simon Schaffer is convinced that the Large Hadron Collider would never have been quite such front-page news if it had simply looked for the Higgs boson rather than the so-called “God particle”. This was originally known as the “Goddamn particle” because of its elusive nature, but cleverly truncated – not by a scientist, but by the astute editor seeking a title for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman’s book.

Professor Shaffer says: “Here we have a story about a large, dark tunnel in Switzerland doing things nobody can understand. And that’s going to be a massive news story for the next 30 months. Who’d have thought it?”

Professor Peter Higgs, after whom the ‘Higgs’ part of the Higgs boson is named (the boson being named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose) told a press conference that the ‘God particle’ name was “nothing to do with me. It’s a joke.” But it has become common currency, seeping into the popular consciousness. When the team at CERN announced that the Higgs boson had probably been found, the Guardian ran an online poll asking whether the ‘God particle’ nickname should be abandoned.

Seventy-nine per cent of participants said yes; none of the newspapers took any notice whatsoever.

And this is the point at which names cease to serve as essential pathways through scientific disciplines. They stop being ways to access and unlock information – and start to be ways of spreading misinfomation. Ask any plant geneticist who has seen his or her life’s work to engineer disease-resistant strains of wheat dismissed as ‘Frankenstein food’, with all the negative connotations that the phrase implies. This is a far bigger problem than the debate over whether or not a genetic researcher should name a discovery after a creature in an episode of Star Trek.

“In terms of naming, we all muddle through pretty effectively,” says Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias of the Department of Genetics.

“However, I think it is much more serious that the press do not understand the difference between a gene and a mutation, which is a very basic nomenclature issue. And very often, I read about people ‘having a gene for this’ and ‘not having a gene for that’ when actually we all have the same genes – the question is whether we have the mutation or not.

“That is a very serious misconception, because if one is not careful, people can start discriminating against those who they claim have ‘a gene for obesity’ or ‘a gene for drug addiction’ when actually it is a mutation.

I think there is something quite profound there. These serious misconceptions can set off a chain of events that might lead someone to find themselves in a very difficult position.”

Yet we shouldn’t be surprised at the seemingly random ways in which names become assigned, says Schaffer. “Often, we have a very misleading image of the scientific method, which is just our name for what scientists do. We then tend to be surprised or embarrassed to discover that scientists are social groups of human beings distributing credit and trust as accurately as they can, which is something that the rest of us also do.”

There’s also a kind of social law, he says, which dictates what names catch on – a law that links together science and the media. After all, the history of Western science developed in tandem with journalism. “The word scientist and the word journalist were invented in the same decade, in London in the 1830s, and probably by the same man, Coleridge.

When these two new institutions were invented, a lot of scientists began to discuss extremely explicitly how to name things so that they should be pithy, memorable, and have the right associations. A name didn’t just have to work in the journals, but also the popular press.”

And for all its faults, confusions, disagreements and misnomers, sometimes scientific nomenclature simply gets it right. On 6.14am BST on Monday 6 August this year, a NASA rover successfully landed in the Gale Crater on the surface of Mars – the most difficult, complex and challenging rover landing ever attempted. The mission took thousands of man-hours and more than a billion pounds, and may discover evidence that there was once life on the Red Planet. The rover’s name? Curiosity.

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Dr Jens Scherpe says that legal frameworks that permit only binary gender identities – man or woman – have devastating consequences.

Words Simon Wilson Photograph Marcus Ginns

CV 2002 PhD in Law, University of Hamburg; Otto Hahn Medal awarded by the Max Planck Society 2002 Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg 2006 College Lecturer and Fellow, Caius

“I’m just a boring lawyer,” declares Dr Jens Scherpe, with a smile. True, he can usually be found in suit and tie, either in his office at the Law Faculty, at his College, Caius, or at his chambers, QEB, in London. He is married – “and in England, that means to a woman” – and is about to become a father for the first time.

As he says, a boring lawyer. But as a leading thinker on gender and family law, Scherpe regularly asks governments, fellow lawyers, and of course students, to think the unthinkable on the role of gender in family law.

“In most areas of the law, we don’t use gender that much,” he says. “But in English family law, you are either the mother or the father of a child, and only a man and a woman can get married. So your gender has farreaching implications.

“But why do we need a gender category? Why mother? Why not birth parent? Why does marriage need to be between a man and a woman? Or civil partnership between two men or two women? Does that mean if you are neither clearly nor exclusively biologically male nor female, you should not have the right to marry?”

Scherpe is quick to point out that removing the category of gender from family law is not to deny the importance of gender more generally. “People often object to the idea of removing gender because they say it is a defining element of your personality – to which I can only say, yes, of course. Socially, gender is not only very obvious but also a very important category.

“But it is no more a defining element than your ethnicity or your religion and the other things that make you who you are. Why should the state have the right, or indeed the duty, to record your gender?”

2007 University Lecturer and Senior Lecturer (2010) Faculty of Law 2010 Honorary Fellow, St. John’s College, Hong Kong 2011 Academic Door Tenant, Queen Elizabeth Building (QEB), Temple, London 2012 Early Career Fellowship, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)

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If a transsexual person changes legal gender from male to female, at what age may she draw a state pension?

This may seem a relatively esoteric question, or perhaps to some, ‘political correctness gone mad’. But the way in which governments resolve these issues can have devastating real-life consequences.

For example, if a transsexual person changes legal gender from male to female, at what age may she draw a state pension? If a trans man gives birth to a child, is he the mother, or is the child legally motherless? In many jurisdictions, no legal mother means no one has automatic parental responsibility for the child.

Scherpe also points out that just because an issue appears niche, it does not mean it is not important. “As it happens, we’re not talking about a completely insignificant fringe group – current estimates are that these issues affect around 0.1% of people, or 700,000,000 worldwide,” he says. “But referring to low numbers is a strange way to think about it, because it’s a matter of principle.

If you lived in a country where there were only three Anglicans, you wouldn’t say that it was OK to discriminate against them because very few people were affected.”

In fact, many governments across the world, including the UK, are beginning to acknowledge these problems and allow a change in gender. Belgium and the Netherlands have gone further, ruling that gender does not have to be determined immediately at birth, and Australia has dropped the binary system for passports, allowing individuals to list their gender as ‘indeterminate’.

So just how did a self-confessed conventional German lawyer end up an expert in family law and gender in Cambridge? Scherpe admits that, even putting aside his specialism, it is still a slight surprise that he ended up a lawyer.

“I actually applied for a communication and design degree course, but I was away from home when the letter came announcing I had not got a place,” he recalls.

“I asked one of my best friends to sign me up for something that was still available and he thought law would be most appropriate!”

It may have been an unlikely beginning, but Scherpe thrived, and was eventually asked if he wanted to do a PhD. While working at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, the opportunity arose to work on an ‘amicus brief’ for the German Constitutional Court on nationality and gender. “It got me thinking about changing gender and what that would actually mean in legal terms,” he says.

“And then you start to meet trans people. One young person, who came to one of my lectures, was struggling because his family could not come to terms with his gender identity. He later committed suicide. When you meet people directly affected by these issues, it becomes more than a legal point.”

In 2004 Scherpe moved to Oxford, where he had something of a conversion. “I found I absolutely loved the supervision system. I firmly believe that it is the best way to teach people. So I gave up my German academic career, burnt my bridges, and started to apply for jobs – and happily, ended up in Cambridge.”

Does he think being a ‘boring lawyer’ is an advantage when working in this area of law? “A good lawyer’s answer is yes – and no,” he says. “Certainly, I am often asked to make clear that I am heterosexual and that I have not changed gender and have no intention to do so.

“People assume self-interest, and the fact that I don’t have any can give some of the work greater credibility.

In a way, it’s a bit of a bizarre thing – if you work on the law of murder, no one assumes you will have direct

experience. But on the other hand, it also means there are things I just can’t know and that I have to talk to a lot of people in order to find out.”

Having advised governments and litigants from the UK to Hong Kong, Scherpe now believes the only way forward is to complete a comprehensive survey of the law as it stands, with a view to making practical proposals to at least gradually remove gender as a legal category.

He says: “Jurisdictions can choose to deal with the problems of a binary system pragmatically. So they say, ‘We’ll just put an ‘M’ here and it doesn’t really matter – here’s your driving licence’. And if you are willing to accept that, then it’s fine. But if you have a passport that says you are Peter and you look like a Mary, then every time you have to produce your passport, it will cause problems.”

Instead, Scherpe believes focusing on function rather than gender could be a more practical solution. So in the case of maternity leave, rather than specifying that a mother is entitled to additional leave, family law should focus on why one parent requires more protection.

“Maternity leave is generally more generous than paternity leave, with good reason,” he says. “But if you look at the trans person who gives birth to a child but is legally a man, that person will also need longer parental leave, even if he is not the ‘mother’. And more broadly, once the post-birth period is over, why shouldn’t parents be able to choose for themselves who should stay at home to look after their children, rather than it having to be the mother?”

Could there be exceptions to this rule? “I’m sure my research will discover areas where gendered categories are still necessary, for example in the criminal law or domestic violence. I am not advocating a blanket approach. But I do think it is important to have the debate and move beyond gender in most cases,” he says.

Does he believe a change in the law will also change attitudes? Maybe. “There is a limit to what the law can or should do – but on the other hand, the law can perhaps assist with these developments,” he says.

Working in such a controversial area of law – as far from being a ‘boring lawyer’ as he could be – means that Scherpe is often accused of being anti-religion and antitradition. But he is remarkably sanguine.

“There is a very good book by a colleague of mine, Stephen Cretney – one of the greatest family lawyers in the UK – where he describes public discussions surrounding changes to family law of the last centuries: things like whether there should be divorce, or whether you should be allowed to marry your deceased brother’s sister. Everyone always says it’s the end of the world, that society will be changed for ever, and then 15 or 20 years down the line, no one can remember what the fuss was all about.

“It reminds me of the changing of German postal codes, which became necessary after reunification.

The resistance was fierce! Removing gender from law will be hugely beneficial for those directly affected.

But will it really make a difference to the identity of a nation? Not really.”

Dr Jens Scherpe is a Fellow at Caius, a University Senior Lecturer in Law and an Academic Door Tenant at Queen Elizabeth Building. His latest book, Marital Agreements and Private Autonomy in Comparative Perspective is published by Hart.

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Hot metal Before the desktop publishing revolution, producing a student newspaper was a dirty, smelly and sticky business.

Words William Ham Bevan Photography Marcus Ginns

Heidelburg single revolution, single colour, sheet-fed press Regarded by many as the Rolls Royce of letterpress printing, this type of press combined high volume with high quality output.

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A

s with all text in CAM, this feature was written on a personal computer and emailed to the magazine offices in Bridge Street. A graphic designer will have laid out the magazine on screen – words and pictures alike – using an industry-standard software package. On receiving the editor’s final nod, the pages will have been transmitted electronically to a facility at Scarborough, a touch under 200 miles away, for printing.

When the paper emerges from the rollers, it will be the first time this issue of CAM existed as anything more than a thread of ones and zeroes in digital media.

And throughout this term, many scores of Cambridge students will have used similar technology to produce Varsity, The Cambridge Student, and countless more esoteric (and short-lived) publications.

But before the desktop-publishing revolution in the mid to late eighties, producing a student newspaper was rather more laborious – not to mention dirty, smelly and sticky. For many alumni, the most evocative Cambridge memory will be the astringent odour of Cow Gum, the brand of rubber cement used to paste galley proofs to pages (now, sadly, discontinued). The generation before them may even recall the clink and rattle of Linotype machines glimpsed during the weekly trip to the print works; but all are likely to remember regular clashes with authority, political in-fighting, and an uneasy lurch from one financial crisis to the next.

Now the long-standing fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune and one of the most respected figures in the industry, Suzy Menkes (Newnham 1963) enrolled at Varsity on her first afternoon at Cambridge.

She recalls that in her early days on the paper, she looked after “a column called Dolly Girls about parties and fashionable goings on”. But in 1966, she became the first female editor (“I remember that my appointment competed with that of the first woman welder”) and set about changing Varsity’s editorial dynamic.

“As the 1960s was the moment of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, there had to be some reflection in the paper of this period of upheaval,” she says. “This was the time when Marianne Faithfull was hanging around in Cambridge with John Dunbar. We got hold of a hunk of ‘hashish’, as we called it exotically. The national press went wild and it turned into a huge ‘shock horror’ story.

To our alarm, it meant that the police cracked down on every party held in Cambridge – so not such a brilliant piece of journalism.”

Alongside the excitement, the drudgery of taking pages to press sticks in her mind. “My memory of Cambridge is of an immense effort to get all the copy in and edited, and writing headlines and working on layouts, all between delivering essays. When it was finally ready with all the pages at two in the morning, a group of us would pile into a small coach and go off to the printer at Chipping Sodbury, or some other country town.

“We would come back to Cambridge at dawn with the papers, and I would go and have a shower and attend the first lecture of the day – my college having brutally insisted that there was no time off for being an editor of Varsity.”

By the time Andrew Nickolds (St Catharine’s 1969) claimed the editor’s chair, Varsity had relocated to cramped offices on Bridge Street, next door to a set of public lavatories. Working on the paper meant fighting a continuous battle with the volume of detritus generated by the editorial process.

Right: Curved printing plate Semi-circular metal plates such as these contained the text and images for a single page of newsprint.

Clamped to cylinders inside the printing press, they revolved at great speed producing about 18,000 impressions per hour.

Right: Flong Before DTP, and prior to the use of film, curved plates were made using a flong.

This was a thick piece of card which, when pressed against metal type and images, created a negative mould from which the curved plate was made.

Right: Galley Press The lines of hot metal output by typesetting machines such as the Linotype were placed inside a ‘form’ which held it in place on a press.

These lines of type would be proofed on a galley press and handed to subeditors to read, check and mark-up for correction.

Right: Hunter Penrose Galley Camera Large cameras such as these were used to photograph original artwork and text, outputting large sheets of lith film for plate making.

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“Whoever was nearest the big waste-basket overflowing with paper had to climb inside and flatten it, like treading grapes, to get another day’s worth of use out of it,” he says. “That was everybody – future owners of Factory Records [Tony Wilson], future presenters of Newsnight [Jeremy Paxman]... and the room was extremely dingy, undecorated except for these bits of stories hanging from the walls.”

Varsity went on being printed using hot metal type well into the 70s. Once a week, the editors would decamp to the print works at Kettering, spend most of the day waiting for the presses to run, and return to Cambridge after dark. Nickolds – who went on to become an acclaimed writer for radio and television – remembers it as an opportunity to do some showing off.

He says: “They used to show late-night movies at the Arts Theatre, and the thing to do was to walk in with a rolled-up copy of the newly printed newspaper sticking out of your pocket. Someone would shout, ‘Is that tomorrow’s Varsity, old boy?’ Well, we were only 18.”

The relationship between precocious student journalists and print workers was not always a smooth one.

Printing with hot metal demanded that all material was re-typed on a Linotype machine by unionised operatives, and controversial items – such as Varsity’s occasional sex surveys – could be relied upon to cause problems. However, Nickolds recalls that his biggest dust-up was on a matter of vocabulary.

“There was a new Master at one of the Colleges,” he says. “He’d described himself as an ‘apolitical civil servant’, so that was our headline: ‘Apolitical civil servant takes over at Emmanuel’, or whichever College it was. And the printers just wouldn’t accept that there was such a word as ‘apolitical’. We argued for most of the afternoon, but out it came as ‘a political civil servant’ – the exact opposite of what we meant.”

The set-up costs for hot-metal printing were prohibitive to smaller, fringe publications, but more rough-and-

Printing with hot metal demanded that all material was re-typed on a Linotype machine.

Controversial items – such as Varsity’s sex surveys – could be relied upon to cause problems.

Left: Ludlow Headline Caster Developed in 1911 as a semiautomatic slug casting device, the Ludlow produced lines of hot metal at larger sizes than that of the Linotype machines. These larger lines of text were inserted into the main columns of text typeset by the Linotype machine to create complete pages.

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ready solutions existed. Daily Telegraph writer Neil Lyndon (Queens’ 1966) first became involved in journalism while involved with the Free University, an experiment in open education organised by left-wing students and dons during the summer of 1968.

With the journalist and broadcaster Simon Hoggart (King’s 1965), Lyndon would stay up into the early hours and produce a daily bulletin called Penny Red on a Roneo – a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that could turn out thousands of smudgy copies each night from a typed template. Its success prompted him to think about producing a regular newspaper for the Cambridge left, using the upstart technology of offset lithography. He says: “We had some clever people who understood offset printing, which had just entered the frame. They said we could produce a weekly paper, sell it on the streets, and price it at an amount that would cover our costs, the office rent, and the lease of an IBM golf-ball printer, which was absolutely cutting-edge technology.”

The break-even price gave the new publication its title, and the Shilling Paper was to become one of the most controversial student newspapers in Cambridge’s history. Before it petered out in the early 70s, several attempts were made by University and College authorities to have it shut down – the first one coming when Lyndon had barely begun publication. He says: “The head of one of the Colleges, who was a very cunning lawyer, instituted proceedings under the Post Office Act because we hadn’t registered with them as a newspaper. But it turned out that you were only required to do that if you were sending it by post, not selling it on King’s Parade. So all he could do was glower at us.”

If the Shilling Paper’s editorials often advocated redistribution of wealth, its sales model supplied the practice to go with the theory – though not quite in the way its editors had intended. “It was quite quickly identified by drunks and derelicts on the street as a source of ready cash,” says Lyndon. “They used to come in, pick up a pile, and go out and flog them, actually bullying people on the street to buy them. And of course, everybody was too scared to say, you can’t do this.”

As the Shilling Paper and other niche publications showed, it was possible to achieve a reasonable level of print quality by typing up articles in-house, cutting and pasting them to page boards, and sending the sheets to be photographed and printed. But to achieve a truly professional look using offset litho, the typesetting had to be outsourced – adding another tier of fuss.

In 1977, Tim Brooks (St John’s 1976) became editor of Stop Press, the newspaper that had overtaken Varsity, and then absorbed it. “It was unbelievably laborious, when you compare it with what happens now,” he says.

“The copy would all be written on typewriters, and one of us would edit the stories for length and sense, and mark up how we wanted them typeset.

“The bundle of work would be taken to Cambridge Rail Station, and we had to get there before the parcels office closed at 7pm. Its destination was a typesetter in Royston – a very kindly, long-suffering gentleman. I’m sure we were his least profitable customer.”

Throughout the day, the articles would be set into “galleys” on long sheets of paper, and then dispatched by railway parcel to Cambridge. “These would be cut up with scalpels, and pasted on layout sheets. And when sections were complete, we’d send them to Royston for him to photograph and turn into print-ready film –

With many thanks to Terry Marshall, Duncan McEwan, John Hutchinson and the John Jarrold Print Museum for their assistance.

which would again be sent back by rail parcel. Then, when the film was all complete, that went over to a busy commercial printer in Bicester on a Thursday evening. The finished newspapers came back to Cambridge on Friday afternoon, and then volunteers – though they were paid – drove from College to College and dropped them off.”

The print technology may have advanced with the times, but the newsroom surroundings had not. Brooks –later to start Media Week magazine and become managing director of Guardian News & Media – remembers “water beading down the wall, paint peeling, and no carpets”, as well as an unlikely cohabitee.“During the winter months, we shared the premises with a tramp,” he says. “A lot of gentlemen of the road would come down from the North as the weather turned, and winter in Cambridge where it was milder. The man who ran the student union at the time was a kindly soul, and he allowed one of these chaps to sleep in the cellar where we put the paper together. We made interesting bedfellows.”

For the Sunday Times Far-East correspondent Michael Sheridan (Jesus 1977), who took over the editorship of Stop Press with Andrew Gowers (Caius 1977), the main lesson of student journalism was “the tyranny of the production process”, which began a full six days before each issue went to print.

Above: Linotype 78 typesetting machine Linotype machines were universally used in the newspaper industry for typesetting. Invented in 1886, machines like these mechanised the typesetting and casting process. Copy was entered via a keyboard. Lines of hot metal type were then cast.

Combined, these lines of type formed long strips of text called ‘galleys’.

“We worked on a cycle, which began every Saturday with a ‘lunch’ in a big, cold room at Jesus,” says Sheridan. “The previous week’s paper was reviewed and torn apart, and plans for the next week were discussed.

A typically Cambridge quirk was that no lunch was actually served, and it often turned into a battleground for 70s ideological disputes.”

Gowers adds: “Stop Press was at what Private Eye would call the Spartist end of the spectrum. It had a collective feel about it – anyone could turn up to the lunch and offer stories, arts reviews, photographs or whatever took their fancy.”

Reconciling left-wing politics with the realities of running at a profit could prove difficult. It became obvious during their tenure that revenue from a few local advertisers (the most stalwart of which was Andy’s Records) would not secure Stop Press’s continued existence. Gowers, a future editor of the Financial Times, found he could swell the coffers by selling titbits of gossip about well-connected students to Nigel Dempster at the Daily Mail; but a more radical solution was needed.

Enlisting the stockbroker father of one student journalist as a middleman, Stop Press set up a careers section to attract blue-chip companies with an interest in recruiting graduates. “For £10,000 per head, they would get sponsored editorial in this section of the paper. We thought it was suitably ring-fenced, and clearly identified so as not to compromise the newspaper’s independence,” says Gowers.

There were other ideological compromises to be made, too. Sheridan says: “Though Stop Press was frightfully left-wing, it regularly broke all the tradeunion closed-shop agreements in East Anglia. At that time, printers would refuse to print copy unless it had been typeset by members of the NGA [National Graphical Association]. So in order for the printers in Bicester to accept Stop Press’s made-up pages, they would have to be adorned with a sticker from the NGA. “Anyway, by a series of processes which we did not ask too much about, the typesetting was farmed out to a little local entrepreneur at student rates, mysteriously came back with NGA stickers, and would be cut up and stuck by us onto paste-up sheets, with the headlines added in Letraset. Somehow, this was accepted by the printing plant; we learned never to ask questions, and in my time there was never a crisis.”

Such wrangling may seem utterly alien to today’s student editors, hunched over flatscreen monitors in clean, serviced offices. But the tools, technology and culture of publishing are continuing to change, and at an accelerating pace. It is likely that the freshers who flock to put their name down for Varsity or its competitors at this year’s Societies Fair will be one of the last generations to work with the printed word. Many student publications have already taken the decision to publish online exclusively.

To Suzy Menkes, whose journalistic career stretches back more than 45 years, reading the fruits of one’s labour on screen is a poor substitute for “the sense of achievement with that paper in hand, at the end of it all”; but she is able to point out a nice little corollary.

“My son, Gideon Spanier, was also editor of Varsity and now works at the London Evening Standard,” she says.

“I believe we are the only mother-and-son Varsity power couple. I think printing ink must run in our veins – even in this digital world.”

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DEBATE

MARCHING TOA BRITISH TUNE Professor Brendan Simms argues that to resolve the current crisis, the eurozone would do well to look to the Anglo-American example.

Illustration Celyn

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urope – what to do about it, and whether Britain should be ‘at the heart of it’ or even part of it – is now back at the top of the political agenda. Calls for a referendum on membership of the EU threaten to split the coalition, and even the Conservative Party. This is not surprising, given the state of a European project still struggling to deal with the sovereign debt crisis. The collapse of the common currency cannot be ruled out.

But the resulting debate on this side of the Channel tells us not only a lot about what Europhobes and Europhiles alike wish for in Europe – unity or diversity – but also much about they way in which they regard Britain.

It has always been thus. Europe was central to British policy and politics throughout the 18th century, and the same is true of much of the period before and after as well. Should Britain be engaged in continental alliances, or remain aloof, focusing on commercial and colonial destiny overseas?

Broadly speaking, the Whigs are the Europhiles and the Tories the Eurosceptics of this story. At the more robust end of the spectrum, the rhetoric often became highly xenophobic, with not only French and Spanish enemies, but also Britain’s German and Dutch allies in the firing line. The content of the debates has changed over the past 200 years, of course, but it is striking how familiar their general outline seems to us in the early 21st century.

Today, Eurosceptics feel vindicated by the failure of the eurozone and look to the chance to cut political links to the continent. By no means all or even most of those who hold this view are simply xenophobes. One of the founders of the UK Independence Party (though now estranged) was Alan Sked, a noted historian of the Habsburg Empire, who is as much at home in Vienna as in London.

Nor does the charge of insularity fit the distinguished Cambridge historian of France, Robert Tombs, who spoke against further European integration at the Hay Festival.

Their argument that the EU threatens the valuable cultural and political diversity of the continent is a perfectly plausible one. The trouble with the Eurosceptic argument more generally, however, is that it does not recognise the catastrophic effect of an EU collapse for Britain – not merely economically, but in terms of the creation of a disordered geopolitical space on her door-step, at a time when NATO bonds are beginning to fray.

Europhiles, on the other hand, fear Britain’s isolation and want to keep her ‘committed’ and ‘engaged’ in Europe. They have a strong case, both historically and politically, given that the prosperity and security of this island has always been intimately bound up with that of the rest of the continent. The trouble with many Europhiles, however, is that they want to ‘stay in Europe’ because they think there is something fundamentally wrong with Britain – socially, economically or culturally – or because they fear that she would not survive outside Europe.

In fact, the European Union was designed to fix something that was never broken in Britain. This happy ‘sceptred isle’ was spared the traumatic experience of occupation in the second world war by the Nazis and their local helpers. A separate, free-standing sovereign democracy is possible here in ways which the size of Germany, the pressures of the international economy and the strength of left and right-wing radicalism made impossible in 20th century continental Europe (outside Switzerland). It is therefore not surprising that as the Union seeks ever closer political cooperation – in effect creating a single eurozone state – the British government, while wishing the enterprise well, does not wish to be of the party.

Indeed, one of the arguments in my forthcoming book, Battle for Europe, is that what is needed is not so much a European Britain as a British Europe, or at least an Anglo-American one. This is because the challenges facing the eurozone today have been mastered in the past by the United

Kingdom and the United States.

In 1707, for example, the English and the Scots confronted escalating debts, their own historic rivalry and the threat of Louis XIV’s France by concluding the Act of Union.

This created a parliamentary and fiscal structure which endures to this day. Likewise, representatives of the 13 newly independent American states met at Philadelphia in 1787 to decide how to deal with the debts of the War of Independence, growing external threats, and the danger of falling out among themselves.

Explicitly rejecting looser confederal models, such as the German Holy Roman Empire, they followed the example of the Anglo-Scottish Union. Once again, the resulting constitution created an enduring synthesis between political participation and viable sovereign debt that ultimately underpinned a US rise to greatness on the world stage.

It therefore stands to reason that the eurozone needs to take a leaf out of the Anglo-American book: to federalise debts, to establish proper common representative institutions through an elected presidency, a senate to represent the formerly sovereign constituent states, and a house of citizens to represent the population.

It would have a single army within NATO, and English would be the language of the union for political purposes. Britain would not necessarily need to be a member of this new democratic union, any more than the United States or Canada. Nor should Britain fear such an entity, because the risks of a disordered space in Europe are far greater than the risks of a strong European Union.

Britain should look with favour on the creation of yet another great English-speaking democracy. There would be nothing to stop Britain from joining later, by mutual consent, if the experiment proved a success. Far from being a threat, therefore, eurozone political union would be the best compliment that the continent could pay Britain.

What is needed is not so much a European Britain as a British Europe – or at least an Anglo-American one.

Professor Simms (Department of Politics and International Studies) is the Newton-Sheehy Teaching Fellow. His forthcoming book, Battle for Europe, is published by Allen Lane. He took part in a debate on Europe as part of the Cambridge Series at this year’s Hay Festival. For more information about the University at Hay, please visit www.hayfestival.org.

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Illustration Peter Quinnell

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t is a commonly held assumption that tragedy is an elite theatrical form: noble, dignified, profound and with little relevance to our modern concerns. But in fact, the public still tends to respond to tragic events in ways that echo the age-old traditions that go back to Greek tragedy.

When disaster happens, people want to know about the individual victims. What were the nationalities of the people involved? How old were they, and what were they like as people, as precious parents, children, partners? Newspaper reporters are sent out to investigate the ‘story’, to transform the brief announcement of death or injury into narrative. With the event set into the context of a sequential narrative, the report becomes an investigation into causes and consequences, decisions taken and fatal steps made. Journalists attempt to glean some sort of explanation for the disaster. In a way, they transform the merely accidental into something fateful, predestined, and inevitable.

Dr Jennifer Wallace says that far from being an elite theatrical form, the classical conventions of tragedy still influence the way we interpret personal and public events.

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The media often focuses on the deaths of individual journalists in war and this perspective used to puzzle and annoy me

These standard methods of reporting a tragic event actually conform to the techniques of Greek tragedy, identified by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. Tragic plays should have a hero, Aristotle wrote, who is neither wholly good nor wholly bad but with whom we can identify sufficiently to feel pity and fear at his plight, since “pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves”. The plays should have a coherent plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, revolving around a moment of reversal of fortune and recognition of that fact.

So just as Euripides chose to depict the aftermath of the Trojan War by focusing on the individual suffering of several women, like Hecuba and Cassandra, Time magazine drew attention to the plight of Afghan women by focusing on 18-year old Aisha, whose nose and ears were cut off by her husband’s family when she attempted to flee their home. And rather as Sophocles depicted the dilemmas of female self-sacrifice in the figure of Antigone, who preferred public duty to her private safety, so the Sunday Times and other newspapers devoted many pages to the death of journalist Marie Colvin in Syria last February. The siege of Homs in Syria had been widely reported, but Colvin’s death promoted it to the front page.

Indeed, the media often focuses on the deaths of individual journalists in war, treating those deaths as worthy of more tragic attention than the many local civilian casualties. One might think, for example, also of the treatment of photographer Tim Hetherington’s death in Libya last year.

This skewed perspective used to puzzle and annoy me.

After all, these journalists chose to travel to these war zones; the civilians had no choice. Are the newspapers guilty of treating journalists as more important than ordinary people so that their deaths matter more? Are these journalists more ‘like ourselves’ than the actual victims, and therefore it is supposedly easier for us to feel sympathy for their deaths? Maybe there is something insidiously true in this analysis.

But it does also seem to me now that it is precisely because these journalists chose to go to these war zones that, according to Aristotle, their deaths may be interpreted as particularly tragic. Theirs was a fateful decision, based upon the aspects in their characters that

both made them courageous journalists and also led to their deaths. According to an article in Vanity Fair, for example, Marie Colvin was driven repeatedly back to war zones by her own private demons, drinking problem and post-traumatic stress disorder, her competitive quest for scoops and her sense of excitement when in danger. “There is always a story at the end of a rocket.

On the positive side, this is like a health reservation without the counselling. No booze, no bread. Off to the front in my Toyota pickup”, she wrote to a friend from the fighting in Libya.

The ‘hamartia’ or fateful decision, sometimes translated as fatal flaw, is traditionally central to tragedy, and there are many examples of it in the ‘fall’ of celebrities and politicians, as presented in the media, in modern life. Tragedy in these cases is often close to farce. The ‘characters’ lose their dignity until they become objects of our ridicule. In Sophocles’ play, Athene invites Odysseus to laugh at Ajax when he is killing sheep under the delusion that he is murdering his fellow Greeks. Odysseus chooses to pity Ajax rather than to laugh at him, but the two responses are very closely aligned in that play, and similarly our sympathy towards and mockery of our leaders are ambivalently intertwined. Let no one tell you that tragedy is dignified and noble. It’s cruel and funny, and watching the grotesque unmasking of a hero’s pretensions is central to its business.

It is a well-known fact that all the deaths in Greek tragedy (actually, except Ajax’s) took place off-stage.

But what is more rarely acknowledged is that the bodies of the dead were then brought onto the stage afterwards. So important was it considered for the audience to witness the aftermath of the reported killing that a special piece of theatrical equipment, known as the ekkyklema, was designed to allow the bodies to be wheeled into view.

The Greeks recognised what we now commonly believe, that in mourning the dead it is very helpful to have the actual bodies over which to pour our lament.

So in wars today, families weep publicly over the bodies of their relatives, drawing the world’s attention to the atrocity wreaked upon their family. Or, after a disaster, the police and rescue workers will make strenuous efforts to find the bodies of the dead, even if they are already buried under a landslide or lost at sea, so that they can be given a proper funeral and mourned before being buried once more.

However, one central element of Greek tragedy – the notion of catharsis – is much more problematic now, and can be hard to justify. Aristotle stated that through witnessing tragedy, we purge ourselves or ‘gain relief’.

The Greek of his treatise is a little ambivalent here.

It can be translated that through feeling ‘pity and fear’ during a tragic performance, we purge ourselves of these emotions, so that we are no longer troubled by them.

Or it can mean that through feeling pity and fear we clean these emotions themselves; in other words, we refine our capacity to feel. But however this phrase is translated, Aristotle is suggesting tragedy has some moral or therapeutic function in society.

Is it still possible to consider witnessing others’ suffering morally improving or enriching? “It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others”,

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However, one central element of Greek tragedy – the notion of catharsis – is much more problematic now and can be hard to justify

observed the great liberal commentator, Susan Sontag, in her book on war photography, entitled Regarding the Pain of Others. But why is that knowledge, or acknowledgment, a ‘good’ thing? Does it make any difference to the situation? Does it alleviate the suffering or prevent further harm in the future?

It is not clear that the assumptions lying behind Sontag’s remark command universal assent. Other cultures can deal with suffering differently. The Chinese, for example, traditionally believed that misfortune carries with it bad luck, so that a community might shun a widow who has lost two husbands and her children (as witnessed in a short story by early 20th-century writer Lu Xun) in case she infects them with her sadness.

To dwell on the pain of others is the self-indulgent malaise of the decadent West. It is better to focus on “biting unhappiness” now with the hope of bringing about punitive revenge on the perpetrators later.

In general, Aristotle’s catharsis might work better when the community is smaller and more coherent, and not globalised as it is today. Ibsen, after all, explored the muted, ambivalent response to the demise of his heroes shown by the fractured, repressed communities of late 19th-century Norway. The general public is much more dispersed and divided today. In an era of 24/7 news and constant potential exposure to tragedies around the globe via the internet, it may be paradoxically difficult to focus the kind of active, sympathetic attention on suffering which dramatists could do in the past. When there is no “end”, in Aristotle’s terms, when we cannot turn the tragedy off (or conversely, when we can turn it off at the push of a button), it might be possible to fall prey to what is known as compassion fatigue and lose our capacity to feel. Does that matter? Is the readiness to make what might be termed a ‘good tragedy’ the hallmark of human civilisation, or an indication of a humane society? Can one speak, as Karl Jaspers once wrote, of “tragic knowledge” as a form of “achievement”?

And should one?

All these questions were undoubtedly rightly far from the minds of the residents of Wootton Bassett as they gathered to pay their respects each time the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were driven through their town. These questions were surely equally

far from the thoughts of New Yorkers after 9/11, or indeed the family of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber, or Rachel Corrie as she knelt fatally in front of the bulldozer in Rafah refugee camp in Gaza. For one of the other major insights the Greeks gave us is that emotional response always precedes and exceeds any amount of thinking and theorising on the subject.

Aristotle’s rules only get us so far; watching a performance of Oedipus or the Bacchae provokes reactions unaccounted for in his Poetics. So although we can dissect intellectually the sentimentalised emotions sometimes whipped up by media frenzy, or balk at the subsequent political manipulation of public feeling, there is no gainsaying the anger at the fall of a dictator or grief following the death of a child. Those feelings are usually followed by the desire to seek an explanation, even if that explanation differs wildly from culture to culture, and age to age. That is what it is to live through tragedy.

And when one is experiencing it, let others worry whether or not it is a ’good’ thing.

Dr Jennifer Wallace is the Harris Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy,

by Jennifer Wallace, is published by CUP.

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Concrete Cambridge In between the medieval arches and soaring spires you can spy the city’s alternative history – one built in concrete.

Words Fred Lewsey Photographs Marcus Ginns and RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection

Right: Churchill, 1966 Architect: Richard Sheppard Robson & Partners

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The important heritage and rebellious attitude these buildings represent has undergone a damnatio memoriae in the public mind

Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection

very year, thousands of tourists flock to Cambridge to marvel at the stunning architecture of University and College buildings. Many of these buildings are studied by students and scholars of architecture the world over – but it may come as a surprise to hear that the ones that attract the most attention are not medieval, adorned with spires or built in distinctive yellow limestone.

In fact, some of Cambridge’s most fascinating buildings are to be found in dingy corners of the city. Many people even consider them ugly. But they were built at a time when post-war architecture peaked in a wave of euphoric gusto, as maverick architects experimented with shape and materials to create their visions of the University of the Future. And for the most part, they are concrete.

In a period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Cambridge experienced a boom in brutalism. The University Centre, Churchill College and the then new Faculty of History building were attempts to mirror the innovation and hope of that era through dramatic, expressive shapes and exposed use of raw material.

“This style embodies the laboratory of the future: a deliberate attempt to reflect the revolutionary ideas generated at the University by creating a rupture with the past,” says Dr Marco Iuliano of the Department of Architecture. With Professor François Penz, he has curated an exhibition of architectural photographs shot in the 50s and 60s, featuring many of Cambridge’s brutalist buildings, which will be shown at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) early next year.

According to Dr Iuliano, the important heritage and rebellious attitude these buildings represent has undergone what he describes as a damnatio memoriae in the public consciousness, because they don’t fit the picturepostcard version of Cambridge.

“The use of shape and materials – the raw concrete, as well as steel and brick – was a real punch in the face.

You had a public that was used to Georgian terraces, and this style arrives as if alien buildings have descended from space and landed in Cambridge,” he says.

Opposite page: Fitzwilliam, 1963 Architect: Denys Lasdun & Partners

Above & right: George Thomson Building, Corpus, 1964 Architect: Philip Dowson, Arup Associates

Left: The Keynes Building, King’s, 1967 Architect: Fello Atkinson

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Eric de Maré/RIBA Library Photographs Collection Andrew Drummond/RH Partnership

Henry Snoek/RIBA Library Photographs Collection

Top: University Centre, Granta Place, 1967 Architect: Howell Killick Partridge & Amis

Opposite page: New Court, Christ’s, 1970 Architect: Denys Lasdun

Left: New Hall, 1966 Architect: Chamberlin, Powell & Bon

Right: Cripps Building, St. John’s, 1967 Architect: Powell & Moya

For Dr Iuliano, there are no buildings that better symbolise the challenging spirit of one of the world’s leading academic communities; although the utopian aim and experimental nature of these building’s stark and angular appearance – something he considers vital to the story of the city and University – is in danger of being lost.

“These fantastic buildings have been banished from the narrative of the University in the course of promoting a reassuring model of English tradition,” he says.

“The classic view of the Backs forms a noble depiction of the stereotype of the Arcadian and scholarly – but the innovation, freedom of thought and experimentation, which is the beating heart of any leading educational institution, can be seen clearly in the architecture of buildings such as Churchill and the History Faculty.”

Dr Iuliano and Professor Penz set out to revise some of the negative views of these buildings by displaying photos of them taken by some of the best architectural photographers of the day, which are now held in the archives of RIBA. The catalyst for the flourishing of radical architecture in Cambridge was the arrival at the University of Sir Leslie Martin, who became head of the Architecture Department in 1956. Sir Leslie was an influential British architect who had already led the design team behind the Royal Festival Hall. “He had the capacity to get excellent minds to invest in a vision, and he became the driving force behind up-and-coming architects receiving commissions in Cambridge,” says Dr Iuliano.

The first major building of the Martin era was the 1959 extension to Scroope Terrace at the Architecture Department. Over the next decade, Cambridge experienced a surge in avant-garde building.

Among the most recognisable of Cambridge’s concrete treasures are the Cripps Building at St John’s, the University Centre and Churchill College. However, perhaps the jewel in Cambridge’s modern crown is the Faculty of History building, designed by James Stirling, which fills pages of architecture textbooks studied in the UK and beyond.

“The History Faculty was ground-breaking, a complete schism from traditional construction,” says Dr Iuliano. “Every piece has an exact role in the fabric of the building’s composition, with the stunning glass roof creating a waterfall of light.”

There is a growing awareness of the importance of this architecture, but its legacy is controversial. “Many of the buildings are now Grade II listed, but one suspects that not everybody in the Colleges and University is enamoured with their modernist heritage,” says Professor Penz. “In fact, in 1985 the University considered demolishing the Faculty of History.”

The ambition and invention of post-war British architecture that these buildings embody has arguably faded; but for many architects, it remains a golden period. “At the time, modern architecture exemplified the adventurous, forward-looking qualities of universities,” says Dr Nick Bullock, architect and Fellow of King’s College. “Today, there isn’t such a clear idea of direction in architecture – these buildings stand as testament to the strength of the vision these architects had.”

Cambridge in Concrete, edited by Marco Iuliano and François Penz, is available from the Architecture Department and at the RIBA bookshop in Portland Place. www.arct.cam.ac.uk

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Jill Calder

University Matters My Cambridge Reading List Cambridge Soundtrack A Sporting Life Prize crossword

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Extracurricular CAM 67 39

Extracurricular

University Matters

Lyndon Hayes

Professor Patrick Maxwell Regius Professor of Physic

I am very much looking forward to taking up the post of Regius Professor of Physic this term. Indeed, I think it is the most exciting job in medicine today. This is partly based on existing strengths in Cambridge.

First, there is an extraordinary concentration of world-leading biomedical research.

Second, there is very effective strategic alignment between the local NHS healthcare organisations and the University.

One example of this alignment is Cambridge University Health Partners (CUHP). CUHP includes the University and three substantial healthcare organisations: Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust (CUHFT) which runs Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie Maternity Hospital; Papworth Foundation Trust, which runs the specialist cardiothoracic hospital; and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust which is responsible for mental health.

CUHP is one of only five designated Academic Health Science Centres in England.

Another example of successful alignment is the Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre funding awarded to the partnership of CUHFT and the University in 2007, and renewed with a very substantial uplift to £110m for 2012-17.

This means there is enormous potential.

This can be easily appreciated by driving from the M11 on the new road into the Biomedical Campus. My previous post was Dean of Medical Sciences at UCL in central London, where there were a lot of practical constraints related to buildings. But in Cambridge, ‘2020 Vision’ has enabled the comprehensive development of a very large site with improved transport infrastructure around Addenbrooke’s hospital.

Especially impressive is the striking new building which will rehouse the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology – an extraordinarily successful research institute, which has made many important discoveries. Work there led directly to the use of monoclonal antibodies, which represent a real breakthrough in the treatment of many different serious illnesses.

Over the next few years, a number of further

Breakthroughs commonly involve a major element of serendipity and often occur when people trained in different disciplines come together

new buildings are planned on the campus.

For example, Papworth will be relocated to a new cardiothoracic hospital, and there will be a new Heart and Lung Research Institute.

This is a challenging time for healthcare and biomedical research. Many people think that meeting these challenges will require universities, hospitals, biotechnology companies and the pharmaceutical industry to find new ways of working together. As yet, the best ways to do this are unknown.

My personal view is that there are at least two areas where we can make dramatic improvements.

First, the way we do things in hospitals tends to be very conservative. I would like many more people involved in healthcare to

be thinking of new ways of tackling a very wide range of day-to-day problems. I am quite sure that with a will to improve, we can provide better and more effective care, and that this need not necessarily be more expensive.

Second, I think it should be much simpler to test new treatments that might have a big effect in patients. We have become so concerned about protecting humans from potential harm that we have made it extremely expensive and difficult to test whether a new treatment actually works.

Particularly sobering is that some of today’s best treatments were developed for a completely different purpose from the ones for which we use them now. It was only after they were tried out in humans that it was discovered that they had other effects, which were often completely unexpected. Good examples are aspirin for heart disease and Viagra for male sexual dysfunction. I firmly believe that the only way to work out what a medicine will really do in people is to test it in people.

Breakthroughs commonly involve a major element of serendipity and often occur when people trained in different disciplines come together. My own work in Oxford on how cells sense oxygen was transformed by making an unexpected connection with a chemist who was a world expert on a particular family of enzymes.

I had not worked in Cambridge before, and did not study here. But my impression from outside is that the number of really bright people is unusually high. I also think that the ‘activation energy’ needed for crossdisciplinary interactions in Cambridge is unusually low. One of my main aims is to find new ways to lower it even further, and I would welcome suggestions!

Rounding off, I believe that right now, Cambridge is probably the best place in the world to develop solutions to the big challenges we face, both as clinicians and as a society.

Professor Maxwell is the new Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine. He is also Director of Cambridge University Health Partners, the Academic Health Sciences Centre for Cambridge.

His predecessor was Sir Patrick Sissons.

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Extracurricular ANDREW LAMB EWB-UK started while I was a student at Cambridge. I got involved in 2002, when they held an event to recruit committee members to the new society. Listening to a presentation by someone who’d worked on water projects in Thailand during his gap year, I thought, that’s what I want to be part of – so I volunteered immediately to help with fundraising.

The most memorable moment was during a recent visit to Nigeria, to a project that began as a suggestion

by Professor Peter Guthrie in the Engineering Department. I went with a former volunteer who’d worked on it to look at the impact we’d had. There was lots of new infrastructure to reduce the impact of flooding, and social improvements; but the most amazing thing was meeting people who told us their kids wouldn’t be alive without EWB-UK. I’ve been chief executive of EWB-UK for the past four years, and every day I have an opportunity to make people in the UK aware of the power of engineering and the difference it can make. Its cause has made me stay involved with EWB-UK and grow it.

My Cambridge

Engineers without borders In 2001, a small group of engineering students decided to form a new student society called Engineers Without Borders. Since then, EWB-UK has grown into a national organisation with 35 university branches, seven regional professional networks and 4,500 members.

Andrew Lamb (Pembroke 2001) read Engineering.

He is chief executive of Engineers Without Borders UK (EWB-UK).

Joanne Beale (Selwyn 2005) read Engineering.

She is a programme support officer with the international NGO WaterAid.

Interviews Becky Allen Illustration Alex Green

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Mo Ali (Christ's 2001) read Manufacturing Engineering, followed by an MPhil on Supply Chain Manufacturing.

He now works in emergency relief.

For a long time at Cambridge I was frustrated with wanting to apply what I was learning to something that mattered to me. When it came to my fourth-year project I was determined to do something that had an impact on people. Thanks to Professor Peter Guthrie and an EWBUK bursary, I worked in Bhutan on a rural householdwaste management project.

My fieldwork was in remote areas where until recently people had consumed only what was produced locally.

With the advent of packaged food, they had to work out what to do with the non-biodegradable waste. Mine was an early scoping study to find out what people were doing by instinct, and what solutions they’d accept and would fit in with their way of life.

During my final year I was heavily involved with EWB-UK. I took on management of the bursary panel in Cambridge because I wanted to enable others to have the opportunities I’d had.

There’s something special about being part of a community of people passionate about the same issues, so finding EWB-UK in my fourth year was pivotal for me.

Development is a difficult career to aim at; there are few jobs and they demand a specific set of skills, engineering as well as social. Being involved with EWB-UK gave me those skills, and the engineers I met inspired me.

For me, it has been transformative. I went to university wanting to be a rock-concert designer, but I quickly realised that was pretty ephemeral and the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives was right in front of me with EWB-UK. It’s a learning and leadership factory for engineering: the engineering rigour comes from degree courses, and the transferable skills come from EWB-UK. You become an engineer without borders, and you go on throughout your engineering career to change the world for the better.

JOANNE BEALE At school I didn’t know anything about development work. I travelled for the first time between school and university. It was just for a month, but I went to Venezuela and stayed in a village where collecting water involved a half-hour walk with a bucket to a hole in the ground. It got me thinking about how the rest of the world lives.

It’s easy to think you have all the answers.

Lots of the time, problems can be solved by local people and realising that at a young age is really useful

MO ALI The idea that engineers can be sent to emergencies always fascinated me. My parents are Pakistani, so I travelled there a lot as a child and saw the disparities that exist in access to health and education.

EWB-UK was a perfect platform to bring my interests and skills together.

At my first EWB-UK meeting I was struck by the fact that rather than telling us what to do, we were working out how we could be most useful, both to fellow students and to projects abroad. After that, I did a bit of everything for EWB-UK. In 2002/3 I ran two projects in Ecuador sponsored by Mott MacDonald, and in my final year I was in charge of research for the EWB-UK national committee. I was lucky enough to get funding for my own masters project in Nicaragua and Ecuador. Contaminated water is a major issue, and the project looked at low-cost ways of manufacturing ceramic water filters.

EWB-UK exposed me to all the different levels of development, from working with local communities to pitching to donors at the UN. It has been the platform for my career for the eight years since I left Cambridge.

It’s easy to think you have all the answers; EWB-UK helped me realise you don’t. Lots of the time, problems can be solved by local people, and realising that at a young age is really useful.

I’ve worked in six African countries, and all that stemmed from the experience I gained through EWB-UK. I did Manufacturing Engineering, so most of my work is with governments and NGOs in systems and planning.

My last long-term posting – three-and-a-half years – was in Sudan and South Sudan. The South completely collapsed after decades of war, so it’s not reconstruction work because there was nothing there to start with.

I’ve been working on getting a health system developed, and co-ordinating the huge number of health NGOs, and emergency preparedness.

For more information on EWB-UK, visit ewb-uk.org.

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Extracurricular

Reading List Professor Andy Parker

Interview Lucy Jolin Steve Bond

Andy Parker is Professor of High Energy Physics and a Professorial Fellow of Peterhouse

he first rule of approaching Douglas Hofstadter’s wildly original Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is simple: it’s not really about Gödel, Escher and Bach. Rather, it’s a journey through complex concepts sparked by their maths, music and art, melded with numerous ideas, analogies and diversions. There are strange loops, a questioning Tortoise, and Zen. There are record players with only one record, there is molecular biology, and there is Aunt Hilary.

She is an ant colony.

It’s not a book that is easily classified. But it fascinated Professor Andy Parker when he encountered it during his days as an Oxford physics student.

“I can’t actually remember where I came across it,” he says. “But I was reading some pretty enormous works at the time – Bertrand Russell and suchlike. It seemed to be an interesting book that covered all the things I worried about at the time, being a teenager.

What’s it all about? Is the universe logical?

How does your brain work?”

Parker is now Professor of High Energy Physics at Cambridge and a founder of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which searches for new discoveries produced when protons collide at incredibly high speeds. He didn’t find the answer to life, the universe and everything in the book. Instead, he discovered the value of incompleteness.

“The book was the first time I encountered many concepts such as looking at systems on different levels, emergent behaviour and selfreferential paradoxes,” he says. “But its main theme is Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

I found that quite a revelation. It really got to me.” Gödel’s theorem states that all formal systems of local thought, including mathematics, are incomplete. “Therefore you can make statements in them which cannot be supported by the logical system itself,” says Parker. “That was just mindblowing.

Particularly when you’re a teenager, because you tend to think you know everything, and that if you don’t, you can find out.”

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There’s a lot of clever stuff in it – some of it might be a bit too clever or pretentious in a way. But then it goes into long sections of very hardcore logic or number theory

Hofstadter was an obscure graduate student when he wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, first published in 1979. In an early example of desktop publishing, he typeset it himself electronically. It ended up becoming a bestseller, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is regarded as a key text in artificial intelligence and computer science. Part of the book’s appeal to non-technical types is the off-kilter inserts, such as the running dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise – characters first

CAMCard discount at Heffers The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discount is going up from 10% to 15% – a perfect incentive to give books as Christmas presents this year. Shop in person with your CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at: alumni.cam.ac.uk/ benefits/camcard/bookshops.

Extracurricular

Cambridge Soundtrack Alexis Taylor, Hot Chip

Interview Dorian Lynskey

Recent reads Map of a Nation A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt (Granta Books). “I like maps, and if we go off on holiday I always buy the Ordnance Survey for wherever we are.”

The Pirates!

In an Adventure with Scientists

by Gideon Defoe (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). “ I took my children to see the film and we liked it so much that I read the book.”

Electronics for Dogs “This doesn’t actually exist but I’d love a copy – Gromit is reading one in an episode of Wallace and Gromit. I love anything to do with them.”

©Tom Oxley /NME/ IPC+ Syndication

used by Greek philosopher Zeno, then appropriated by Lewis Carroll – which helps to illustrate complex mathematical ideas.

“I was intrigued by the presentation back then,” says Parker. “I don’t know whether I would be now. There’s a lot of clever stuff in it – some of it might be a bit too clever or pretentious in a way. But then it goes into long sections of very hardcore logic or number theory. And then it will whizz back to a bit of Achilles and the Tortoise.”

At first glance, it seems a big leap from theoretical record players to the LHC. But in Gödel’s world of incompleteness, there can be no much-vaunted ‘theory of everything’.

“I don’t think many scientists think about Gödel when they are doing their work,” says Parker. “We are arch-reductionists. But I am not a believer in a theory of everything. We will have better and better theories that describe more stuff with fewer inputs, sure. Yet the idea that if you had a complete description of the lowest level of matter, you could then build up from that to a description of the way that complicated systems work, I think is completely wrong.”

Alexis Taylor (Jesus 1999)

Alexis Taylor arrived at Jesus to study English Literature in the autumn of 1999 with an acoustic guitar and low expectations.

“I think I was set up for it to be horrible and posh,” he says. “I feared the worst and was pleasantly surprised.”

Taylor came to Cambridge already a member of Hot Chip, the electronic pop band who have since released five acclaimed albums, worked with artists from Peter Gabriel to Wiley and picked up nominations for the Mercury Prize and Grammy awards. At the time, however, his favourite artist was Prince.

It’s hard to sound like Prince on an acoustic guitar, so his Cambridge songwriting drew more on two recent discoveries: the 1969 albums Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon by cult American singer-songwriter Tim Buckley.

Taylor quickly discovered the city’s electronic music scene, which was centred on the Portland Arms on Chesterton Road, and on a charismatic figure called Pete UM. “It seems like most people interested in music in the Mill Road area knew him because he kept popping up all the time. He’s a great musician making brilliant records, but he’s only really known about in Cambridge. It made a big difference, going to these gigs and meeting people like Pete.”

He remembers other influences too. “I went to see Spiritualized at the Corn Exchange but most of the time the bands I was interested in didn’t seem to stop off at Cambridge. I remember I went to see Royal Trux in London, Brighton and Oxford in the same week because they didn’t come to Cambridge.”

Taylor also DJed regularly at student house parties, where his passions were UK garage and US R&B, especially Mary J Blige’s Family Affair and early Destiny’s Child singles such as Bills, Bills, Bills and Say My Name.

In his third year, he met a Sidney Sussex student, Felix Martin, in the Hot Numbers record shop on Kingston Street and invited him to play with Hot Chip. Martin had a radio show on the University station with Al Doyle, who also ended up joining the band. Not all of their early shows ended well, though. When they played low down the bill one night at

the Boat Race on East Road, all the friends they had invited along left before the rest of the bands came on, incurring the wrath of the promoter. A few years later, when Hot Chip released their debut album, the same promoter tried to book them and Taylor explained why he was turning him down.

“We had to tell him he’d been slagging us off early on.”

Back at Jesus, Taylor found an unexpected fellow music buff in the shape of Professor Stephen Heath, the influential literary theorist.

“He happened to run the library that contained work by anyone who had been at Jesus.

I talked to him a fair bit about music. He was interested in the history of the College and how [singer-songwriter] John Wesley Harding had been there, so I sent him Hot Chip’s music for the next few years. There was a nice sense that he was supporting what I was doing that wasn’t English Literature.”

Looking back, Taylor is sometimes surprised by how Cambridge confounded his expectations; and whenever Hot Chip play at the Junction or Corn Exchange, he gets to replay his Cambridge soundtrack. “Each time we go back, I try and spend as much time there as possible, just walking around the town and meeting up with people who might still be there. I still feel some connection to it.

I met some of my closest friends there and it was a lot to do with music.”

Hot Chip tour the UK in October. The album, In Our Heads, is out now on Domino. hotchip.co.uk.

CAM 67 45

Extracurricular

A Sporting Life IceHockey

Interview Becky Allen Marcus Ginns

Many thanks to Planet Ice, Peterbrough for their help.

Teale Phelps Bondaroff

For a young man so deeply committed to politics – he first stood as an MP in his native Canada at the age of 19 – Teale Phelps Bondaroff, who is at Clare, has a keen interest in violence.

The violence inflicted by humans on each other and on other animals is central to Bondaroff’s PhD, as his research examines the tactics and strategies of radical environmental groups such as Sea Shepherd, the controversial US marine wildlife conservation group.

Violence is also one of the things he says attracted him to ice hockey, which he has played since his childhood in Calgary. “The controlled aggression is great. It’s one of the fastest-thinking games in the world. In a lot of fast sports, like motor racing or skating, you’re going round in circles and have a bit more time to formulate strategy and tactics. But in hockey, you’re going at top speed with knives on your feet, trying to score, and at the same time people are trying to knock you down,” Bondaroff says.

“That speed appeals to some people, and you can get some beautiful skating. But I like the rough-and-tumble fights in the corner, the battles in front of the net. There is a moment in hockey when you know you’re about to be absolutely creamed, but it’s imperative that you take the puck, pass it off and take the hit.”

Formed in 1885, the Cambridge University Ice Hockey Club is one of the oldest in the world and has a long-standing rivalry with Oxford – albeit a rather one-sided one.

Cambridge has won only twice in the past 10 years and a total of 28 times during the 20th century. “Unfortunately we don’t have a rink here,” Bondaroff explains. “It’s one of the disadvantages we face against Oxford, because they have a rink in town so they practice on the ice twice or more a week. We have to travel to Peterborough, so we get less time on the ice.”

Nonetheless, Bondaroff is bullish about the coming season. “We’re going to be playing a lot harder. And we have a new top-secret training regime, which I can’t say any more about; but it’s going to help give us an edge,” he says.

Despite the violence – and thanks to its more relaxed rules, the Varsity match is more violent than most – ice hockey at Cambridge has its cerebral moments, too. Talking about hockey kit (and from padded pants and helmets to shoulder pads and chest protectors, there is a mountain of it) Bondaroff mentions that the physics of skating is a popular topic of conversation in the locker room and team bus.

“The skate blade isn’t flat but curved, so the pressure is distributed on either edge of the

skate. That liquefies the ice, so there’s actually a lot of physics behind how much arch you have between the edges. We have long discussions about it – this is Cambridge, after all. It’s one of the most fascinating things about playing sport here. You can have classic sport banter, and then someone asks a question about John Locke and freedom, and two hours later the bus ride’s over. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced playing hockey before.” srcf.ucam.org/cuihc

CAM 67 47

Extracurricular

✄

CAM 67 Prize Crossword

Sacco Mala

by Schadenfreude

All entries to be received by 10 January 2013 Send completed crosswords: • by post to CAM 67 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge CB5 8AB • by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk • or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam The first correct entrant will receive a copy of East Anglia: A Different Perspective, a collection from leading print-maker Glynn Thomas of scenes from across the four counties of East Anglia and beyond (Mascot Media, £27.50) and £15 to spend on CUP publications. Two runners-up will also receive £35 to spend on CUP publications.

Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 68 and posted online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam on 18 January 2013.

4

41 21

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 18 19 22 23 25 27 29 31

34 36 38 40

A den left warm and dry (4) Engineers about to enter lido lower the temperature in advance (7) Customary income mostly reduced (5) Tart accommodating soldiers heading for Israel (7) A prickly shrub, not old, next to stream (6) Untidy reckless office worker (8) Catty German (4) An excursion for example touring remains (6) Missing a section Latin is translated into Scottish (5) Life of a fruit (4) Cardinal with time and energy for a response to a thrust (5) Uncle Sam leaves extremely funny note (8) Pressure in modelled aircraft’s wheel cover (4) Relating to a Homeric theory without final changes (7) Honey lives with retired copper (7) Poles are deserted, caught in a trap (6) Weighing machines originally tuned by foreign gent from the south (6) Greek character with a litre bottle (5) Bird rising over top of elder came into view (5) 200,000 or more caught in loch (so far) (4) Shock treatment finally rejected by dwarf (4).

Winner: Thomas Ransford (Trinity 1977)

CLOCKWISE PERIMETER

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1 2

Runners-up: J Chris Hobbs (St Catharine’s 1957) and Nesta Thomas (Newnham 1965) Special mentions: Peter Mabey (Selwyn 1943), the entrant with the earliest matriculation date and Josephine Living (Newnham 2003) the entrant with the most recent.

Sixteen clues lack definitions.

Their answers with some pairings form a complete set with one omission. The answers to these clues must be encoded such that the nth letter of the alphabet becomes the nth letter of a 26letter phrase.

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DOWN

10 Sketch about Republican community in Scotland (7) 11 Current stopping European with line for Dutch climber (5) 12 Duke to approach old fellow (4) 13 Old maid to continue without change perhaps (5) 15 Gaseous element removed from volatile chlorine dye (6) 16 Scots spoil woman’s special fruit (7) 17 Remove the colour from earth (7) 20 Litigation turned over by independent ruler (4) 21 Nothing put in novel card holder (4) 22 Sharp point on special needle (5) 23 Filters gluey substance for the auditor (4) 24 Popular actor’s part (4) 26 Anterior leg at the front! (4) 28 Too active orchestra (4) 30 Oils over in too much sun (5) 32 Some bidders use this Internet service provider to save $100 (4) 33 Depth in cover (4) 35 He tells stories about muscle men (7) 37 Everything in sight is superficial (7) 39 Fellow to build a fence (6) 42 Younger institute blocking college lecturer (5) 43 Boundary measure (4) 44 Pouches are emptied into coloured cases (5) 45 Prince is after French chemist’s unfinished collage (7)

Solution to CAM 66 Crossword Capital Letters by Schadenfreude

INSTRUCTIONS

14

ACROSS

Working is cushy around November time (9) Cleaning lady is overcome by it twice (10) One date in the year (3) Bobby’s outside entrance to Scotland Yard, returning what?

(6) Lake has gallons for hospital (5) Look inside Chinese base (5) I held up the poet’s flaming torch (10)

Extra letters from wordplay give the names of five Cambridge alumni who were Olympic gold medal winners: ABRAHAMS, BURGHLEY, BRASHER, MEADE and LLEWELLYN. The first and last letters of the extra words give ATHENS and LONDON, respectively. Solvers were required to highlight all the cells containing the letters of LONDON, thus revealing 2012.

The red letters in DOOL, VARDOS and NOTION replaced CAM, spelling DON.