CAM 72

Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 72 Easter 2014

In this issue:

Exam nightmares Fell running Cycle engineering May Balls Summer reading

CAM/72

Contents

Simon Pemberton

CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine Issue 72 Easter Term 2014

30 David Stewart

18

Regulars

Extracurricular

Letters 02 Don’s diary 03 Update 04 Diary 08 My room, your room 10 The best ...

11 Secret Cambridge 12 Profile 26

University matters Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life Prize crossword

41 45 47 48

Features Waking terror

14

By popular demand, CAM discovers just why we are still having nightmares about Finals.

How the bicycle got its spokes Marcus Ginns

14 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 ybm.co.uk

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

Executive Editor Morven Knowles

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

Managing Editor Kate Morris Design and art direction Paul Oldman smithltd.co.uk Print Pindar

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.

Publisher The University of Cambridge Development and Alumni Relations 1 Quayside Bridge Street Cambridge CB5 8AB Tel +44 (0)1223 332288

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.

Cover: David Stewart Copyright © 2014 The University of Cambridge.

18

The humble two-wheeler is a miracle of engineering. But just how did we get from the Penny Farthing to Kevlar tyres? Lucy Jolin investigates.

Running free

30

Rough grass, mud, rock, scree: fell running is an unforgiving sport. Richard Askwith explores its mysterious and enduring appeal.

We had a ball

34

Bands, fireworks, marquees...and 50 litres of leftover ice-cream. William Ham Bevan uncovers the highs and lows of being on a May Ball committee.

Summer reading

43

Which books are you planning to read this summer?

CAM’s star panel makes some suggestions.

CAM 72 1

Editor’s letter

Welcome to the Easter edition of CAM. As I write this, Cambridge is in the process of transformation as an atmosphere of quiet contemplation is pushed aside by a jubilant, exuberant mood that infects students and academics alike.

And if you are flicking through this issue of CAM on the steps of the Senate House, a newly minted Cambridge graduate, you may be thinking that Finals are over and done with. I have bad news. Cambridge graduates of all vintages and departments report that exams – and particularly Finals – will continue to loom large in your nightmares for years to come.

After a deluge of letters on the subject, CAM had to investigate. You can read our findings on page 14.

Elsewhere, on page 30, Richard Askwith explores an improbable fascination with fell running in Cambridge, and on page 34 we revisit the trials, tribulations and triumphs of being on a May Ball committee.

This summer, the Tour de France will come to Cambridge. To mark the occasion, on page 18, we examine how the bicycle evolved from the Penny Farthing to Kevlar tyres – from humble two-wheeler to tour de force, if you will.

And finally, if for you sun is merely an excuse to move from armchair to deckchair, latest book in hand, on page 43 we unveil our annual summer reading recommendations.

Mira Katbamna (Caius 1995)

2 CAM 72

Your letters

Exam nightmares In 1947, on the morning when we were about to sit the Law Tripos Part II, my good friend John Winterbotham said to me: “It is just three years since I was in the Far East, flying in a Douglas Dakota that had been shot to pieces, and saying to myself, ‘If I ever get out of this alive I will never worry about anything else ever again.’ And here I am having not had a wink of sleep last night worrying about this wretched exam.” Needless to say, John went on to get a good degree.

Bob King (Queens’ 1940) At Christ’s the revered Senior Tutor entered all medical students, regardless of ability, for the Natural Sciences Tripos at the end of their second year, regarding us inherently idle.

To this day, I regularly dream that I am about to enter the examination hall having done no work and in total ignorance of my subject. I awake sweating!

Dr (I did pass!) Philip Edmondson (Christ’s 1957)

Me2 In her interesting piece, Kathleen Richardson asks: “But what happens when all of life can be experienced digitally?” The short answer is: It can’t be, or at least not with any technology currently conceivable. And that’s the problem.

Virtual worlds have no haptic or olfactory content. This is possibly the most worrying part of the phenomenon that she describes: not that the “every aspect of the lived and present life can be recreated in the online

world”, but precisely that it cannot be. By retreating to the digital world of vicarious living, people are not only depriving themselves of experience, but looking at the real world as intrusive.

Michael Scuffil (Emmanuel 1963)

Classical thought Dr Omitowoju (CAM 71) set me thinking about why Greek and Latin are still regarded as a unit for Classics. In the history of medicine and science the sequence of thought was from Greek to Latin then Arabic and on to modern times. Classics should include a Semitic language; after all, Christ was a Semite, why should Christianity be interpreted through Latin?

Hugh Crone (St John’s 1954)

Praise I astonish myself by reading CAM from cover to cover, even articles on subjects which I would never have thought could possibly be interesting, and I love the beautiful, elegant and witty illustrations – those for The waters are rising and Men at play for example – but even the portraits have a distinctively offbeat charm. Thank you!

Rose Constantine (Lucy Cavendish 1971)

Stranger blue Illuminating but disappointing – for those of us in the Footlights in the late 70s – to read the true genus of Strange Blue, the frisbee team. I had always assumed it was a brilliant chapeau to

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to: cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk Write to us at: CAM, 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.

our own Hugh Laurie, whose Blackadder character, George, so movingly reminisced about the college tiddlywinks team – the Trinity Tiddlers.

Nick Miles (Corpus 1979) ps: I thought the latest edition was a cracker.

Floods The waters are rising (CAM 71) takes the now conventional, and rather comforting, stance that we can adapt to sea level rise.

Sadly, however much we raise the heights of the dykes, the sea will eventually overtop them since the sea level continues to rise. Unless we reduce our CO2 emissions, it will continue to do so.

John D Anderson (King’s 1957)

More than great chips In December 1958, after the candlelight Advent Carol Service in Great St Mary’s led by Mervyn Stockwood, I asked Meriel Pilkington (Homerton 1958) to accompany me to the Gardenia for our first time out together.

We sat in the cellar with our frothy coffee eating brown sugar with teaspoons. We are still drinking coffee together as husband and wife, but have cut back on the sugar.

Kelvin Appleton (St Catharine’s 1958) Good to see that the Gardenia is still going strong.“Gardies” seems a bit pretentious; in my day it was known (just as affectionately) as “Greasy Joe’s”.

John Buckle (Trinity 1959)

Don’s diary Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald is Senior Research Group Leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cancer Unit, Hutchison/MRC Research Centre. She is also Director of Studies for Medical Sciences at Trinity and an honorary consultant physician at Addenbrooke’s.

This Lent Term has been an unusual one for me as I have been on sabbatical leave. This academic custom, first recorded at Harvard in 1880, to take one year (or, in my case, one term) away from academic duties, stems from Mosaic law, which held that on the seventh year land was to be left untilled.

The ‘rest’ applied to my teaching duties for first year medical undergraduates at Trinity, but not to my academic research at the MRC Cancer Unit or to my clinical duties; escaping to another university or to a sunnier clime was not an option. However, if my family of four hungry boys hoped I might appear to cook supper on Tuesday evenings, they were sadly mistaken. One of the frustrations and challenges for clinician scientists (and no doubt other disciplines) is the lack of uninterrupted time to sit and think or write. So I kept my weekly teaching hours and wrote scientific papers in the solitude of my lovely College study.

the most senior of whom I have known for fiveand-a-half years. Post-doctoral students have been described by some as the ‘lost tribe’ of the University and clinical students can sometimes fall into a similar category. As well as time spent at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, they are placed in small non-College based groups, living in bed and breakfast or hospital accommodation, as far away as King’s Lynn, Peterborough or Stevenage, for six weeks or so at a time.

This can be a very formative experience and probably the only way to learn clinical skills with plenty of opportunity for direct patient contact over a range of specialties. However, for some, it can be lonely and even disconcerting.

A hospital campus in the evening is quite different from the solitude of a room of one’s own in College, from where one can be in the company of friends or sport or music within minutes.

One aspect of College life often neglected by me, and other academics working off-site, is the fellowship that emanates from time spent with other members of the academic community.

An advantage of Trinity is the size of the fellowship, which therefore encompasses expertise on a huge range of disciplines and diverse opinion. Dining in Hall at the end of my erstwhile teaching hours was therefore another benefit of my sabbatical. This did feel a little indulgent, especially given that my husband was at home cooking scrambled eggs or similar, but after several hours spent at my desk trying to make sense of clinical trial results and genomic data, the conversation was uplifting and encouraging. Not being accustomed to a three-course dinner on a weekday, the five-mile cycle home afterwards helped to combat the calories and allowed me to mentally change gear from the inspiring surroundings of College to the reality of a busy, messy household beginning to think of sleep.

The Trinity clinical medics thus gather with me once or twice a term to share experiences born out of their clinical encounters or comment on interesting data from recent journals with other fellows for a ‘journal club’. Refreshment from the College kitchen is always a draw on such occasions, especially the legendary cheese straws.

Nonetheless, the best-attended event was supper at a local self-service restaurant. We talked late into the evening and cleared the decks of food until we were forced to leave at closing time.

The camaraderie was a pleasure to behold and I was struck by the maturity and determination of the sixth-years to succeed in clinical medicine.

Having returned from their elective, several of them had found a new level of confidence and were starting to form a preference for their chosen career path, ranging from forensic psychiatry through to surgery. A lot happens over six years as a medical student, and by the end of it I am pleased to say that the popular phrase ‘my life in their hands’ does not seem such a terrifying or outlandish idea at all.

I chose to continue my duties as director of studies during my sabbatical for the sake of continuity, especially for the clinical students –

mrc-cu.cam.ac.uk

CAM 72 3

UPDATE EASTER TERM Cambridge Newspapers

COLLEGES

Trinity triumphs in University Challenge Students from Trinity triumphed in the final of University Challenge in April, beating their rivals from Oxford 240 points to 135.

Team captain Ralph Morley, a Classicist, and his fellow competitors Matthew Ridley (Economics), Filip Drnovšek Zorko (Natural Sciences) and Richard Freeland (Maths) stormed to victory over Somerville College, Oxford, answering questions on subjects ranging from the works of Jane Austen to tea production in Asia. “The trophy never looked in danger of spending the summer anywhere other than Cambridge,” wrote a journalist from The Telegraph.

The win marks the third time Cambridge has won since the BBC series was revived in 1994, and is the third win for Trinity in the series’ 43-year history. A Cambridge team last claimed the title in 2010 when Emmanuel beat St John’s College, Oxford.

Sir Gregory Winter, Master of Trinity commented: “The Trinity team were quite fantastic, so sharp and so knowledgeable.

I was delighted to see our students doing so well, but also uneasy that the world might presume that Trinity’s Master had similar abilities!”

ITV/REX Features

Below: The Trinity team (Left to right): Richard Freeland (2011), team captain Ralph Morley (2011), Filip Drnovsek Zorko (2010) and Matthew Ridley (2011) with their trophy after their 105 point victory over Somerville College.

4 CAM 72

DEPARTMENTS

Giving voice to the garden Roy Lancaster, one of the UK’s most celebrated plantsmen, says his abiding memory of the Botanic Garden is of a leaping gardener.

Lancaster, whose reminiscences form part of an oral history project for the garden, says Ron Rule, the foreman in charge of systematic beds “would run and leap over each hedge in turn”.

The Gardeners’ World presenter, who trained at the garden from 1959, said: “He used to amaze us all by jumping over in succession all the hedges like a thoroughbred from Newmarket.”

Lancaster’s memories now sit in an online oral archive at voicingthegarden. com, where alumni can also share their thoughts.

Juliet Day, development officer at the garden, said: “The last phase of the website has now gone live, meaning

that you too can become part of the story. On the memory board you can upload your own recollections and motivations for visiting the garden and pinpoint your favourite spots in Map Your Love.” voicingthegarden.com

Honorary degrees Honorary degrees have been conferred on nine individuals. They are: Catherine Cesarsky, astronomer; Zaha Hadid, architect; Yusuf Hamied, pharmaceutical chemist; Ian McKellen, actor and director; Dan McKenzie, geophysicist; Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal; Albie Sachs, lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner; Joy Seddon, Founder of Welcome International Students of Cambridge and Mitsuko Uchida, pianist.

SPORT

Tour de France goes wireless in Cambridge When the Tour de France speeds through Cambridge on 7 July, the crowds gathering on Parker’s Piece will be able to follow its progress online thanks to some ingenious work by the University.

Experts from the Department of Engineering and the University Information Services (UIS) have helped to install hidden WiFi points on six new Victorian-style lampposts across the historic open space, the race’s starting point in the city.

Their work is part of a larger project in collaboration with the city and county council to install public WiFi points across the city centre, making use of the University’s fibre-optic network.

Jon Holgate, head of networks for the University, said: “We hope this will

•

UPDATE EASTER TERM

Heineken Prize Widely regarded as second only to the Nobel Prize, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics has been won by Professor Christopher Dobson, who is working to uncover the molecular processes that underlie diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and type II diabetes.

The $US200,000 prize was awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

not only be of great benefit on the day, but also potentially create a lasting legacy for the city and the University long after the riders have left.”

The 2014 Tour starts in Leeds on 5 July, taking in Harrogate and York before heading south for the 159km, third and final stage, Cambridge to London.

At midday the cyclists will head in to Cambridge up Regent and Sidney streets, before turning south at the Round Church down Trinity Street, King’s Parade and Trumpington Street.

The tour has not been to the UK since 2007 when its first race, known as Le Grand Départ, drew crowds of over two million in London and Kent. alumni.cam.ac.uk/events/ tour-de-france-in-cambridge

find image

DEPARTMENTS

James Dyson Foundation makes £8m gift The Department of Engineering has received its largest ever gift, of £8m, thanks to the James Dyson Foundation. The money will fund the Dyson Engineering Design Centre, providing students with high-tech facilities where they can design, build, experiment and exchange ideas.

A separate new building, the James Dyson Building for Engineering, will house graduate students and will contain incubator units that allow students to share ideas. The building will support world-leading investigations into areas such as novel materials, smart infrastructure, electric vehicles and efficient internal combustion systems for cars.

Professor Dame Ann Dowling, Head of the Department of Engineering, said: “Academic rigour must meet with practical invention. The Dyson Engineering Design Centre and the James Dyson Building for Engineering bridge the gap, encouraging engineers to apply their minds creatively to experiment and try new things.”

Indeed, research at the new centre will build on a rich tradition of engineering invention: it was at Cambridge that Sir Harry Ricardo pioneered the internal combustion engine and Sir Frank Whittle revolutionised travel with his jet engine.

Sir James Dyson said: “I’m hopeful that this new space for Britain’s best engineers at the University of Cambridge will catalyse great technological breakthroughs that transform how we live.”

CAM 72 5

6 CAM 72

UPDATE EASTER TERM

Alumni benefits From priority booking at music and literary festivals, to discounted theatre tickets, there are an exciting range of benefits on offer for alumni. To explore the benefits, discounts and offers available please consult our website at alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits.

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

Access the network Wherever you are in the world, more than 430 local alumni groups offer the chance to network, socialise, and make new friends.

Five new groups have recently formed and are welcoming new members. To contact Susan Sipos (Hughes Hall 2008) of the Cambridge Club of Monaco, email susan.sipos10@gmail.com.

The Cambridge Alumni Society of South Florida has been established by Jonathan Cardenas, jcardenas@cantab.net.

Alumni in east Asia may be interested to hear of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Penang and North Malaysia, run by Louise Goss-Custard (Oxford), who can be contacted at oxbridgepenang@gmail.com and the Cambridge China Alumni Network, run by Shan Lu, who can be contacted at volunteer@cambridgechina.org.

The newest European group is the Oxford and Cambridge Society Strasbourg; secretary Kyrie James (Magdalene 1988) can be reached on kyrie@ibnetworks.net.

Robin Heighway-Bury/David Semple

Crossword now online Calling all cruciverbalists: our fiendishly difficult prize crossword is now online. Set by Schadenfreude, the puzzle has a loyal following among those who enjoy a challenge. Nearly half of the entries submitted now come via our website and email from fans as far afield as New Zealand and Orkney. Test yourself with the latest puzzle at alumni.cam.ac.uk/magazine/crossword.

TRAVEL PROGRAMME

An adventurer’s education

T

ake a gastronomic tour of Piedmont or cruise across the Bay of Bengal on two new tours available with the Cambridge Alumni Travel Programme. These trips, presented by our newest travel operator, Martin Randall Travel, join other tours to destinations ranging from Borneo, Peru and Costa Rica.

Alternatively, closer to home we offer trips to the Scottish Borders and Hereford’s Three Choirs Festival.

These tours offer a unique opportunity for you to travel with likeminded alumni, and with a donation made to the University for every booking they are also a good way to support Cambridge.

From the 3000-plus alumni who have travelled with the programme in its 22 years, the University has received more than £1.1m.

alumni.cam.ac.uk/travel

CAM 72 7

DIARY EASTER TERM Alumni Festival 26 – 28 September, Cambridge Have your horizons broadened by some of the world’s top thinkers as the University throws open its doors for three days of discovery and intellectual adventure at our flagship alumni event.

Speakers drawn from all six Schools will participate in more than 30 lectures, with topics ranging from the history of finance to bomb detection.

Listen to our physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory explain some of the most exciting developments in particle physics and astronomy, or gain a fascinating insight into cuttingedge work on psychosis.

The Alumni Festival also includes exclusive tours of colleges, the University Library and the chance to sing Mozart’s Requiem in King’s College Chapel.

Information about this year’s programme is on our website. Booking opens on 14 July and closes on 15 September. Look out for updates on the website or sign up for regular Festival email updates by emailing events@alumni.cam.ac.uk.

Ben Hawkes

alumni.cam.ac.uk/festival14

Brilliant minds, exclusive insight and quality debate at the annual Alumni Festival 8 CAM 72

DIARY EASTER TERM

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

In brief Other events

Global Cambridge: India 19 September 2014, New Delhi Join the Vice-Chancellor, academics and thinkers from India and Cambridge as they discuss their work and ambitious mission to identify solutions to three key global challenges.

The day of lectures and panel discussions – entitled India and Cambridge: Working Together – will focus on health, society and education and provide opportunities for you to engage in the search for creative solutions.

The day will conclude with a reception where attendees can meet the speakers, amid the largest gathering of Cambridge alumni in India, to continue discussions.

For more information on Cambridge’s links with India, see alumni.cam.ac.uk/india14 The Red Fort, New Delhi

La Grande Guerre Fitzwilliam Museum, May–September See the first seven months of the first world war illustrated in colour lithographs and woodcuts. Depictions of battle scenes, sieges and airstrikes are punctuated by calmer moments, such as prints showing English and Scottish forces taking tea together.

WOW: Women of the World, Festival of Ideas Cambridge Junction, 26 October Celebrate the incredible achievements of women and girls and explore the most potent topics for women today with inspirational talks, heated debates and lively workshops.

In collaboration with the Southbank Centre, London. cam.ac.uk/festival-of-ideas

Gustav Metzger: Lift Off! Kettle’s Yard, until August This solo exhibition of Metzger’s work includes his landmark piece Liquid Crystal Environment, on loan from Tate. The exhibition also highlights Metzger’s close

connection with Cambridge – he studied at the Cambridge School of Art in the 1940s. kettlesyard.co.uk

The Turn of the Screw

by Benjamin Britten

West Road Concert Hall, 13 July This performance of Britten’s chamber opera based on Henry James’ classic ghost story is conducted by Susie Self and features Kelvin Lim on piano and Sarah Forbes as the governess. westroad.org

Assassins

by Stephen Sondheim ADC Theatre, 9–13 September From John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald, this musical follows the stories of nine individuals from different times, united by only one thing: their attempts to assassinate a president. adctheatre.com

Save the date!

Cambridge Festival of Ideas 20 October–2 November cam.ac.uk/festival-of-ideas CAM 72 9

My room, your room Room 223, Sidgwick, NEWNHAM Words Kate Hilpern Photograph Marcus Ginns Sarah Dunant (Newnham 1969) is the author of the international bestseller The Birth of Venus.

She worked for many years for the BBC, teaches renaissance studies at Washington University in St Louis and lectures on creative writing for the Faber Academy and Oxford Brookes University. Her latest book is Blood & Beauty, a study of the Borgias.

10 CAM 72

Yun Je, 21, is a second-year mathematics student at Cambridge University. “My desk is by the window because I crave a lot of sunshine,” she says. “You can never have too much of it.”

I

would have been scared of you if I’d known you when I was here,” novelist Sarah Dunant admits to Yun Je upon meeting her in the white, highceilinged corridor just outside 223 Sidgwick. “I know absolutely nothing about maths,” she explains, goodhumouredly. “Ah, but I know nothing about history, so perhaps I’d have felt the same,” retorts Je, equally amiably.

“We could have talked about the history of maths,” they both laugh, as Je shows Dunant into the room that she last saw in 1970.

“I remember thinking, when they showed me in here for the very first time, that it was very small and very cold,” says Dunant, her eyes darting round the room. “The other rooms on this corridor, which belonged to girls who became my great friends, were bigger and I was quite envious. But actually, I grew fond of it.”

The best... bed in Cambridge Thea Hawlin is reading English Literature at Murray Edwards “To bed, to bed, there’s knocking at the gate.” It’s rather worrying that the words my mother used to lovingly coerce me into bed as a child are from the lips of a deranged Lady Macbeth post-regicide.

However, for me, the words do still ring true (although, one hopes, minus the bloody context). Amid the joyful chaos of the Cambridge term, the moments spent in bed are perhaps the most undervalued and precious, even in the commotion of continual action (there is always someone knocking, figuratively or not). With so much on, at all hours, one has to be clever when planning one’s shut-eye. The dreaded all-nighter practically becomes normative; sleepless nights, and sleep-filled days, a topsy-turvy of reality.

In this dream-like state, Kettle’s Yard is a sanctuary in the midst of hubbub. Tucked away on Castle Street, the intricately arranged house – a memorial to the quiet and cultured life of Jim and Helen Ede – serves as a continually calming presence. Sent there as a first year by my supervisor to write a

response to the house, I discovered a place that perfectly sets the scene for what must be the best bed to be found in Cambridge.

What is a bed? For Shakespeare it was “the dear repose for limbs with travel tired”, but the best beds provide a resting place in which the mind too can rest. In Kettle’s Yard I see a bed that provides a place not for fretting about work, but large enough to allow room for dreams.

It may not be encrusted with jewels or elaborately adorned with gold, but this is the kind of bedroom, and bed, that Virginia Woolf talked about in A Room of One’s Own: a haven. Sleep may not strictly be allowed, but a moment of calm is permitted. Surrounded by the muted paintings of Winifred Nicholson and the softness of the drawings of Elisabeth Vellacott, the bed itself becomes a shrine, an object that presents a chance for peaceful rest and a blank canvas on which one can happily retire from the business of the world. Even if you can’t bounce on it. www.kettlesyard.co.uk Marcus Ginns

Pointing to the blocked chimney breast, Dunant explains that there used to be a gas fire. “There was one in every room, and you always knew the people who had just come out of their rooms because they’d have bright red legs from sitting by it. I used to have a little gas ring too, where I heated up my instant porridge. That also helped warm me up.”

Je is aghast. “This room is so warm now. But I relate to the envy about room size and you’ll see I also have my instant cooker, although in my case it’s a rice cooker,” she says, looking towards her desk.

Although Dunant never felt homesick at Cambridge, partly because she’d just come from a stint in California as an au pair, Je does miss her homeland of Korea. “Mainly I’m fine, because I get to go home in the holidays. But sometimes when I turn the light out at night, it hits me.”

While Je’s decor is minimalist (“I’m a pragmatist”), Dunant had pop art posters on the walls and a brightly coloured rug. But they both agree that the room’s best quality is its view on to the library. “They’ve built an extra corridor on the front though – the plaque says 2003 – so it’s not quite the same scene,” notes Dunant.

Je’s favourite place to study is one of window seats of that library. “I work better when I’m surrounded by other people working and there’s one window seat where you can see this room, which I like,” she says.

It’s not that Je never works at the desk in her room.

It’s just that it tends to be reserved for all-nighters.

“I was just the same,” says Dunant, nodding. “I’d love to think back and remember staying up all night in this room for the sex, drugs and rock and roll, but actually it was usually because an essay was due in the morning.”

Not that Dunant’s student life at Cambridge was all work and no play. An enthusiastic member of Footlights, she even considered a career in acting when she left Cambridge. “There was so much going on all the time here. It really was exciting.” It was also a time of huge change. “Perhaps I felt it more than most, having just come back from San Francisco, but actually it was radical here too. The Garden House riot took place that year.”

Student life for Je has proved less revolutionary, although far from dull, with extracurricular activities including badminton and film club. “It’s true that there is always something going on, which I love,” she says.

None of Je’s family could believe it when she won a place at Cambridge. “My father had come to Cambridge for a year for work and I enjoyed secondary education. I never thought I’d get into the University, though, and my own mother didn’t believe me when I said I’d applied,” she smiles.

There was a sense of disbelief in Dunant’s family too. “I found out via telegram,” she recalls. “It said: ‘OFFER OF PLACE AT NEWNHAM STOP PLEASE ACCEPT BY RETURN STOP’.

Nobody in my family had ever been to university and few women came to Cambridge, then. The funny thing was when I then went off to California, I decided I wanted to go to Berkeley instead. But my mother made sure I came back, and I’m so glad she did.”

CAM 72 11

SECRET CAMBRIDGE

All that remains Words Becky Allen Illustration Lee Woodgate

S

pring heralds the return of tourists to Cambridge.

Beating a path down Free School Lane, two Blue Badge guides lead their charges through a slice of the city’s history. At a blue plaque on the old Laboratory of Physical Chemistry, they remember the work of Stephen Perse, Fellow of Gonville and Caius, and founder of the school that lends the lane its name.

Further along the street the parties pause twice at the slate plaques marking the first hundred years of the Cavendish Laboratory and JJ Thompson’s discovery of the electron. At Free School Lane’s fourth plaque, however, they hurry past.

Stained with verdigris, and supported by leafy scrolls of stonework, the plaque explains: “This wing of the Engineering Laboratory was erected in memory of John Hopkinson and of his son John Gustave Hopkinson who hoped to have learnt here to follow in his father’s footsteps. They died on August 27 1898, the father aged 49 and the son 18.” But who was Hopkinson, how did father and son meet their deaths, and why are they commemorated in Free School Lane?

Born in Manchester in 1849, John Hopkinson was the son of a mill worker turned engineer. The eldest of five children, all boys, Hopkinson won a scholarship to Trinity in 1867, graduating in 1871 as Senior Wrangler.

He would marry Evelyn Oldenburg, who remembered of their first meeting his “great luminous eyes”, but was less struck by his attire. In a family memoir she wondered: “Why did he wear horrid brown socks with trousers too short to cover them?”

She was more impressed by Hopkinson’s academic and sporting achievements. “At Cambridge he had a phenomenal career – the most examined young man in England and always at the top of the lists. And with all this, living the usual happy, boating, athletic life of the University,” she wrote. “Three weeks before the Tripos, he ran the mile race in the University Athletic Sports, came in first and broke the record.”

12 CAM 72

A plaque outside the Engineering Laboratory on Free School Lane does little to explain the untimely deaths of those it honours, leaving passersby to puzzle over its history

Leaving Cambridge to work in his father’s factory, in 1872 Hopkinson moved to Birmingham’s pioneering glass makers and lighthouse engineers Chance Brothers, whose glass glazed Crystal Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Clock Tower. Marriage to Oldenburg soon followed, and despite having six children the couple converted two rooms of their home into laboratories for Hopkinson’s experiments into electricity and magnetism. They moved to London in 1890 when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering at King’s College. The following year he began work advising the Manchester Corporation on the city’s electric lighting, and in 1896 on new electric trams for Leeds, Liverpool and St Helens.

After running and rowing, recreation for Hopkinson revolved around climbing. It was a family affair: he and all four of his brothers were members of the Alpine Club, and although they recorded few of their climbs, considering it bragging, they scaled Ben Nevis’s North East Buttress and descended Tower Ridge, two of Britain’s classic climbs.

Like other Victorian climbers, Hopkinson loved the Alps and the family spent their summers in the small Swiss village of Arolla. “He reached the zenith of his strength and activity when he was about 40 years of age.

At that time he was truly a magnificent sight upon a mountain. I have seen him ploughing through soft snow up to his waist on the slopes of the Aletschhorn and tiring out men 10 years his junior who had but to follow in his tracks,” his son Bertie wrote. “Nothing seemed to serve him as a holiday and set him up for the next year’s labours except a month in the Alps.”

And 1898 was no different, except that for Hopkinson and three of his five children it would be their last. Holidaying with James Alfred Ewing, Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics at Cambridge, on 27 August Hopkinson, his 18-year-old son John (Jack) and daughters Alice (23) and Lina (19) set out from Arolla’s Hôtel du Mont-Collon in the early morning to climb the Petite Dent de Veisivi.

Ewing stayed behind, his legs too stiff from the previous day’s climb.

By midnight, the climbers had still not returned.

On Sunday morning their bodies were found, roped together, at the base of the wall under the summit.

Jack was found with his hands on his head, beside him a loose stone. “These facts give much probability to the supposition,” Bertie wrote, “that a stone hit Jack and caused the whole disaster.”

The accident changed many lives. Hopkinson’s brothers – including engineer Edward, and Albert, a medic, both of whom were students at Emmanuel – never climbed again. Bertie, who had followed his father to Trinity to read mathematics, abandoned his career as a patent lawyer and returned to Cambridge as Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics.

And Hopkinson’s widow gave £5,000 towards an extension to the engineering laboratory.

The only memorial to Lina and Alice is the grave where the climbing party is buried, in Territet on the shore of Lake Geneva: “Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”

Waking terror Everyone who has received his certificate of matriculation after passing his final examination at school complains of the persistence with which he is plagued by anxiety-dreams in which he has failed, or must go through his course again, etc. For the holder of a university degree this typical dream is replaced by another, which represents that he has not taken his doctor’s degree – to which he vainly objects, while still asleep, that he has already been practising for years, or is already a university lecturer or the senior partner of a firm of lawyers, and so on.

Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

Right: The Small Examination Hall, New Museums Site

I

n his masterwork on the sleeping mind, Dr Freud closes chapter five, The Material and Sources of Dreams, by citing three of the most typical scenarios – “dreams which almost everyone has dreamed in the same manner”. Appearing alongside “the embarrassment-dream of nakedness” and “dreams of the death of beloved persons” is “the examination-dream”.

And judging from the response to Professor David Tong’s description of exam setting in CAM 70, anxiety dreams about exams are no less common now than they were at the turn of the 20th century. Adrian Williams (Peterhouse 1957) wrote: “More than 50 years have passed since I passed Maths Tripos Part II, and I continue to dream of the experience. In my dream I have never done any work and have not attended any of the lectures. For 50 years I have let down my College, my tutors, my University, my parents, my school, and most of all, myself.”

He has not been alone. Alumni of all different ages, representing the whole range of Colleges and subjects, have dispatched letters to CAM about their own Tripos nightmares. Among them was Roger Smith (St Catharine’s 1957), who took his Classics Part II in 1960.

He says: “In some of the dreams I’ve had, I don’t know what the set books were for the Tripos, or I know but haven’t read them. In the most terrifying dream, I turn over the exam paper at the given signal and the print is dancing in front of my eyes so I can’t read the questions.”

Words William Ham Bevan Photograph David Stewart

14 CAM 72

CAM 72 15

These unwelcome sojourns into the past are hardly conducive to a restful night’s sleep. But many researchers in the fields of psychiatry and psychology suggest that there is a difference between a dream of this kind and the out-and-out nightmare; not even those who suffered the Law Tripos examinations tend to wake up screaming and hyperventilating when they are recalled nocturnally. Freud’s colleague Robert Fliess formalised this with his division of such dreams into the Angsttraum – the simple anxiety dream – and the more harrowing Alptraum.

According to Professor John Forrester, Head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the explanation for the first type of dreams in classic Freudian theory would be that they represent anxiety displaced from a present concern back to an event in the past.

By this account, they serve as ‘wish fulfilment’, offering consolation by revisiting episodes that were highly stressful but successfully overcome. So should they be considered a positive experience?

He says: “You’re writing for a magazine which is about people who’ve overwhelmingly passed through the Cambridge system successfully, and passed their exams. So it’s a wonderful irony that they’re dreaming their exams over and over again, because they’re precisely the very small proportion of the population who’ve quite often built their lives on their supreme success at exams.

“That’s exactly the framework of the Freudian theory of examination dreams. In Freud’s original edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, examination dreams have, in his view, a standard format and a standard raison d’être, which is a consolation. The dream is saying ‘you were so successful back in the past, and you will be successful in confronting whatever it is you’re actually preoccupied by in the present’.”

This may hold true of mildly unpleasant dreams, but how does this framework account for more serious cases of recurring nightmares – such as are often observed in those traumatised by war? Forrester says: “Later on, Freud revised his theories slightly. He recognises that there are some experiences in the past that you relive constantly even though there’s no point to it, and he called those traumatic dreams.

“That fuels the account of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the fact that people for years dream of horrendous events they’ve experienced. But Freud doesn’t think the examination dreams are like that. This is not a trauma that has been imposed upon the brain; it conforms to his wish-fulfilment model.”

Along similar lines, many researchers in modern neuroscience would maintain a distinction between simple anxiety dreams and the involuntary recurrent memories that characterise some psychological disorders. “Emotional memories are much more salient than other kinds of memories,” says Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology. “Things such as how stressful an event was will make you consolidate the memories stronger as a fixture – and of course, our sleep is when we consolidate and reconsolidate our memories, so a particularly salient one may be very long lasting.

“But I wouldn’t say it’s like PTSD. With exams you might have this particularly salient memory that keeps flashing back. For most people it might disrupt their sleep a bit, but it wouldn’t stop them being able to function in the normal way – which is when it becomes clinically serious and relevant.

“I think it’s very important to separate out the levels of these things. When we’re talking about functionality and wellbeing and it’s very impaired, that’s when it’s a serious problem. But we all have recurring memories: often they’re about salient things, and because a few things in consolidation get confused together. But certainly the more striking and emotional salient memories will be the ones that are most strongly encoded.”

Examination dreams may be common, but is there anything particular to the Cambridge Tripos exams that make them even more

likely to batter their way back into the mind in later life? Several of the correspondents who shared their experiences with CAM noted that other exam memories simply lacked the same staying power.

Adrian Williams, who went on to become an actuary, reports never having similar dreams about his accountancy exams; but very few life events, he believes, reach the intensity of Cambridge finals. “It was a fearsome experience. There were six exams of three hours each, starting on Monday morning and running till Wednesday afternoon.

There’s your whole academic life washed up in 18 hours, almost head to tail.”

There is also the fact that a vast amount may be riding on those few exam scripts. “When I sat, I had job offers from both the Civil Service and the Bank of England,” says Roger Smith. “Both depended on getting a First or a good Second. But the appointments board had said to me, ‘if you want to be sure of an interview, get a First’.”

Nevertheless, the conscious and unconscious associations of sitting Tripos exams may differ widely between former students.

Now a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, Jonathan Lear guided many students through the Philosophy Tripos when he was Director of Studies at Clare; and from practising as a psychoanalyst, he is familiar with hearing about anxiety issues from clients on the couch.

“It’s a typical point in life where you’re moving towards adulthood,” he says. “It’s marked as a moment of transition, and thus in the moment you are being measured in a socially significant and public way. So of course people tend to have memories about it and it tends to be a lifetime memory. But when one hears about these things, they can be very various: I’ve certainly talked with people who’ve really enjoyed the experience and think of it as a really great, defining moment for them. And then each person then takes it off into their own direction as they tie it up with the rest of their lives.”

He cautions against assuming that there is ever a one-size-fits-all correspondence between a certain type of dream and a particular meaning or significance; though he notes that this is something that Freud himself seemed to encourage with the third edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, which contained a large addendum on specific dream symbolisms. “By and large, I think the fundamental idea of Freud is that each individual is going to make very idiosyncratic meanings out of very basic events in their lives, and that’s really borne out in my clinical work. That’s part of why I think Freudianinfluenced psychoanalysis is so important.”

So for those seeking a way to rationalise – and perhaps end – their examination dreams, there may be no easy answers. But in the CAM postbag, a number of letter writers have mentioned their own attempts to exorcise the demons by confronting the material they had to face in the Tripos papers all those years ago.

Roger Smith says: “Around the time of my 50th birthday I started to reread the classics, and the nightmares stopped. I still have my Greek and Latin at breakfast time each morning – I read some Greek with my porridge and Latin with my toast and honey. And I can read what I like, such as the comedies of Aristophanes, rather than what the examiners told me to read.”

It seems – alas – to be an imperfect cure. When a contemporary of Adrian Williams lent him a full set of Mathematics Part II papers, he found that time had taken its toll. “It’s not that we don’t understand how to find the answers,” he says. “We can’t even understand the questions.”

In his original letter, he nevertheless expressed hope that this could “purge the memory of its bitter lees”. Has it worked? “Well, I’ve not had the full monty since,” he says. “I’ve not got to sit the exam, though I’ve dreamed I was about to go into it, thinking ‘this will not be a good experience’. So the jury is out on this one; but I think I shall go on having that bloody nightmare.”

CAM 72 17

T

he evolution of the bicycle is a glorious story of serendipity and ingenuity. It didn’t just require technological advances and engineering knowhow: its history touches on all kinds of accidental coincidences, from volcanic eruptions to an early roller skating craze. Like all great inventions, it required the right people to be in the right place at the right time. And like most good machines, it is both simple and phenomenally complicated.

“No matter how much we try, it’s very difficult to get away from the beautiful elegance of the double diamond frame and its conventional equipment,” says Professor Tony Purnell, Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at Cambridge and head of technology at British Cycling. “Take the chain. As a commuter, the chain is greasy, it’s a pain, it gets muck on your clothes. As a racer, a chain is 98.5% efficient, weighs 200g or so and that’s all that counts. It’s awfully difficult to get any alternative close to that.”

HOW THE BICYLE GOT ITS SPOKES The humble two-wheeler is a miracle of engineering. But just how did we get from the Penny Farthing to Kevlar tyres? Lucy Jolin investigates.

Photographs Marcus Ginns

18 CAM 72

Right/Far right: Horseless travel Early bicycles were really ‘running machines’, as the examples here show.

Propulsion was provided by the rider pushing his feet along the ground while sitting astride leather-padded rests.

Constructed using a wooden frame and wooden wheels with iron tyres, the machine featured a steering column (shown opposite) operated using a metal handlebar.

The design and production of these machines owes much to the craft of the carriagemaker. There was no braking mechanism.

CAM 72 19

It’s true that we never forget how to ride a bike.

But it’s also true that most of us don’t know how we do it in the first place. The Bradley Wigginses of the world excepted, there are usually only two occasions when we consider the forces required to drive a bicycle: once, aged four and desperate for freedom, and again, maybe 20 or 30 years later, working out how to help our own four-year-old develop that elusive, lifelong balance. And even then, it’s not something we consciously think about. We don’t consider the complex mathematical parameters.

We just fall off, or not.

But this is how it should be. “People are almost shocked when a bicycle goes wrong, because it’s such a reliable piece of kit, especially when stripped down to its essentials,” says Matt Seaton (Corpus 1983), staff editor at the New York Times, former Guardian cycling columnist and author of three books on cycling. “It needs incredibly little maintenance. There is a beautiful simplicity and a magical efficiency.

The chain drive is a really simple technology but it is fantastically efficient at transmitting the power that you put in at one end into an output at the other.”

Pedalling, for example, is simple. When you push down with your feet on the pedals of a modern bicycle, the force causes the chainring attached to the pedals to turn, and generates tension in the chain.

This tension is transmitted through the chain to the cog on the back wheel, which causes the back wheel to turn. The back wheel pushes backward on the road. The law of action and reaction means that this force pushes the bicycle and its rider forward.

Then comes the phenomenally complicated bit: not falling off. “Only a few people really understand how balancing a bicycle works,” says Philip Garsed, a PhD student in electronic engineering whose passion for bicycles developed into his recent talk at the Cambridge Science Festival, titled How the Bicycle Got Its Spokes. “There are lots of effects interacting with each other. One of the most interesting is the gyroscopic effect. If you have a wheel spinning around an axle and then try to tilt the axle from side to side, you get this weird effect that makes it resist that change. On a bike, that tends to keep you upright and for quite a long time it was thought that this was the reason why a bike can be balanced. It was then proved that it was not actually necessary – someone stuck a flywheel that rotated in the opposite direction on to the wheel and eliminated the effect, but the bike was still rideable. I have a book that explains the details of bicycle balance. It’s hundreds of pages thick and it helps to have a physics or engineering degree to get your head around it.”

Yet bicycles were originally born of a simple need: transportation that did not require feeding. In April 1815, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, erupted. It was the biggest eruption ever recorded. It sent vast quantities of gas, dust and ash into the atmosphere, forming a global fog that blotted out the sun and caused temperatures to fall. In Europe and North America, 1816 became known as “the year without a summer”. Snow fell in August and crops rotted in the fields. The people starved.

Opposite page/above: Mechanical propulsion The next major step in the evolution of the bicycle came with mechanical propulsion.

Pedals were attached to the front wheel axle. The integration of steering and pedalling was difficult and created an awkward riding position. The rider could now brake, however, by simply twisting the handlebar. He could also rest his legs in the iron supports provided at the front. This machine, the velocipede, also saw the fist tentative introduction of ball bearings and sprung frames.

Above right: Rear wheel propulsion The idea of driving power through the rear wheel was far more practical. Early experiments included foot operated treadles, which were similar to the foot pedals used to drive looms and sewing machines. Although shelved as an idea, maybe in part because the mechanism restricted the arc of the steering - it was revived in the design of the ‘safety’ bicycle (overleaf).

Below: Speed and comfort From 1872 steel began to replace wood and iron as the main material of construction. Hollow tubular steel frames and forks were developed, and large diameter lightweight wheels provided higher gearing and more speed.

Unlike the wooden wheel, which used compression spoking, the steel wheel was in suspension from thin steel spokes and was fitted with rubber tyres. A steel saddle spring also provided a more comfortable ride.

CAM 72 21

Right: Efficiency ‘Safety bicycle’ from the 1880s.

Moving the pedals away from the front wheel and providing propulsion through the rear wheel furthered the development of the chain drive. This allowed multiplication of the ratio of pedal revolutions to wheel revolutions - so large diameter wheels with their attendant hazards were no longer needed. This was the birth of the modern bicycle.

Various forms of frame were tried in the 1880s until the cycle industry settled on the ‘diamond’ frame, simple to make and adequately rigid in use. The ‘dropped’ or ‘loop’ frame which could be ridden by a lady in a long skirt was developed in the 1890s, hugely increasing the market for the safety bicycle.

Right: Comfort Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre The pneumatic tyre was patented by John Boyd Dunlop (1840–1921) in 1888. This resulted in a huge growth in the demand for rubber and advances in processing technology and manufacturing capacity. Early pneumatic cycle tyres had to be repaired in a workshop or at the factory and it was Édouard Michelin (1859–1940) who invented the form of removable tyre and inner tube which we know today. This allowed cycle tyre repairs to be carried out on the road by any competent cyclist.

This original 1900s tyre from the National Cycling Museum in Wales, shows the canvas substrate and the remains of the rubber cover, with the Woods valve of the inner tube of an early Dunlop tyre.

22 CAM 72

awaiting hi res later today

Right: Efficiency II Primitive forms of variable gearing were developed from the velocipede era onward.

Two basic approaches came to dominate. The hub gear in the rear wheel (as manufactured by SturmeyArcher) and the derailleur invented in the 1890s which has become the dominant form of multiple gearing used by continental makers and for competition cycling.

Hub gears can have a frictional efficiency as low as 90% while the derailleur can transmit up to 97% of the input power.

Far right: Maintenance Dunlop Cycle Repair Kit This Dunlop cycle tyre repair kit was a typical accessory for the cyclist, which allowed the rider to roam at will and make any necessary tyre repairs along the way.

There were clearly problems with the wooden horse.

It could not be controlled.

There was no way of propelling it

This led Karl Drais, a German inventor, to ponder the problem of horses. They were the only practical way to get around. But you had to feed them, even if you weren’t using them. Wouldn’t it be better to have a form of transport that didn’t use up scarce and precious resources? He came up with the Laufmaschine (running machine). “Well, it was bicycle-like,” says Garsed. “It was not very refined.

It was made of wood. But the big leap forward was that it had two wheels, one in front of the other, and a seat, fairly close to the ground. There was no easy way of stopping it, as it had no brakes.”

This aspect of the wooden horse was enjoyed tremendously by its young riders, but not so much by the authorities in various cities, from New York to Hull, who banned it on safety grounds.

There were clearly problems with the wooden horse. It could not be controlled. There was no way of propelling it, apart from getting your mate to drunkenly launch you down a hill. But for the next 45 years, nothing much happened, until one significant problem – propulsion – was solved, with the help of roller skates.

It’s always deeply satisfying to look back at theories that turned out to be spectacularly wrong (the anti-railway idea that humans would suffocate if subjected to rapid motion, for example), and the overturning of such a belief made the next step in bicycle evolution possible. “Previously, it had been widely thought that it would be impossible for a person to keep control whilst riding on wheels without having one’s feet on the ground,” says Garsed. “A brief roller skating craze, it has been suggested, proved that wasn’t the case, and then three

Frenchmen – one carriage maker and two blacksmiths – came up with the pedal. Shortly afterwards, a guy called James Starley, who was from Coventry, came up with the idea of making wheels held in shape by weaving wire spokes together. He worked out a way of doing that which has been used ever since. Spokes on a bicycle wheel are pulled very tight and this makes spoked wheels both strong and very light.”

Enter (slowly and carefully) the Penny Farthing.

It’s hard not to look at it these days and wonder: “What were they thinking?” But in fact, Garsed points out, the wildly oversized front wheel was eminently logical for a bicycle with pedals attached directly to the front wheel, and lacking those other yet-to-be-invented components: gears and a chain.

With no gears to control how far the wheel turned with each pedal stroke and therefore increase or decrease speed that way, the only way to go faster was to make the front wheel bigger and bigger.

Happily, some riders possessed models incorporating a spoon brake – a lever on the handlebars that pushed a leather or metal pad against the front wheel.

Tyres remained solid rubber – until John Boyd Dunlop’s three-year-old son became ill and was prescribed exercise. Dunlop bought him a tricycle, but the cobbled streets of his native Belfast plus solid rubber tyres did not make for a comfortable ride.

Dunlop experimented with rubber and discovered that a tyre filled with air did a far more efficient job.

Around the same time, James Starley came up with his ‘safety bicycle’. His big idea? To remove the pedals from the front wheel and instead use a chain to allow them to drive the back wheel, without being directly attached to it. This made it practical to create a much CAM 72 23

24 CAM 72

First generation Brompton Folding Bicycle circa 1988.

The Brompton, with its small wheels, draws on bicycles such as the Moulton S Stowaway, designed by the engineer and inventor Dr. Alexander Moulton (King’s 1938). Moulton was a specialist in rubber technology who also developed the revolutionary rubber suspension system on the Mini car.

Bernhard Angerer/Embacher Collection

Below: Compactness With the introduction of railways, cars and eventually city commuting, the need for storable bicycles offered up new engineering challenges. Folding bicycles were developed from the 1890s and early examples of folding bicycles include the Capitaine Gérard, the BSA Airborne Paratrooper bike, the Bickerton and the Moulton S Stowaway, but the Brompton is perhaps the most widely known.

The key to the Moulton bicycle’s excellent performance was the use of thin, very high pressure tyres coupled with a necessary springing system based on the use of specially developed shock-absorbent rubber components.

The frame ensured that very little of the rider’s energy was lost through unnecessary flexing. It also improved handling and gave accurate wheel tracking and cornering stability.

Left: Moulton Speedsix c. 1965.

All the talk now is of the complex: aero helmets with built-in visors that smooth the front of your face, or teardrop-shaped, super-light bike tubes

Right: Weight and aerodynamics The Lotus Type 108 The Lotus Type 108 was specifically developed for track cycling and is known as the machine which Chris Boardman rode to break the world hour record at Manchester in 1996. It uses a monocoque carbon fibre frame and carbon fibre disc wheels, giving extremely light weight and minimal frictional air drag. Little of this technology, however, is relevant to the usual road bicycles, although disc wheels are frequently used for short-distance time trial racing.

Other recent introductions for cycle frame and component manufacture have included magnesium (a complete cast magnesium frame) and the wider use of titanium for frame tubes and for components.

Non-metallic composites (plastics) offer the greatest potential. At the moment, they are only used for competition bicycles but there is a great future in their eventual use in road and commuter machines.

On 7 July the Tour de France will speed through Cambridge.

For more information about University events on the day, visit alumni.cam.ac.uk/ events/tour-de-france-incambridge.

safer bicycle with two equally sized wheels front and back. The Penny Farthing became obsolete almost overnight and the bicycle as we know it today was born.

But it’s never stopped changing. We just can’t leave it alone. There’s a multitude of potential modifications whirling around that simple doublediamond frame. “A century ago, there was a mechanical revolution,” says Michael Sutcliffe, Reader in Mechanics of Materials at the Department of Engineering, who oversees the Bicycle Design Project module. “And over the last 40 years, we’ve seen a materials revolution, which began in the aerospace industry and is now feeding into bicycles.

This isn’t a new thing – the Wright brothers were originally bicycle engineers.”

And what materials: aerospace aluminum alloys and carbon fibre composites for frames and wheels are the norm now, replacing the steel of old. Saddles previously made in leather are now plastic composites and foam. Kevlar is used in tyres, and different kinds of steel and titanium alloys in spokes and chains.

“I come from a Formula One background, and we pride ourselves on being leading edge in composite materials,” says Tony Purnell. “Coming to cycling was a bit of a wakeup call. The construction of the bikes is really pretty impressive and it’s certainly, in some cases, the same standard as Formula One. But the incredible thing about cycling is that they make thousands of them at a price that people can afford. Which is certainly not the case with a Formula One car.”

And following the stunning success of the British Olympic team, there’s now an even bigger challenge ahead for bicycle engineers. How do you improve on near-perfection? Purnell points out that the huge gains made from new materials and aerodynamics over the last decade or so are starting to plateau. “It was virgin territory. When you apply science to a new area, you get big gains very quickly. We are not there any more. It’s easy for any cyclist to buy top-end equipment and clothing and the difference between standard off-the-shelf and the very best Olympic equipment will be quite small in terms of technologyled gains; disturbingly small. So we have to think far more laterally now about how to gain advantage.”

All the talk now is of the complex: aero-dynamic tweaks, aero-helmets with built-in visors that

smooth the front of your face and teardrop-shaped, super-light bike tubes developed in wind tunnels and using finite element stress analysis. It’s all a long way from the Laufmaschine or, indeed, that four-year-old finally breaking free from her stabilisers.

But these conversations aren’t just happening in Purnell’s so-called Secret Squirrel development team, deep in a British Cycling bunker. Such is the popularity of bicycle science, ideas and conversations are happening all over the internet, in school playgrounds, in bike shops and between engineering cyclists around the country. Luckily, if you care not a jot for the science, it doesn’t matter. Today you can still just get on and ride the most fantastic bikes.

As Mark Twain concluded after finally mastering his machine: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”

CAM would like to thank Philip Garsed of the Engineering Department and Freda Davies and Scotford Lawrence from the National Cycle Museum.

The Moulton Speedsix bicycle is from the Embacher Collection; image courtesy of Bernhard Angerer from Cyclepedia (Thames & Hudson).

CAM 72 25

26 CAM 72

Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly explains how his research may hold the key to the obesity crisis.

Words Victoria James Photographs Marcus Ginns

F

rom the outside, it looks like part of a normal NHS hospital; on the inside, it’s an academically super-powered research unit. The new Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science (IMS), inside Addenbrooke’s Hospital, is one floor of clinical treatment suites and three floors of research and technical facilities – and sitting on top of it all is the office of Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, the endocrinologist and diabetes researcher whose vision brought it into being. “The idea is that the science is brought to the patients, and the patients are brought to the science,” says O’Rahilly.

The Institute was developed with the aim of addressing the causes and consequences of some of the most debated public health challenges of our time: diabetes, obesity and their associated pathologies. Its investigations advance on two fronts: public health (through the MRC Epidemiology Unit, directed by Professor Nick Wareham) and biomedical research. The former considers environmental factors, such as how we eat, live, work and move, as well as genetic variation that is common in the whole population. The latter encompasses clinical and lab work that investigates the detailed biology involved in controlling fat storage and glucose levels, and how these are disturbed at the level of the molecule, cell and whole body in patients with metabolic disorders. A major strand of this is endocrinology or the study of hormones, which is O’Rahilly’s specialism.

He works on ‘extreme metabolic phenotypes’ – individuals with exceptional quirks in their genetic makeup – such as a complete lack of one specific hormone. While the number of patients with the conditions he studies may be small, their genes hold secrets that could be crucial to understanding how all of our bodies function. “You can learn a lot about how something is supposed to work,” he says, “when you know about how it’s messed up.”

O’Rahilly was the first to identify children with congenital leptin deficiency – those born without the hormone (usually produced in fat cells) that researchers in the 1960s had identified as regulating satiety in the brain and energy expenditure by the body. And so he became the first to treat that deficiency, by administering doses of the missing hormone.

An appetite for science CV 1981 MB, BCh, BAO National University of Ireland (University College Dublin) 1984 Research Fellow, University of Oxford 1987 MD, National University of Ireland

1996 Professor of Metabolic Medicine 2002 Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine 2008 Opening of Institute of Metabolic Science

1991 Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow

CAM 72 27

28 CAM 72

What keeps people lean?

Are they morally superior or biologically different?

I find it hard to conclude that it is all down to choice

The IMS is the result of an innovative four-way funding partnership between Cambridge University, the Wellcome Trust, Cambridge University NHS Hospitals Trust, and the Medical Research Council.

The results were striking. “We have given leptin to [leptin-deficient] kids who were close to being wheelchair-bound through obesity,” he says. The weight loss was dramatic, and “for these patients, it changed everything”.

That possibility of remedy was one of the things that first attracted O’Rahilly to endocrinology – at the precocious age of 14. “My father bought me a copy of Scientific American and it had an article about how hormones from the pituitary gland controlled many aspects of the body’s functions,” he recalls. “I was hooked.”

At the time Irish-born O’Rahilly began his undergraduate medical studies at University College Dublin, the image of endocrinology was of a detached, intellectual pursuit. It seems at odds with O’Rahilly’s own enthused and engaging nature, but “it was pretty widely held that if you were an endocrinologist, you were very cerebral, quite remote, whereas if you were a diabetes doctor you were warm and supportive and liked chatting to people”.

That perception “wasn’t terribly fair,” he says.

“I was attracted to endocrinology because it seemed to be such a positive field. You could understand what was missing in a patient, put it back, and they’d get well. It wasn’t like that in neurology, say, when back then there really wasn’t much treatment to offer.

I found it incredibly depressing to think you’d have to say: ‘Well, this is what’s wrong with you, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do’.”

O’Rahilly’s intervention with the leptin-deficient children, many near-crippled by their obesity, was a remarkable demonstration of the positive power of endocrinology at work. The results were written up in a definitive paper in 1997, and the work was part of a new wave of investigations that revolutionised how medicine understood obesity. “In 1993, there wasn’t a single human being with a molecular explanation for obesity,” O’Rahilly says. “Five years later, there were many explanations.”

It was work that sealed his scholarly reputation – and contributed to his 2013 receipt of a knighthood for services to medical research. What it wasn’t, though, was a cure for obesity.

“The sad thing is,” he says, with a rueful smile, “we can’t all just take leptin. The effect of going from no leptin, to some, was quite dramatic; the effects of going from lower levels of leptin, to higher, wasn’t nearly the same.”

And so his search has continued ever since for fresh insights through the identification and investigation of those patients who, for one quirk or another, are ‘extreme outliers’ from normal human biochemistry.

The search is made more straightforward by the fact that clinical subjects come to him, as NHS patients at the Addenbrooke’s-based Institute.

“Just yesterday,” he explains, “I saw one patient who had a large tumour removed from her rectum.

And with the removal of that tumour, her diabetes has simply disappeared. Which tells us very clearly that there was something happening within that tumour to cause her diabetes. Studying her samples should help us work out what.”

‘Solving’ the problem of the growing prevalence of obesity, and its related serious disorders, chiefly diabetes, is now a major policy and public health goal. Much is expected of the brilliant minds gathered at the IMS, many of whom were O’Rahilly’s own doctoral students, and who form a world-class team of investigators.

Which is just as well, because the task they face is hugely challenging. In recent decades, medical research and behavioural change have brought major advances in treating and preventing hypertension (high blood pressure), O’Rahilly says. The combined impact of public health messaging about the dangers of dietary salt, and the development of an array of drugs that target kidney function, has been little short of revolutionary. But the fight against obesity and diabetes won’t be so easily won.

That is because for obesity, the range of causation is much greater on both fronts which IMS fights: many and more complex environmental factors, dietary and lifestyle, rather than one (dietary salt), and many and more complex physiological locations (principally the gut and the brain), not just one (kidneys).

And because the importance of a person’s genetic makeup in determining how their body will respond to the availability of abundant calories is still poorly understood, lay people continue to apply confused notions of personal responsibility to the obese.

“In an environment where cheap calories are abundant, what keeps lean people lean? Are they morally superior, making better lifestyle choices, or biologically different? As a scientist I find it hard to look at the decades of consistent data on the importance of genetics in influencing body weight and conclude that it is all down to choice.”

O’Rahilly continues to try to fill those gaps in understanding, to harness endocrinology’s potential to offer solutions to those who suffer from diabetes and, by extension, obesity. He is currently involved in a promising study, led by his close colleague Professor Sadaf Farooqi, that involves a disorder that affects some 50,000 people in the UK and more than a million worldwide that may (just as their work on leptin did) remedy the adverse effects of another defect in the brain’s sensing of hunger and fullness.

Whether O’Rahilly and his colleagues will be the ones to find a magic bullet for obesity – should it exist – no one can tell. But the IMS’s integrated design, allowing researchers to move seamlessly from patient to lab, surely gives it one of the best chances of any team in the world.

And in the meantime, there is good news in the pipeline for the obese in another segment of the population – the four-legged.

“We’ve some promising findings on Labradors,” says O’Rahilly, with a twinkle in his eye. “Working in collaboration with the Department of Veterinary Medicine, we have some hints regarding what might make them so prone to being hungry. So we may end up curing fat Labradors before we can cure humans.”

CAM 72 29

RUNNING FREE Rough grass, mud, rock, scree: fell running is an unforgiving pursuit. Richard Askwith explores its mysterious and enduring appeal.

Illustration Simon Pemberton

30 CAM 72

E

even in its traditional homelands, fell running is a niche pursuit. The appeal of a sport that involves racing up and down trackless mountains on foot, in all weathers, is not obvious to most people.

In Cumbria, Yorkshire, the Peak District, Scotland and Wales – the homelands in question – fell runners are considered an eccentric minority. How, then, should one consider that tiny subset of fell runners who have indulged their passion for the sport at Cambridge?

The question is rarely asked. I am sure I am not alone in having passed my time as an undergraduate (Trinity 1977) without once having encountered the idea that such a sport existed, let alone that the University might be one of its centres of excellence. You’ll have spotted the difficulty. How does one run up and down fells in a city whose defining geographical characteristic is flatness? Happily, fell runners rarely allow such trivial difficulties to circumscribe their dreams. If they did, they wouldn’t be fell runners. The entire sport is an affront to common sense.

Think of fell running as athletics at altitude, on absurdly steep gradients, and you’ll have grasped barely half the difficulties. The surfaces are unsuitable too: not just rough grass but mud, rock, scree, heather, bracken, bog and boulders.

(British fell runners rarely bother with anything so effete as paths.) Then there’s the weather: often hostile, sometimes dangerous, usually disorienting. To excel as a fell runner you need not just speed, stamina and strength, but agility, daring, resilience, mountaincraft and, not least, a capacity to throw off, at crucial moments, the shell of physical caution that encases most adult lives.

It isn’t sensible. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it; and, over the years, many Cambridge men and women have found the concomitant thrills too potent to resist.

The golden age of fell running in Cambridge was probably the 1980s.

Anthony Kay, a graduate student at Clare (1979), is credited with introducing the bug in 1981, having caught it as an undergraduate at St Andrews. He found some potential kindred spirits in the Orienteering Club; enthused tirelessly; and was advised to set up a dedicated fell running club. “Maybe I was boring them with my enthusiasm,” reflects Kay, now Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Loughborough University. “I am sure some people did think it mad, but that has never stopped students from doing anything, has it?”

The Cambridge University Fell Running Club (CUFRC) was established in 1981, and a small but enthusiastic membership developed. Many, like Hugh Shercliff (Trinity 1981), had experience of orienteering and mountain hiking – Shercliff was already a keen Munro-bagger. Others were crosscountry runners who had been seduced by talk of mountain adventure.

The scope for term-time adventures was limited, but the travel was, in a sense, part of the challenge. “It was the good old days of British Rail,” says Dr Shercliff, now Director of Undergraduate Education at the Department of Engineering. “They used to do a cheap weekend return to anywhere in the UK for £8. Of course, having gone all that way, you couldn’t let anything like bad weather put you off.”

The Marsden to Edale race and the Edale Skyline, both in the Peak District, were two early attractions. For the most part, though, CUFRC was about fell-focused training, which typically ranged from normal crosscountry to long runs back from Haverhill (reached by bus) via the Gog Magog hills.

There were also regular trips to Royston, a 15-minute train ride away, where Therfield Heath provided a passable imitation of proper mountain terrain. “It’s only old

Richard Askwith (Trinity 1977) is author of Running Free: A Runner’s Journey Back to Nature (Yellow Jersey).

CAM 72 31

downland,” says Shercliff, “but it’s cut into by several quite deep re-entrants, so if you ran across the grain of the land you could easily do five or 10-mile training runs that were virtually all up and down, all on rough ground.”

In January 1982, CUFRC hosted its first fell race, a mere 100 miles away on Box Hill in Surrey. The home-counties location lacked rugged credibility in northern eyes, but, as London 2012’s Olympic cyclists will testify, it didn’t lack steepness, especially with a zig-zag route that squeezed 1800ft of ascent and descent from a 735ft hill.

Runners came from as far afield as Cumbria and Yorkshire, and the race has remained a fixture of the fell running calendar (although Cambridge’s role in it has lapsed).

A second CUFRC event, the Roaches, was set up in the Peak District a few months later. The 15-mile race attracted a field of 54, and, again, the race has thrived. CUFRC had 15 members by then, making it Britain’s 14th largest fell running club. Those who wore the light blue CUFRC vest began to be seen less as curiosities than as respected rivals to their northern counterparts. A few, such as Mark Rigby (Caius 1980), made their mark on the sport’s record books.

There was even a brief attempt to set up an inter-university fell running championship.

But keeping the momentum going was, aptly, an uphill struggle. Key players moved on, and in 1989 Hugh Shercliff (by then Research Fellow at Girton) bowed to the inevitable and allowed the remains of the fell running club to be subsumed into the hillwalking club. The two races were in due course taken over by local clubs; and those light blue vests, with CUFRC in cursive lettering and a little figure running up the slope of the ‘f’, became collectors’ items.

Yet a University that draws students from all over the world is bound to attract, from time to time, a few students who combine academic gifts with the rare combination of talent and temperament that makes a fell runner. Current members of the Cambridge University Hare & Hounds cross-country running club who match that description include Will Bowers (Trinity 2009), a member of Ochil Hill Runners in Scotland whose accomplishments include a creditable showing in the Ben Nevis race, and Holly Page (Homerton 2013), who has already come second in one English Championship fell race this year – and who has been known to train by doing repetitions over the railway bridge. There’s also an annual club trip to the Easter Festival of Running on the Isle of Man, the attractions of which include the Peel Hill Race.

Nor, it turns out, were the pioneers of

the 1980s the first Cambridge students to succumb to the lure of the fells. Several great Cambridge athletes of the early 1960s – Bruce Tulloh (Selwyn 1959), Herb Elliott (Jesus 1960) – are said to have dabbled with mountain-running, although not under University auspices; and Chris Brasher (St John’s 1947), later prominent in the sport, indulged his enthusiasms for cross-country running and mountain adventure while at the University, without ever quite meriting the definitive label of ‘Cambridge fell runner’.

Go back further, however, and the record becomes clearer. In 1898, George Macaulay Trevelyan (Trinity 1893), a young fellow – and future Master – of Trinity, combined with two undergraduate friends, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (Trinity 1895) and Sidney McDougall (King’s 1895), to establish a fell running tradition that survives to this day. The Trevelyan Manhunt – like its summer offshoot, the Trinity Lake Hunt – is, essentially, a giant game of tag, which takes place over 10 square miles of wild Cumbrian mountains. Between 30 and 40 people assemble once a year in the heart of the Lake District and spend three days hunting one another. They are divided into hares – usually four per day – and hounds – everyone else. The hares get a head start to make themselves scarce in the mountains.

The hounds then set off to ‘kill’ them.

A kill is made by touching.

It doesn’t sound dangerous until you think about it – at which point you realise that ‘affront to common sense’ is, in this case, putting it mildly. Think, for example, about the word ‘mountains’, and all that it implies: rocks, gullies, cliffs, extreme weather. Think, too, of the last time you played tag – the headlong sprints, the desperate lunges, the evasive twists and turns. Then mix the two together.

The challenge lies in the fact that 10 mountainous square miles is an enormous area for a running game involving fewer than 40 people. The joy is that success depends partly on fitness, partly on fearlessness, partly on guile; but also, largely, on mastery of the landscape.

When I tried it, last year, I thought I would be let down by my lack of speed. In fact, it was slow-mindedness that betrayed me. The best hunters know the hunt’s terrain intimately, and understand instantly the threats and opportunities offered by each square foot of ground.

Tales from hunts gone by include incidents of hares climbing trees, hiding in haylofts, burrowing under boulders, swimming into tarns, leaping from great heights and, in several cases, escaping so

far up or down precarious rock-faces that hostilities had to be temporarily suspended.

If that sounds foolhardy, well… in cold print, it is. Yet for most of its history, the hunt has been enjoyed by people of great intelligence. The bond with Cambridge was loosened when a separate Trinity Lake Hunt broke off in 1901. Nonetheless, a substantial proportion of hunters – who have included one chancellor of the exchequer, one home secretary, two secretaries of state for India, a lord chief justice and a governor of Hong Kong – have been Cambridge high fliers. Meanwhile, the Trinity hunt survives too, quietly convening for a week each summer. It’s a private tradition: the College has no formal role in it. Around 15 undergraduates are usually invited, with the other places taken by veterans who can’t bear to give the sport up.

Why? It may have a lot to do with the age-old student propensity to take a detached attitude to risk. Geoffrey Winthrop Young wrote the first of the famous guidebooks for Cambridge nightclimbers: The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity (1900). Chris Brasher, half a century later, shared that enthusiasm.

Yet the appeal of manhunting, and of fell running generally, goes deeper than mere thrillseeking. The need to immerse yourself in the landscape – in order to succeed and to avoid all manner of disasters – requires a shedding of civilised preoccupations that amounts almost to a shedding of self. For a few intense hours, fell runners must focus with demented intensity on every detail of the mountains until (as the Oxford philosopher and Trevelyan manhunter CEM Joad put it) they have been ‘impregnated by nature’. Mark Holland (Trinity 1994), Master of the Trinity Hunt, enthuses about exchanging “the pandemonium of modern life... for England’s most stunning and inspirational landscape”; Will Bowers, who has been on a Trinity hunt, talks about the joy of “getting out in wild places”; Holly Page finds “something freeing” about “getting to the top of a hill and hurtling down it”. But my favourite explanation was that quoted by Chris Brasher in 1972, after he had pressed some hardened fell runners to explain why they did it: “‘Oh come on, Chris, you know why.’”

Fell running may never become a Full Blue sport at Cambridge; or even a popular one. But as long as there are students there who love to run, some will have dreams that take them beyond the drab horizons of the fens and into the cloud-topped hills.

CAM 72 33

Tom Stoddart/Getty

We had a ball Bands, fireworks, marquees... and 50 litres of leftover icecream.

William Ham Bevan uncovers the highs and lows of being on a May Ball committee.

Above: The First and Third Trinity Boat Club May Ball, June 2007.

34 CAM 72

Below: The morning after a May Ball at Cambridge in 1906. The group photo includes the future war poet Siegfried Sassoon and his brother Hamo.

Right: Dance card for King’s May Ball 1892.

Far right Clare College May Ball Menu,1931.

The Cambridge Collection

IWM

B

y popular acknowledgement, it is just short of a century and a half since Cambridge’s first official May Ball. The First and Third Trinity Boat Club event of 1866 set the template for the many hundreds of celebrations that have followed. There have been a few upheavals, such as the movement of the May races and their attendant activities to the month of June in 1882. But by the time King’s and Clare were holding their own regular balls in the 1890s, it was accepted practice for undergraduates to form ad hoc committees to organise their College celebrations – and it still is.

In the archives of St Catharine’s, for instance, the earliest ball committee photo dates from 1929. To a historian, it is perhaps most notable for featuring two rugby union internationals – Robert Smeddle (England) and Guy Morgan (Wales) – who had already clashed at Twickenham that year. But to a lay observer, what’s striking is that the picture might have been taken at almost any ball over the past 100 years. Though the hairstyles provide a clue to its age (as do the ribands that the members wear with their white tie) the committee members’ look of jubilation will be familiar to anyone who has worked frantically to put together a May Week event, and finally seen the effort pay off.

Left: Revellers enjoy a hearty post-ball breakfast at The Orchard.

CAM 72 35

Since the very beginning, the success or otherwise of May balls has been down to the skills of these junior members. Elizabeth EnnionSmith, archivist at St Catharine’s, says: “The ball committee would have been responsible for everything from the provision of food, in conjunction with the College kitchens, to music and decoration.

“Putting on a ball was probably very hard work – first of all, to get permission from the authorities. They don’t seem to have been particularly keen on undergraduate activities. Looking at the College history, you find very little reference to undergraduates.”

For most of the past century, they could at least be sure that their efforts would be appreciated. The formula for May balls seemed set in aspic, and even continued through the 60s with few concessions to the undercurrents of popular culture. But soon, parts of the student body were questioning their cost and perceived stuffiness. Towards the end of the decade, Varsity even provided tips for its readers on how to get in without paying, with advice such as “Ball-crashers’ hands always get dirtier than the legitimate participants, so take a small polythene bag pack of Kleenex”.

Rock acts did begin to appear at Oxbridge balls, with the Rolling Stones even flying back from New York to appear at Magdalen College, Oxford. Nick Drake, now acknowledged as one of the era’s finest singer-songwriters, played his gentle ballads to a tipsy crowd at the Caius May Ball in 1969. But for the most part, the revellers still shared nine-minute waltzes and white tie was the implacable dress code. It was not until the 70s, after the riot at the Garden House Hotel and with almost weekly demonstrations, sit-ins and free gigs taking place, that the traditions of balls began to shift.

In 1971, the Corn Exchange put on an ‘Alternative May Ball’, but it took a further two years for the counterculture to breach College walls during May Week. Characteristically, it happened at King’s, where in 1973, the May Ball was rebranded the King’s Banana and, taking its cue from the title of an obscure progressive rock album, was advertised as the ‘Two Quid Deal’.

“A friend and I decided to hijack the ball committee and organise the first-ever multimedia rock and roll extravaganza,” says Henry Gewanter (King’s 1971). “We faced tremendous opposition from the College – they kept putting more and more restrictions on us – but we decided we’d do it, whatever it took. Instead of having an expensive, exclusive ball, we wanted to have an inexpensive party and invite everyone in town.”

Despite the College laying down onerous rules for ticket buyers, who were each limited to two tickets and had to provide a specimen signature, the event sold out. But lax security on the night meant that a massive number of gatecrashers joined in the mayhem, which saw every corner of the College taken over by bands (though not including Roxy Music, whom the committee had been invited to book but “didn’t think were that good”). One of the bands caused severe repercussions.

Gewanter says: “[The band] were playing in the chapel so we’d given them [College Dean] Reverend Till’s rooms as their dressing area. And they turned up with a giant garbage bag full of marijuana, which they proceeded to smoke all night long, both in the chapel and in Reverend Till’s rooms. That caused a bit of consternation.”

Worse still, the band soon discovered the Dean’s private wine cellar and drank it dry. Gewanter recalls that several dons who lived in College had not appreciated the changed nature of his event.

“They came down in their tailcoats, ready to waltz until dawn, and were faced with all this loud rock,” he says. “Shortly thereafter, my friend and I were kicked out of our rooms and told to live outside the College precincts. We were deemed a bad influence on the student body.”

Unsurprisingly, following the Banana was a formidable task for the next year’s event committee, as Nick Baker (King’s 1972) 36 CAM 72

discovered. He remembers protracted negotiations with College authorities over security and ticket sales. But the biggest hitch emerged on the night, when headline act Dr Feelgood were faced with the makeshift stage that an undergraduate volunteer had knocked together.

He says: “[Frontman] Wilko Johnson was a very energetic guitarist, from the school of Pete Townshend, and was wont to stride around stage and leap in the air. In rehearsal, he found that the stage bowed like a trampoline when he jumped, and the band thought he’d end up breaking his legs. They were very displeased. We had to get it reinforced with hours to spare.”

The event proved to be a success. “It was very much a product of the radical fervour of King’s at the time,” says Baker. “There was no dress code – faded, flared jeans would be the nearest thing to one, and no champagne. Other Colleges’ balls booked top-20 acts, but that was danceable pop music. Our music policy was more underground.”

T

oday, June Events at King’s are well established as the approved alternative to dressy May Balls, the latest incarnation being the King’s Affair with its motto of ‘Beats, not Bollinger’. However, there was a brief return to full-scale balls in the late 70s and early 80s, and their abrupt disappearance in 1982 is the stuff of College legend.

The most persistent rumour is that an appearance by post-punk group The Stranglers attracted a scrum of gatecrashers, police were called and balls were banned at the College by the Cambridgeshire Constabulary as a result – thus the reappearance of June Events.

The story is reproduced (with a query as to authenticity) on the King’s website, but is much disputed. Former College archivist Tracy Wilkinson notes that there is no mention of the episode in the King’s records.

The 80s saw increased media interest in Cambridge balls, which some reports portrayed as confirming the decade’s penchant for conspicuous consumption. Further news stories were generated by the occasional town-gown friction in May Week, particularly now that authorities could accurately monitor noise levels with electronic equipment. The Jesus Ball of 1985 hit the headlines when a din of 100dB was recorded by council officials, though the degree of press coverage may have had something to do with the organiser: HRH Prince Edward.

May Balls faced their greatest challenge in the early 90s. In 1991, Sidney Sussex and Downing were forced to join forces because of poor ticket sales, and the following year Pembroke cancelled its ball, traditionally held on alternate years to Magdalene’s. Matters reached a head in 1993: Selwyn, Emmanuel, Peterhouse and Girton all abandoned their May Week celebrations, while Sidney Sussex and New Hall merged their joint ball with Trinity Hall’s.

The ongoing recession received much of the blame for this bonfire of May balls. But other factors came into play, too. With almost all Colleges now mixed, double tickets were now likely to be bought by couples within the College, eliminating a potential ball-goer from outside. More serious was the simple lack of coordination between Colleges, with each ball or event committee acting without regard to its rivals’ plans. In 1993, this caused a vast oversupply of places: according to a report in the Independent, 16 balls were competing for guests, with 16,000 tickets available to an undergraduate population of just 10,000.

Ticket sales for the glitziest balls remained solid, with Trinity and Magdalene both selling out in 1993. But there was no longer any room for easygoing amateurism when it came to organisation – committees had to maintain an iron grip on finances. For committee member Peter Boucher (Magdalene 1990) it supplied a crash course

Anthony Barrington-Brown/ The Cambridge Collection Anthony Barrington-Brown/ The Cambridge Collection

Above: Punting to Granchester, c. 1950.

Below: Undergraduates return home, early 1950s.

in marketing and sponsorship. “We treated it as a business venture and negotiated some really tough commercial bargains,” he says.

“We realised that you had revenue and you had costs, and the breakeven point was flexible, depending on how hard you drove your commercial agenda and your sponsorships.

“For instance, we found two beer brands that were just launching, and they provided the beer at the ball absolutely free. We also got a good deal on the champagne. We had two actors dressed as French cavalry officers opening the bottles all night with a sword, which was theatrical and special for the guests, but also meant that we got lots of money from the champagne house. All those little things ended up making several thousand pounds’ worth of difference, which brought the break-even point down.”

“We were the first year to use a spreadsheet, because my copresident was mathematically inclined,” says Simone Cunliffe (Trinity 1991), who was a committee member in 1993 and joint president of the College’s 1994 ball. “It’s the norm now, of course, but they’d never had one before. Apart from that it was all about endless phone calls and faxes to suppliers. Of course, it’s a huge thing for a 19 or 20-year-old suddenly to have a budget in the tens of thousands of pounds.”

Despite attacks from the media and Student Union about mounting opulent balls during straitened times, Cunliffe’s committee refused to contemplate downsizing the event. “We had to keep on regardless of that kind of criticism, because we felt the Trinity Ball still had to be the Trinity Ball,” she says. “We didn’t want suddenly to make it a smaller event. The people who were buying tickets had great expectations about what they should get for their money.”

Boucher’s committee thought likewise. He says: “It was a whitetie ball and we were asking a lot of money – we wanted to maintain the tradition. The only way you’re going to get away with that is to make it a really special evening that people will remember for the rest of their life. It had to be an exceptional purchase, not something that they’d pay for out of day-to-day budgets.”

In recent years, the risks and rewards of being on a ball committee have become more predictable – except for one. Suzi Browne (Trinity 2002), who helped organise the 2005 May Ball, recalls: “We’d made sure that we had all the alcohol in place, but the weather was so hot that no one was drinking it. Instead, we ran out of water.

We certainly didn’t predict that.”

Today Cambridge City Council even produces a handbook for ball organisers, running to some 63 pages. All Colleges of the University have undertaken to observe its regulations, which cover everything from ejecting gatecrashers to the correct licensing of stage hypnotists.

For a 20-year-old undergraduate, it must be a daunting document to digest; yet there is still no shortage of volunteers to sign up for committee duty.

Browne finds this unsurprising. She says: “It was among the best things I did. I made an amazing group of friends – in fact, the committee members have been my longest-lasting friendships.

One of them even spoke at my wedding.”

It was only after the 1993 Magdalene ball that Peter Boucher discovered he and his fellow committee members would have been personally liable for any financial losses sustained. Nevertheless, he says: “It put a big load on us in our final year, but I was very proud that we did it. It was one of my highlights at Cambridge.”

And for Simone Cunliffe, the abiding memory is one of exhilaration at pulling off a successful event. “As soon as the evening gets into the swing of things and you realise everything’s functioning smoothly, it’s such a relief. I most remember the morning, just after the survivors’ photo, sitting in one of the courtyards next to about 50 litres of leftover ice cream that was now slowly melting in the sun. We were all totally exhausted – but then came the clearing up!”

CAM 72 37

Jill Calder

University matters Summer reading Cambridge soundtrack A sporting life Prize crossword

41 43 45 47 48

Extracurricular CAM 72 39

Extracurricular

University matters Communicating Cambridge Paul Mylrea is Director of Communications Jim Spencer

D

oes an institution that has led the way in education, teaching and research for more than 800 years really need to be promoted?

Cambridge is Europe’s top higher education institution, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Even The Guardian – one of our most critical friends – places Cambridge at the top in the UK in its own league table.

Then there are the many other achievements: thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Francis Crick and Stephen Hawking; more Nobel laureates than any other academic institution (90 in total); and arguably Europe’s leading technology and biotech cluster.

Surely this speaks for itself? But new technology is changing every field, including higher education.

While the buildings of the University are not about to collapse, some people talk about a parallel higher education universe, transformed by new technology such as MOOCs – or to give them their full name, ‘massive open online courses’.

Nobody knows what impact this will have. But it comes as competition for talent among faculty, graduate students and post-docs – critical to Cambridge’s success – grows fiercer than ever.

The political world is shifting, with elections in the UK and Europe. The impact on higher education – and in particular research funding – is potentially significant.

In the media, 24/7 rolling news has created an endless appetite for experts.

Social media platforms such as Twitter have reinvigorated word-of-mouth as a communications channel.

In this new world, if we do not take part in the conversation, others will continue talking about us. We can let that conversation be based on stereotypes.

Or we can ensure the University’s diverse voices are heard.

This is why Cambridge needs promotion.

It is not really about attracting students, or benefactors, though we do. It is about protecting our ability to shape the future.

As the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, wrote recently in CAM, it is our institutional autonomy that underpins our academic freedoms: freedom to devote time to fundamental research; freedom to choose which young people to admit to our courses.

How do you persuade a sceptical sixth-former that Cambridge wants the brightest young people from across the UK to apply, and will give them a fair hearing?

This freedom depends on us having strong relationships with those outside the University. And good relationships are built on good communication.

Our team uses all the obvious channels.

Have a look at the news page on our website – stories ranging from astronomers creating the first virtual universe through to a report on how CUSU’s shadowing scheme has inspired inner-city teenagers to consider applying to Cambridge. These are designed for sharing globally, through Twitter and sites like Reddit.

Of course, we can only show a snapshot.

But these stories demonstrate how this University transforms the world.

And, subtly, they promote us to potential researchers and academics.

Elsewhere, traditional media still look to Cambridge. “Please can you find me an expert in [something really niche and obscure] for the World at One.” We nearly always can. And of course there is still a place for local media.

The Vice-Chancellor has made it a personal priority to highlight this University’s commitment to fair admissions – on the basis of academic talent not social background. But how do you persuade a teacher, or a parent, or a sceptical sixthformer that Cambridge wants the brightest young people from across the UK to apply, and will give them a fair hearing?

Academics and admissions staff go out to schools and colleges. But they can’t speak to every sixth-former in the UK. The media is vital in getting this message out. A thousand students and teachers went to an outreach event at the Liberty Stadium, Swansea this year. More than half a million people will have seen the news item broadcast about the same event by ITV Wales.

We also facilitate person-to-person communication. The public engagement team organise the celebrated Festival of Ideas and Cambridge Science Festival every year, showcasing University academics.

We engage directly with people in parliament and other bodies whose decisions impact on the way we work.

Of course, trying to present all Cambridge does is almost impossible.

What we try to do is to target areas where we can have the most influence, and where we face challenges.

And we need you, our alumni, to help.

You are all ambassadors for the University; please share our message with your friends and colleagues, and with wouldbe Cambridge students. You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook or sign up for our news digest to find out more. We look forward to you joining the conversation.

cam.ac.uk/news

CAM 72 41

Extracurricular

Books Summer reading CAMCard holders receive a 15% discount on all book purchases at Heffers in Trinity Street, Cambridge and online at www.alumni. cam.ac.uk/camcard

Illustration: Sara Fanelli

What will you be reading on the beach? CAM gathers recommendations from our panel of alumni and academics Alexis Petridis

(St John’s 1991) Head rock and pop critic for The Guardian I’ve been vaguely thinking of writing a book about the 70s, so I’ve been immersed in books about that time. The one that interested me most is Crisis? What Crisis?

Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn W Turner (Aurum). It’s directly concerned with the way events were mediated through popular culture – with loads of quotes from Rigsby in Rising Damp.

Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop by Bob Stanley (Faber) sets itself a big task as it’s an all-encompassing history of pop music from 1952 to 2000. He’s a really smart, incisive writer who’s capable of transmitting a lot of information in a clever turn of phrase. In a world obsessed with nostalgia, there’s something amazing about someone who can cut through that and tell you the story of the Beatles in an original way.

I also really enjoyed Pulphead: Notes From the Other Side of America, a collection of essays by American magazine journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan (Vintage) on subjects including the Tea Party and American reality TV. He’s a brilliant writer who uses an incredibly conversationalist style and makes it work. It’s endlessly gripping – I went on a trip to the USA and devoured it in one plane journey.

Emma Wilson

Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts One thing I love about reading in the summer is that so many books are published in August in France as part of the rentrée littéraire. I’m looking forward to one French novel just published, La Petite Foule, which is the newest book by Christine Angot (Flammarion). She interests me because of the ways in which she explores contemporary perspectives on community, sexuality, race and family, and questions of how to put life into writing.

I’ve been reading the prose writings of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, and

one of my projects for this summer is to read The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited

by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (Faber). She travelled widely outside America and lived in Brazil with her lover Lota de Macedo Soares, and I’m fascinated by that sense of her having lived a displaced life.

I also have a pile of exhibition catalogues waiting to be read, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: L’Art en Fusion by various authors (Hazan). It’s from an exhibition I went to in Paris last year, about the symbiosis between the two artists, and I’m looking forward to reading some of the essays.

Emma Wilson’s most recent book is Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan).

CAM 71 72 43

Andrew Roberts

(Caius 1982) Historian and journalist I’m looking forward to The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy After Napoleon by Mark Jarrett (IB Tauris). It’s got great characters in it – witty diplomats and statesmen of the early 19th century such as Prince Metternich and Prince Talleyrand.

The way I like to relax in the first few days of any holiday is to take a whodunit. I know Dark Summer in Bordeaux by Allan Massie (Quartet) will be good as I’ve enjoyed other books of his. It’s set in 1942 and ties in the history of occupied France with a murder mystery. The other thriller writer I love is Robert Goddard. The Ways of the World (Bantam) is set around the peace conference of Paris at the end of the first world war, so it has a bit of politics, a bit of sex and a bit of violence – what more could you ask for?

Australia’s Secret War: How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops by Hal Colebatch (Quadrant) covers the Australian aspect of something I wrote about in one of my first books. It’s about how trade unionists sabotaged the fighting effort during the second world war, which is a very controversial subject, and it promises to be really interesting.

Andrew Roberts’s next book, Napoleon: A Life (Penguin), will be published in October.

Dr Patricia Fara

Senior Tutor, Clare College I’ve been reading some of the titles covered in Clare’s Great Books Lecture Series and found Gone With the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell (Pan Macmillan) fascinating. It gave me a real insight into life during and after the American Civil War. History is so often written for and by the victors, but Mitchell also reveals stories of the losers.

As well as being very funny, Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes (Penguin Classics) reminded me that people weren’t so different a few hundred years ago – they had similar foibles and problems to our own. I also really enjoyed The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Penguin Classics), which focuses on interior consciousness and awareness. Rather than reading about major plot events, you discover what people felt, thought and said – and the enigmatic ending makes this a profoundly realistic novel.

Professor Simon Franklin revealed that Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse

by Alexander Pushkin is the best-known classic in Russia, which I found surprising, as it’s not particularly famous in Britain.

He insisted I read it in verse and, for me, the recent poetic version by Stanley Mitchell (Penguin Classics) is one of the most brilliant translations I’ve ever read.

Dr Fara introduced Clare’s annual Great Books Lecture Series, which runs during Lent Term and is open to all members of the college, including alumni.

44 CAM 72

Professor Val Gibson

Head of High Energy Physics I read The Singing Line by Alice Thomson (Vintage) while attending a conference in Australia. It’s a delightful book that combines three of my favourite topics: science, social history and travel, by the descendent of four Nobel prizewinning physicists. It’s about Charles Todd, an assistant astronomer from Cambridge who emigrated to Australia with his wife Alice, who grew up in Free School Lane. He built the first telegraph line across Australia and the inhospitable outback, naming Alice Springs in honour of his wife.

How to Climb Mont Blanc in a Skirt: A Handbook for the Lady Adventurer by Mick Conefrey (Oneworld) is a lighthearted and factual read about female explorers.

It’s full of interesting tips about everything from ‘How to spot a good camel’ to ‘Making a good impression in a Mongolian tent’.

The book by my bed right now is The Mystery of Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s Rebellious Daughter by Lucinda Hawksley (Chatto & Windus). I can’t put it down. It’s an intriguing account of Queen Victoria’s sixth daughter, a non-conformist who is believed to have had a homosexual husband, an illegitimate child and a long-term affair with Queen Victoria’s sculptor. Her files in the royal archive are sealed, so nobody can find out the truth. The book is based on existing writings and gossip from the time, and it’s a very brave attempt to put it all together.

Val Gibson is the winner of the 2013 Women in Science and Engineering Leader award and lead for the Athena SWAN Gold award, presented to the Department of Physics last year.

Lord Tony Grabiner QC

Master-elect, Clare College I’m currently reading An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris (Hutchinson), which tells the true story of the Dreyfus case in the form of a novel. It is a superb recreation of the most famous miscarriage of justice in modern history. As always, Harris is eminently readable.

I’m also enjoying Lives in Writing by David Lodge (Harvill Secker), who writes so well. His subjects in this book of essays include Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Alan Bennett and HG Wells. He focuses on works by them, or about them, in an impressively concise way, and brings out their personalities, characters and talents.

A colleague in my chambers recommended Voltaire: The Universal Man

by Derek Parker (Sutton Publishing). This is a beautifully-written biography of the French poet and writer. It’s an excellent story.

Voltaire lived a very long life, full of action and drama.

Herodotus, The Histories by Tom Holland, with an introduction and notes by Professor Paul Cartledge (Penguin Classics), is the product of a collaboration between two outstanding Cambridge historians.

Herodotus was the world’s first historian

and a vital source of much of our knowledge about the ancient world, including the Persian invasions of Greece.

Professor Linda Colley

(Darwin 1972) Historian My reading this year has been shaped by my holding a fellowship at the Cullman Center in New York. I’ve had the time to read Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press), a huge, illuminating panorama of a world in transition.

New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times, edited by Constance Rosenblum (New York University Press), is a wonderful collection of views and stories of New York life and sights. I often pass pavement bookstalls at Washington Square, and pick up classics I should have read ages ago. The latest is WEB Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (multiple editions). First published in 1903, and with a distinctive, arresting prose style, it is one man’s meditations on the impact of the ‘colour line’ in the American South, but also elsewhere.

For fun, I love detective novels, and I’ve been rereading some by one of my favourites, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. His best is The Flanders Panel (HarperCollins), which has a beautiful art restorer solving a painted medieval murder while coming close to violent death herself. Gripping!

Linda Colley’s latest publication is Acts of Union and Disunion (Profile).

Dr Nicky Athanassopoulou

Industrial Fellow, Institute for Manufacturing I recently saw a repeat of the BBC’s Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, in which classicist Michael Scott was talking about theatre’s influence on democracy.

It inspired me to re-read Antigone by Sophocles, which is a really illuminating look at the idea of abuse of power by the state.

My copy of the play is actually a school textbook – the language is very digestible in Greek. English translations include the Cambridge version by David Franklin and John Harrison (Cambridge University Press).

I tend to go in phases with what I’m reading, and at the moment I’m on scientific biographies. True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch (Joseph Henry Press) is extremely well-written and researched. He’s one of just four people to have received two Nobel prizes, and was the first to receive two in the same field, yet he’s virtually unknown outside the physics community. He used to play golf and nobody at his club knew he was a Nobel laureate.

Mr Gum and the Goblins by Andy Stanton (Egmont) is part of a brilliant series and it’s wonderful to read with my kids. These books are basically Monty Python for children – they’re hilariously funny.

Life (Penguin), will be published in October.

Maggie O’Farrell

(Murray Edwards, New Hall 1990) Novelist Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (Vintage Classics) is a book I read and reread. It was a present from a friend who is now my husband. Everyone knows Burgess for A Clockwork Orange, but this is his masterpiece – it was a great oversight when it didn’t win the Booker Prize. It’s a chronicle of most of the big events of the 20th century and it’s a fantastic, funny, tragic novel about the human existence.

Iris Murdoch has an incredible range as a writer and A Severed Head (Vintage Classics) is a very clever book about human relationships and the making and breaking of marriages. I’ll either read books as a reader or as a writer and, as with Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Wordsworth Classics), this is so perfect that you can’t see the machinery to analyse it – that’s true genius.

It’s almost impossible to reinvent the novel as a form these days but Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Granta) does just that. It’s written in short paragaphs with very pared-down observations, which wrongfoots you as a reader – that’s a very clever thing to pull off. It’s a stunning read.

As soon as I finished it, I turned it over and started it again.

Maggie O’Farrell’s latest book is Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press).

Ben Schott

(Caius 1993) Author, journalist and photographer I heard an excellent radio dramatisation of Dante’s Inferno and have been reading the translation we had on our bookshelf, which is by Robert Hollander (Random House).

I’ve also just finished The Complete Mapp and Lucia by EF Benson (Penguin), which is about as far from the Inferno as you can get. It’s a bit like Edward Gorey without all the death – it’s a very mannered, high-camp cross between Hyacinth Bucket and The Archers, with a dash of Miss Marple, set in Edwardian times. It has that PG Wodehouse quality of creating an entire world and it’s just hilarious.

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (Penguin) is an incredible summer book.

I’ve worked with Leanne and know her quite well. She was a very serious swimmer who trained for the Olympics, and this book totally changes the way you think about swimming and indeed an entire element – it’s a stunning read. I’m also looking forward to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker). I’ve read everything of his, starting with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage), and it’s really delightful to have such a great author writing books within my lifetime.

Ben Schott’s latest book is Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (John Murray).

Extracurricular

Cambridge Soundtrack John Spiers Interview Dorian Lynsky

John Spiers (King’s 1994)

The record that reminds me of my first term: Electric Light Orchestra – Mr Blue Sky I came out of school being top of the class, feeling quite cocky. And then, after the first term, I came back home dazed going, “They’re all much better than me”!

When it started to get obvious that the term was becoming difficult and you had lots of things to achieve in a very short space of time, my friends and I would give ourselves a blast of Mr Blue Sky very loud: It’s all going to be all right, we can do this!

Because it often felt like you couldn’t.

The record that reminds me of learning to DJ: Wham! – Club Tropicana My friends were doing this thing in King’s cellar bar called Tacky Shite Night. It was the ethos of School Disco but finding new classics that people could get to like. I’d never really performed in public before so DJing was like a gateway. I learned the skill of judging a crowd and playing to them. Club Tropicana surprised me because I’d always thought it was a dreadful track but it got everyone off their chairs. I used to analyse it and think, what is it about this song that makes people do that?

The record that reminds me of my first Cambridge summer: The Cardigans – Life This album reminds me of the week after the exams finish. It’s such an intense period and then it’s over and you’ve got this week of sitting in idyllic surroundings, going punting and sitting in pub gardens.

This album encapsulates that feeling of being slightly dazed and blissed out and not having anything to do. By the end of the summer I felt like I belonged and knew much more what I was about. I accepted I was somewhere just below the middle of the pile so I coped by reinventing myself as someone who did things outside of academic work.

The record that reminds me of learning the accordion: John Kirkpatrick – Plain Capers If you had a big room you could pay a lot of money to have a piano put in, but I couldn’t afford it so I bought a red plastic Chinese accordion. Part of the reason for doing it was that it wasn’t expected. It wasn’t very cool. I went to a folk club in a pub called The Man in the Moon and saw John Kirkpatrick, who’s a legend of the squeezebox world. I played his 70s album Plain Capers constantly and tried to play it exactly as he did. I know him very well now – his son’s in Bellowhead.

The record that convinced me I could play folk music: Eliza Carthy – Stingo Folk was a really quirky thing to do at that time. The whole scene had been in massive decline. I remember seeing Eliza Carthy when I was back home in Oxford towards the end of my time at Cambridge.

That was a turning point: Oh my God, they’re my age, they look cool, and the music’s amazing! Stingo’s an instrumental that mixes trip hop with old tunes. I’d never seen anything like that. It mixed the two sides of my life together. That was the first time I thought that what I was doing wasn’t just hanging out with old people. It felt like a relief.

John Spiers plays in Bellowhead (bellowhead.co.uk). Their new album, Revival, is released on 23 June.

CAM 72 45

Extracurricular

A sporting life Trampolining

Words Becky Allen

T

he feeling of falling through the air from a great height isn’t for everyone, but it’s what made Andrew Aistrup fall head over heels in love with trampolining – or ‘bouncing’, as the club lingo has it.

Now in his final year reading Law at Christ’s, Aistrup was 18 when he first bounced on to a trampoline. Having moved schools in the sixth form, he found two trampolinist classmates in need of a third to make up a team for a national schools competition. “I was in the mood to try new things,” he remembers. “After the first hour I was hooked: the feeling of falling through the air was exhilarating.

It’s the adrenaline, and I still get that from bouncing.”

It’s a feeling that doesn’t fade because there are always new heights – along with the difficulty of mastery and execution, which are what count in competition – to

aim for. “That’s the good thing about the sport – there’s always something harder and higher and more scary that you can get a bigger buzz from doing,” says Aistrup.

Now competing at national level after only three years in the sport, Aistrup admits he wasn’t a natural on the trampoline, something his coaching mentor describes in musical terms. “He says trampolining is like music, but rather than being about the notes themselves, it’s about the spaces between them,” he explains. “It’s all about your rhythm on the trampoline; to get maximum force from the bed, you have to wait for it. Some people can jump on a trampoline and soar because they have it naturally – they feel it, they get it.”

Aistrup attributes his rise in the sport to great coaching, both physical and psychological. The psychological

preparation is vital for overcoming competition nerves and dealing with the trampoline’s unpredictable nature.

“It takes hard work and perseverance, because trampolining is a very frustrating sport. It’s a bit like golf – you can hit a hole in one and then all of a sudden your game’s gone and your ball’s in the lake,” he says. “So it’s as important to be mentally prepared for competition as physically prepared. One doesn’t work without the other, and there are lots of talented people who fall apart because they can’t cope with the pressure,” he says.

As well as helping him perform in competition – including the Varsity match, which this year Cambridge won by a massive margin – learning breathing techniques and developing the ability to take a mental step back from stressful situations are useful in other areas, he believes: “I’ve used it in exams and when life gets stressful during my degree. It’s a valuable skill, being able to stop and look at things objectively.”

As the Trampolining Club’s president this year, Aistrup’s most memorable moment was welcoming 280 trampolinists from 22 universities to Cambridge’s first national trampolining event – something made possible by the University’s new sports centre.

As well as a roof especially designed to support a trampoline rig – a training aid that lets bouncers learn new skills safely – the new sports centre’s bleacher seats make it an ideal sporting venue.

“The competition was the highlight of my year, one of those experiences you don’t forget. It was epic. We now have some of best university facilities in the UK, and it’s fantastic for the club. But it’s not just about being judged and getting a medal, it’s about having fun too,” he says.

Despite success in competition, Aistrup is adamant that the club’s major asset is the diversity of its membership.

“Our membership is higher this year than it’s ever been, and that’s down to the new facilities and having other sports around us, plus the help we’ve had from the sports department – they’ve really supported us.”

As well as a centre of academic excellence, Cambridge is also becoming a centre for circus and stunt performers. “A lot of them become permanent members – trampolining is quite addictive for some people. It’s great having that diversity: students, non-students, circus and stunt performers, older members who stay with us. That means every session is different, depending on who’s there. The biggest strength of our club is the people in it, so it’s great we have people from so many different backgrounds.” srcf.ucam.org/cutc

CAM 72 47

Extracurricular

$

CAM 72 Prize Crossword

Emerging writer

by Schadenfreude Emerging Writer by Schadenfreude 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

12

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

26

23 27

36 39

41

25

28

30 35

24 29 31

32

37

38

33

34

40 42

44 46

43 45 47

All received September 2014 One entries letter is toto bebe removed from by the 5 answers to 22 clues and the residue used to form a real word for grid entry.

In clue order these letters spell out the first part of an Send completed crosswords: instruction. The wordplay yielded by the remaining clues contains an extra letter that is •not byentered post intothe CAM Prize University of Cambridge, grid. In72 clue orderCrossword, these letters complete the instruction.

11 across 1 11 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, 8AB and down entries are to be entered in reverse, andCB5 all final grid entries are real words or proper nouns (reversed where appropriate).

• by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk • or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam ACROSS

1 first Timepieces once put back at seven (5) The correct entry drawn 4 Force disturbed dancer and a dealer in "stuff" (11, hyphenated) will receive a copy of The 12 Waders run into dyke, eachGreat returning (7) 13 Avoid Girl at the front by (5) Plague: A Bunny People’s History Evelyn Lord. In this intimate history of the 1665 pandemic known commonly known as the Great Plague of London, author Evelyn Lord focuses on Cambridge, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. Lord’s fascinating reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton to common folk. Two runners up will also receive £35 to spend on CUP publications.

Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 73 and posted online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam on 19 September 2014.

INSTRUCTIONS One letter is to be removed from the answers to 22 clues and the residue used to form a real word for grid entry.

In clue order these letters spell out the first part of an instruction. The wordplay yielded by the remaining clues contains an extra letter that is 48 CAM 72 71

not entered in the grid. In clue order these letters complete the instruction. 11 across and 11 down entries are to be entered in reverse, and all final grid entries are real words or proper nouns (reversed where appropriate).

ACROSS 1 Timepieces once put back at seven (5) 4 Force disturbed dancer and a dealer in ‘stuff’ (11, hyphenated) 12 Waders run into dyke, each returning (7) 13 Avoid Bunny Girl at the front (5) 14 Murphy’s pursuing square ancient piece (6) 16 In an excited state duck a drinking party! (5) 17 Search that is stopping your holiness going to Spain (5) 18 Musical movement – work penned by junior (3) 20 Unorthodox unionist, in part a gospeller (7) 21 Aunt’s left murdered behind Muslim ruler’s office (9) 22 No Scots finish a circuit (4) 24 Engineers apparently blocked by motorway create a fresh plan (5) 26 Speech sounds empty like beginning of news letter (4) 27 An examination probing copper’s glove (7) 29 It accompanies Indian fried dish (5) 30 Over and out (with a hum) (5) 31 Plan to breed (5) 35 In Paris she’s after a locally unusual painting (9) 38 Indolent Roger takes the other over (6) 40 Remain outside entrance to mouse trap (4) 41 Beam clamping old breakwater across the pond (5) 42 Zero news about oddly rare musteline (5) 43 A sight in Inverness that is obstructing curtailed sightseeing excursion (5) 44 Someone from South America fleeced an Illyrian countess (6) 45 Rex leaves decrepit boarding house of ill repute (6) 46 Unqualified ostentation abandoned

by Queen, lacking desire (11) 47 The time being noon, drink outside college (5)

DOWN 1 For high tea’s recipe this can be grilled (7) 2 Objection from Penny leaving thrash, returning after demonstration (8) 3 Insolently bold, not loud but very freakish (7) 5 Flower people held back by active unit (7) 6 Gold found in old Jack’s buckets (5) 7 Our least errant knight belonging to a European culture (9) 8 A tendency to rise? When speaking you pretend otherwise (7) 9 Wide-eyed and Morag’s lively after one (5) 10 One who helps fish blocking a river (5) 11 Solitude provided lecturer with extraordinary sense (7) 13 US Navy builder to meet amateur worker perhaps (6) 15 Adds to a list name involved with pleas (8) 19 William’s dirty woman is breaking artist’s dishes (8) 23 Reordered oil put on truck by day (8) 25 European sanitarium in trouble without money (8) 26 A supposedly harmful look from former wife, horrible to you once (7, 2 words) 27 Attempt to stop cousin with a cold (6) 28 Gaelic boy in excited eagerness starting to explore mystical interpretation (7) 32 More white wine or special bubbly?

(7) 33 Poison note I included in short story (6) 34 Noble or profligate king (6) 36 Bolt centre of slot inside sword (5) 37 Somewhere in Scotland, too active bordering loch (5) 39 Past offence by chief financial minister (5)

Solution to CAM 71 Crossword Crowd by Schadenfreude Crowd

by Schadenfreude C A R A F E U S S U M A C

O I O R I A N C Y S E C O

D R O P A A D A M A N T R

E S S E N E O R A T I O N

C H A N C R E F R R A R E

S O R E E S R E G A L I A

S W L V E P O D E N S B L

P R E E M I E A N T I A R

I R A N P N G U T T A T E

L A S T I N G O R E X I S

L T E L L I E S A N I S I

E O R L U N R E I N L T S

D O S E S G S C L O S E T

Phrase: ETERNAL TRIANGLE Spaces in the initial grid formed a TRIANGLE which were to be filled by a definition of ETERNAL “Lasting or existing forever”, creating new words.

Corrections to misprints in clues gave: DAVID, BATHSHEBA and URIAH.

Phrase: ETERNAL TRIANGLE Winner: Maurice Puttick (Sidney Sussex 1961) Runners up: Robert Eastwood (Trinity 1967) and Sara Rae (Girton 1975) Special mention: Jennya TRIANGLE Keene, mother oftoNicola Spaces in the initial grid formed which were be filled Keene by a definition of ETERNAL "Lasting or existing forever", creating new words. Corrections to misprints in clues gave: DAVID, BATHSHEBA (Pembroke 1992).

and URIAH.