The Roll 2010
practical research projects to which all the many dispersed students on an OU course could contribute. One of the earliest of these was the study of the peppered moth from which the results obtained by the students were published in the US journal Science. She went on to train many of the new recruits to academic teaching at the OU. Unusually for an academic ichthyologist at the time, Peggy was much valued by commercial and amateur fishing and fisheries groups. As a scientist with extensive knowledge of commercially important species she was a valued member of the Freshwater Biological Association, the Institute of Fisheries Management and of several British fisheries societies, as well as consultant to the British and Irish Salmon and Trout Associations. She continued aspects of her science in retirement, travelling widely with Rosemary Lowe-McConnell, including a return to Africa; she also reviewed applications from volunteers for the charity Earthwatch and played a major role in the development and operation of the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust.
David Watkins 1967–2010 Born in Sussex, David came up to Girton from King’s School, Canterbury, to read for the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos, specialising in Social Anthropology for Part II. His College contemporaries will remember him as very good company, irreverent and anarchic, with a dry wit and a tendency to mild rebellion. Nevertheless his academic interests and success developed markedly over his three years although he seemed to limit the later use of his social anthropology to quizzical observation of his friends and colleagues. He had been married to Siobhan for only four years and their daughter, Jesse, was only just over a year old when he was killed in an unexplained motorcycle accident on his way to his work at the Sunday Mirror. There David had been employed in the newsroom while Siobhan was a sub-editor for its sister-paper, the Daily Mirror. The Editor of the Sunday Mirror described David as a ‘talented artist’ whose ‘dry wit and ready quips broke the tension on the most stressful of days.’ She described his work on the Sunday Mirror’s sports pages as having ‘flair and energy’. David was ever the enthusiast. At their home in Hampshire he kept bees and fished, brewed beer and studied fine wine, but his great passion was for skiing, at which he was both skilled and daring. He wrote occasional pieces for the Ski Club’s Ski+Board, one of the most recent of which was a description of how, when he was in the office in London, he managed to talk Siobhan down a difficult slope in Bad Gastein – a resort he had never been to – by giving instructions from his office down his mobile phone. David’s funeral was held in the church in which he and Siobhan had so recently been married.
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