17 minute read
‘In Conversation’
In Conversation Paul Cartledge (1960-64) hosts a discussion with other Pauline Professors.
Academic’ can be used in more than one way, and I do not mean only both as a noun and as an adjective. If a choice or a decision is (merely) ‘academic’, then in everyday parlance it is nugatory. If on the other hand we say and believe that St Paul’s is an ‘academic’ school, then we presumably mean that positively. At all events, the School has produced over its five centuries a disproportionate number of academics, some of whom have been and are truly distinguished ‘Professors’. There are getting on for eighty of them still alive – and mostly kicking vigorously – as I write.
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To explain: following Jon Blair’s (1967-69) enviably elegant and pointed ‘In Conversation’ piece in the Spring/Summer 2021 Atrium, showcasing his ten Unbroken Creative OPs, the Editor had the bright idea of commissioning a follow-up piece on ‘Professors’, no less unbroken if not necessarily as creative, and I rashly agreed to have a go at researching and writing it. Jon has been immensely helpful, as has the Editor, but responsibility for the (surely not merely academic) choice of eight is mine alone.
My qualifications? I graduated from Colet Court (1957-60) and attended the School from 1960 to 1964, at the end of which I departed for a nine-month furlough in the States (including a semester at the University of California Santa Barbara) before ‘going up’, following in the footsteps of (Lord) Bernard Rix (1957-62), to New College Oxford to read ‘Mods and Greats’ (1965-69). And I have myself been one, a ‘Prof’, at Cambridge since 1993, first of (ancient) Greek History, then as the inaugural A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, and since 2014 the emeritus version of the latter. Also since 2014 I have been and am a Senior Research Fellow of Clare College (Cambridge’s second oldest). I was a Governor of St Paul’s representing Cambridge University between 1990 and 2007.
I consider myself quite exceptionally fortunate to have caught the ‘Cotter-Cruickshank’ wave of 1946-1966, which yielded no fewer than 100 Classics ‘awards’ (entrance Scholarships or Exhibitions) at Oxbridge, a strike rate of 5 per annum. Our Greek teacher EPC ‘Pat’ Eight Pauline Professors
Mark Bower (1974-78)
Oncologist
Richard Gombrich (1950-55)
Indologist
Duncan Haldane (1965-69)
Physics
Gerd Kullak-Ublik (1979-83) Pharmacology & Toxicology
Colin Mayer (1966-70) Management Studies
Lord (Ian) McColl (1948-51)
Surgeon
Martin Price (1969-74)
Geography
Tim Rood (1982-86)
Classics
Cotter (1917-23, and Classics Department 1928-65) and our Latin/Ancient History teacher WW ‘Wol’ Cruickshank (Classics Department 1947-73) deservedly have a memorial lecture at the School named jointly after them. Both were quite remarkable figures and mentors, in their very different ways. Dr Cruickshank also received a Festschrift entitled Apodosis, edited in-house, one of the contributors to which was the late Martin West (1951-55) OM. (Another is featured below.)
My own choices of Professorial interviewees aimed to cover the waterfront of academic specialisations: from management studies and mathematics, through a variety of medical professions (oncologist, surgeon, toxicologist), oriental philology and religion, geography and music, to my own discipline of Classics (it was very hard to select just one other OP Classics prof – there are so many of us, so well taught were we at School, and not only by Cotter and Cruickshank). In terms of their ages they span some 35 years, well over a human generation.
Not all those whom I would have wanted ideally to approach were available: political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1922-28), OM (died, 1997), the above-mentioned Martin West (2015), and botanist David Goodall (1927– 32) (2018, aged 104) eluded me by dying. Not all those whom I did approach were either able or willing to join in the fun. One of those – a Pauline by birth as it were (being the son of a revered St Paul’s teacher and rugby coach) – has had a remarkable career in particle physics, via Harwell labs, Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, CERN and Birmingham. Another (a musician) generously wished me ‘Huge good luck with it all’, saying he hoped ‘to be free to help out the next time’ (erm…), and adding of himself ‘How lucky I was to have landed in St Paul’s and then Cambridge... Two extraordinary places of inspiration, opportunity, support and care’. This is worth remarking, since the latter two qualities are not ones that have been universally experienced by any means, to judge from some post-Cantabrigian comments by other ex-students that I have read over the years since my own time here as teacher and researcher began in 1979. But I hope readers will agree that my magnificent eight are a rare and illuminating as well as illuminated sample.
I posed to them all by email the same set of ten or so questions, leaving it up to them how – or indeed whether – they answered them. How did you come to be a pupil at SPS? What did you perceive to be the School’s dominant ethos? What most determined your choice of specialist (A Level) subjects at School? Was there one particular teacher/teachers who set the course/totally changed the destiny of your future professorial life? Were you taught what – or rather (more) – how to think? What do you now make – what are your most abiding/stirring impressions – of your days at SPS? Would you say that you use your SPS education every day to this day? What would you say are the most recurring benefits/disbenefits of your SPS education? What would your 18-year-old self say to your present self? And, finally, an open question – is there any other question you would have liked to have been asked or that you think you should have been asked? I hope my distillation of their answers has not been excessively reductive – I took the precaution of showing them a draft before submitting copy to the Editor.
Lord (Ian) McColl (1948-51) wins the prize for laconicity of response. I had the good fortune to meet him and get to know him when we were both serving as School Governors under the old regime of governance (representing our respective universities, when London was still a – unified, federal – university, and it together with Oxford and Cambridge supplied three academic governors respectively. My original – 1990 – colleagues as »
Governors included other OP luminaries such as historian Karl Leyser (1937-39) and mathematician Ioan James (1942-46), both of Oxford.) Ian was too modest to mention his ennoblement as Baron McColl of Dulwich – or to say why and by whom he had been so elevated. Nor did he mention the pro optimo work he has undertaken with the charity ‘Mercy Ships’ since his retirement in 1998 from his chair of surgery at Guy’s. What he did tell me was that medicine was in his sights from an early age, even though as a scholarship-holder he proceeded through the Classical VIII forms at School, singling out for special praise teachers Tony Richards (English Department 1927-68) and Pat Cotter.
What struck me most about his replies was his firm view that the School had taught him not only to think but also to be tolerant, to fight injustice, and to stand up for what is right. His career was in medicine, but he still reads both some Latin and some Greek New Testament every day. I only wish I could say the same for myself.
Another of my fellow School governors is Colin Mayer (1966-70). Like most of my interviewees, he started out at Colet Court and, thanks to strong parental intervention and guidance, followed his older brother to St Paul’s. The School’s perceived academic ethos appealed to him, and he majored entirely on the science side: first chemistry, maths and physics, then double maths and physics. He is currently the Peter Moores
Professor of Management Studies at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, having previously served as its Dean. For his academic distinction he has been awarded not only Fellowship of the British Academy (an elect body principally of non-scientific, humanistic scholars) but also a CBE. He is in general full of praise for what the School did for him as a pupil by way of its positive, supportive environment, encouraging both intellectual application and tolerance, its dedicated teachers, and its supply of wonderful friends – still his friends to this day. On the other hand, he thinks in retrospect it could have done a bit more to encourage greater reflection on how privileged he was to be a St Paul’s schoolboy.
It is not often that a mere Classicist gets to correspond with a Nobel laureate – Duncan Haldane (1965-69). Like Colin Mayer, Duncan had parents who took a special interest in his academic attainments, and they too were very interested in science. He describes his current field of research as ‘condensed matter physics’, tracing his choice of physics Duncan Haldane specialisation ultimately to a teacher whom he remembers as ‘Little Bill’ or ‘Will’ Williams (Physics Department 1950-70). After a stellar Cambridge undergraduate and graduate career he has progressed to his current eminence as Sherman Fairchild University Professor at Princeton. (The ‘University’ in his title is not merely descriptive but marks him out as a cut above the ordinary run of full Professors at this most distinguished of Ivy League colleges). From that eminence he was ‘Nobelized’ in 2016. Running through his career and what he told me is perhaps unpredictably a gratifyingly radical streak. Not many of us, I think, can say that they ‘hung out with the “radical antiestablishment” crowd’ while still at school.
Though largely too insulated from scientists, I probably get to interact and correspond all too often, thanks not least to the ubiquity of remote ‘media’, with my fellow Classicists. Invidiously I chose to interview one who many years ago had impressed me – favourably – by writing a review of a book of mine when he was a junior research fellow. And not an altogether flattering review, either. Another point of personal interest to me is that Tim Rood (1982-86) is a Fellow of the Oxford College at which my (Old Paulina) wife read Classics in the late 60s, when of course it was a women-only
establishment: St Hugh’s. He considers the environment of this now mixed college to be ‘more democratic’ than that of at least some of the more obfuscatorily traditional Oxonian institutions. Tim was not a Coletine nor was he following his two older brothers when his (South African immigrant) parents sent him to St Paul’s.
I suspect this unconventional educational path has something to do with his unconventionally original career. His first book was an explanation and exploration of the classic Athenian historian Thucydides using the newfangled tools of something called ‘narratology’. He praises his Classics teachers who are all Paulines – former High Master Stephen Baldock (1958-63 and Classics Department/High Master 1970-2004), Mike Seigel (1964-68 and Classics Department 1973-99), Peter King (1967-71 and Classics Department and Support Staff since 1976)(aka ‘Basil’, one of the three Latin crossword-setters for The Times), and Chris Jackson (1972-77 and Classics Department 1983-85). Stephen was in the year ahead of me at School, a fellow-member of the cricket 1st XI, and it was as a School Governor that I helped appoint him High Man, casting as chance would have it the decisive vote. Tim has since published on another ancient Greek historian, Xenophon, and his reception by among others James Joyce. Tim closed his replies to me by uttering the fervent – and not, I trust, idle – hope that ‘the first school to teach [ancient] Greek in England may continue to promote the study of the ancient Mediterranean and its languages’.
My next subject, Gerd Kullak-Ublick (1979-83), is the one who got away. I mean, at School he did the usual three Classics A Levels but then ended up like two of my other interviewees in the medical field. I was distressed to learn that he as a German national had suffered what I would call at least ethnocentric prejudice both from his fellow pupils and, even less excusably, from teachers. He had moved on from Colet Court to St Paul’s and, ever prescient, debated whether banking or medicine would be the better career for him. At first it looked as though medicine would be a no-brainer, since he was embarked on three science A Levels, but then a fear of over-specialisation in science intervened and he switched – to humanities subjects: Greek, Latin, History and German! The School’s recommendation, based on his A– and S-level results, was that he read Classics at Cambridge. Instead – a rebel with a cause? – he read Medicine, not in the UK, but at the University of Bonn (then West Germany’s capital). The rest is Cambridge Classics’ (and my) loss, but Zurich University’s Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology’s gain. Though he qualified initially in gastroenterology and hepatology (good Greekderived terms), he is today in practice essentially a liver specialist. Besides his university affliliation he serves as Global Head of Mechanistic Safety and Chair of the Hepatic Safety Team at the worldfamous Novartis company. Gerd was, like myself, a boarder in School House, and I hope that he is able, as I am, to keep up at least remotely with some of his contemporaries there. Unlike me, he has yet another string to his bow – or key to his piano keyboard: a pupil of Phyllis Sellick, he attended the Royal College of Music outside School. So, when he tells me that perhaps in his day the less talented pupils might have found their School experience less rewarding than his, I pricked up my ears.
As I did too when interviewing my next subject. To quote MP (not Member of Parliament but Monty Python): And now for something – or rather, »
Gerd Kullak-Ublick
someone – completely different, worth the price of admission all by himself: Martin Price (1969-74), geographer extraordinaire, emeritus Professor of the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. He started life with one huge advantage: his mother had attended SPGS. At School, geology caught his fancy, but this was not available at A Level, so he studied geography and was well taught by Don Pirkis (Geography Department 1955-86) and Dave Howell (Geography Department 1967-2008). From St Paul’s he consciously avoided Oxbridge in order to study Geology, and then Environmental Science, at Sheffield. Like me, he was made Captain of B Club (‘for reasons I never understood’). Unlike me, he was an active member of the Mountaineering Club, though he adds that at St Paul’s he was more interested in climbing and walking than he was in what now consumes him, as a retired Professor of Mountain Studies, namely mountain people and the environments in which they live. Which of course involves him in one of the two most utterly fundamental issues of our own day, climate change (the other is viral disease and its prevention).
Like all my interviewees, he does not merely look back upon his School intellectual pursuits with fond recollection but still to this day actively applies the main general lesson he learned: to be inquisitive and see the big picture. Like Gerd, Martin is also very musical, though with the voice as much as or more than with the fingers. One final endearing note: in his final term at the School he took the – to me quite extraordinary – decision to grow a beard. (I’m with Alexander the Great on this one.) For that irretrievable transgression he was barred from School activities and so from taking part in the end of year events. Such, however, was his truly Pauline spirit of enterprise that he nevertheless managed to wangle himself into the cross-country team photos – with a beard.
Next, and last but one, comes a professor whose very last name is a signifier of academic excellence, Richard Gombrich (1950-55). Sadly, I have met him in person only once – when Apodosis was formally presented to Dr Cruickshank. Like Tim Rood the son of an immigrant father, and one with
Martin Price
a very strongly humanistic bent, Richard found Classics at Founder Dean Colet’s SPS under the Cotter-Cruickshank regime highly congenial for the most part (‘It was a bit of a treadmill’). From Pat Cotter he learned to be tireless in looking things up, from Dr Cruickshank the virtues of hard work and accuracy (Thucydides would have approved). The curriculum was perhaps a trifle narrow, and – this was no fault of the School as such – he counted being separated from girls as a ‘disbenefit’, but neither of those did anything to hinder let alone halt his superstar career as a student and teacher of Pali language for forty years at Oxford. Richard is not alone among my interviewees in espousing and/or seeking to practise a transcendental religious doctrine, but I am confident that he is alone in being a Buddhist. Readers are highly recommended to go online and consult buddhistbugs.blogspot.com under his name, where they will find a series of meditations on the thought ‘When I say I’m a Buddhist’ and on what that does – and often what it does not – mean.
Last but by no means least, may I introduce Professor Mark Bower (1974-78), who holds his chair at Imperial College London and who works within the National Centre for HIV malignancy at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. At School he studied what he calls ‘the three sciences’ but singles out his teacher of Biology, Mr Rademacher (Biology Department 1967-93). And thereby hangs a most touching tale. As a teacher, Mr Rademacher was able to inspire Mark and others not only to explore but also to question the natural world. Inspiring and calm, he encouraged his pupils to broaden their interests beyond the prescribed curriculum. Thereafter many years passed until Mark next encountered him – at Charing Cross Hospital where he was then working on-call as a registrar in oncology and Mr Rademacher was a critically ill inpatient. Mark is pleased that he was able to repay Mr Rademacher for his inspiration by relieving some of his symptoms, but still chides himself mercilessly for not having been able to show his mentor adequate gratitude for his sage guidance. So much for the questions my eight interviewees did answer – but what of the open question I invited them to add? One trenchant respondent to that was Prof Gombrich: would I send any sons of mine to St Paul’s? A firm ‘no’ (same response as the late Jonathan Miller (1947-53) had given, I recall, to The Pauline in another epoch). He did not say why not exactly, and I did not press him, though I think perhaps I can guess. As I write this essay up, the annual round of A Level results has just appeared, and as usual there tends to be a bias – not a huge one, but a bias all the same – in favour of the small percentage of students who have been privately educated. Does this harmonise with any possible ‘levelling up’ political agenda, or even with the sort of justice, equality and fairness that Sir Isaiah (Berlin) would want to argue for? Almost certainly not, and that should, I think, at least give us pause – a pause for deep and critical and objective thought. Which is pretty much what I, as an academic, believe that an academic professor should be professing, and what, happily, my interviewees and I were all originally taught at St Paul’s.
