36 minute read
Briefings
Masters Remembered
Frank Parker (Modern Languages Department 1928-65) and Philip Whitting (History Department 1929-63).
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Keith Pratt (1951-56) remembers two very different and inspirational Masters.
It was September 1954 when I entered the History Eighth to take A Levels in History, French and Latin, and first stood in awe at the reputation of two remarkable men. They were Philip Whitting (PDW) and Frank Parker (FGSP), great friends who shared tutorial premises in shoebox rooms under the Dining Hall and Lecture Theatre stairs and a mutual disregard for Dr James’s (High Master 1946-53) recent successor.
In days before élitism came to be frowned on as an attribute of the country’s great schools, they made no secret of what they thought about Mr Gilkes (High Master 1952-63) handing out wine gums to boys watching 1st XV matches on Big Side. Both had their eyes single-mindedly on top academic goals, the winning of Oxbridge awards, in the pursuit of which A Levels were viewed as just a necessary hurdle.
In character and teaching methods the two were quite different. Mr Parker revealed little about his personal life. He walked with a limp, but whether it was the result of a childhood illness or a war wound we never knew. He was an affable, quietly spoken and sensitive man: I recall the calm but empathetic way he told his Lower History 8th form at the start of the 1954 Spring Term that one of our number had died of a long-standing illness during the Christmas holiday. I enjoyed going to lessons with FGSP. He had a great fund of interesting facts and stories, and though he could be side-tracked he never seemed to mind, and was quite happy to hold our interest by interspersing our reading of Molière or Racine with anything from an example of a Wagnerian leitmotif to the correct way to use an ivory toothpick.
The low door behind Mr Parker’s seat in his classroom opened into the cubby hole under the stairs where Mr Whitting gave us individual tutorials, our first taste of the Oxbridge system of reading essays aloud for critical thought and discussion and a valuable preparation for what was expected to lie in wait for us at university. His whole-class teaching took place in ‘the Whitting Room’, a book-lined H8 room at the top of the left-hand flight of the main stairs where he trained many unsuspecting generations of future OPs for their careers by delivering his own scholarly ‘notes’. First, however, mutual respect had to be established, his likes and dislikes made known. His classroom routine was generally predictable. After allowing a few minutes for us to settle behind our desks he would enter through the door at the front of the room and walk, head down, straight to his desk and sit facing the door before beginning to talk. One day a prankster (Martin Forde (1951-56) put up a Daily Express poster on the wall behind Mr Whitting’s desk. In came PDW exactly as usual, sat straight down and the lesson began. The joke had evidently failed. But wait: after ten minutes or so he stopped in midsentence and without turning his head, said icily, “Is that an advertisement from the gutter press that I see behind me? I shall not teach you any more until that notice is removed”. And with that he got up and stomped out. We now knew where we stood with him.
But how much and how little did we really know about him: Had he really been banned from using the cane because he had once gone too far with it? Did he actually believe in his argument-stopping claim to reincarnation that gave him the last word on debatable points of Tudor history: “I was Henry VIII so I know”? And we knew that he had been awarded the George Medal, but was it really for catching a bomb as it fell to earth on a parachute? He had been an RAF pilot, but had he flown Churchill secretly across occupied Europe to Yalta for the Conference in 1945? This was one of his exciting claims, but my attempts to prove or disprove it have been inconclusive. He had been on secret service as an RAF pilot in southern Italy and Churchill’s plane was recorded as arriving in Yalta from Malta. Did Whitting help to ferry the British leader across southern Europe on either the penultimate or the final stage of his hazardous journey to the Crimea?
I suppose we began to appreciate more about Philip Whitting the man when he relaxed and took some of us Upper 8th formers to Ingatestone Hall
Pauline Gallantry
to share with us his fascination with palaeography and historical records. We knew too of his interest in numismatics, Byzantine history, and local history, but we had little inkling of his high national reputation in those fields. I guess most of us were unaware even that he had a PhD, for at St Paul’s he was always simply ‘Mr Whitting’ or ‘PDW’.
Mr Whitting was adept at getting the best out of his students. Among the members of H8 who left in 1955/6 I remember Mark Elvin (1952-55), Brian Fall (1951-55), Martin Forde, Simon Gillett (1951-56), Roger Hadaway (1951-56), John Hope (1951-56), G N Kenyon (1951-55), David Maunder (1951-56), Nick Phillips (1952-56) and Robin Renwick (1951-56). In later life two would hold top diplomatic posts as ambassadors to the USA (RR) and the USSR (BF), two would hold university chairs in Chinese at Oxford (ME) and Durham (KP), and others would go on to equally fulfilling careers in their chosen fields. Oxbridge beckoned immediately to several of these, but I was a late developer though PDW did his best and treated me with undeserved patience.
I left school in December 1956 without a university place and faced the unwelcome prospect of National Service, feeling perhaps that my connection with the academic path and even St Paul’s were probably both over. Instead, and against all expectation, it was the RAF that provided me with my Damascene path. Having applied for linguistic training I was selected to learn Chinese, and after such an intensive year’s tuition as FGSP would never have contemplated, but which paradoxically it was his own languagelearning methods that helped me to survive, I received a posting to Hong Kong. Against all my expectations it was my door into academia. In those days Chinese was taught only at Oxford, Cambridge, London and Durham, and when I subsequently obtained a lectureship I was greatly encouraged by the way Philip Whitting stayed in touch and took a personal interest in my early career at Durham. Perhaps he was mindful of the Byzantine twists and turns in his own academic trail. From time to time we met for lunch when I was in London, but though I always regretted being unable to accept his invitations to Rivercourt Road, I have never ceased to be grateful for the part he played in shaping my future.
I suppose we began to appreciate more about Philip Whitting the man when he relaxed and took some of us Upper 8th formers to Ingatestone Hall to share with us his fascination with palaeography and historical records.
John Dunkin (1964-69) has again contacted Atrium. This time regarding Lieutenant (later Major) Johnny Wiseman (192934) who was part of the Special Raiding Squadron (formed after temporary disbandment of 1 SAS) leading section of No.1 Troop, tasked to assault three coastal batteries at Capo Murro di Porco, south of Syracuse.
In the early hours of 10th July 1943 an action took place for which he was awarded an immediate Military Cross. An incident he found amusing after the event was that his fierce CO, Paddy Mayne, upbraided him about mumbling over the net because he had lost during the action his false teeth, worn since a cricket injury at Cambridge.
Johnny Wiseman first served in the North Somerset Yeomanry, which was amazingly still ‘horsed’ until 1942 and took part in the Syrian Campaign against the Vichy French. He was then commissioned into another ancient corps, The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, but he had heard that ‘L’ Detachment Special Air Service was being formed into a full regiment and visited Colonel David Stirling in Cairo who took him on into his unit.
After Sicily the SAS were sent back to England for the Normandy landings and dropped behind enemy lines where Wiseman commanded 1 Troop of A Squadron in Operation Houndsworth tasked to disrupt German reinforcements going to Normandy, in particular 2nd SS ’Das Reich’ Division between June and September 1944, for which Wiseman was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star.
Father of the House Pauline Awards
Dennis Frank (1930-33) – celebrated his 104th birthday on 25 July.
One of over a hundred entries in the St Paul’s Registers for Autumn Term 1930 reads, “Frank, Dennis Raymond born 25 July 1917, son of H. Frank, Manufacturer, of Hampstead; from Peterborough Lodge; left M6b, July 1933.” Eighty-eight years after leaving school, Dennis is the oldest living Pauline. Atrium believes he has a lead of around eight years. How many others can have been an OP for approaching nine decades?
Dennis was born during the Great War and served for five years in the Royal Signals in World War 2. When he was demobbed, he was an acting captain. His time at St Paul’s was limited to three years because his father was dying and his mother decided that he was needed in the family business, Resline Neckwear. Dennis thought he should inform the High Master, John Bell (1927-38). When he nervously knocked, the High Master opened the door on his way to a class. Dennis told Bell why he had to leave School. The reply was short and sweet, “I’m very sorry to hear that; I wish you well”.
After 2 years learning the tie trade, Dennis entered the family firm in 1935 – there were seventy tie manufacturers in the UK at the time (there are now eight) and the factory was then in Clerkenwell. It later was transferred to close to Epping Forest. He retired aged 75 in 1992, having served as President of the Tie Manufacturers’ Trade Association.
Until 10 years ago he lived at home in St John’s Wood and now lives in a care home in Golders Green. Although he is looking forward to lunch at The Bull & Bush (COVID permitting), he will not be making it to the OPC Earliest Vintage Lunch in Spring 2022 – he last attended a decade or so ago. For a time, he was a member of the OP Golf Society and remains an honorary life social member of Sudbury Golf Club.
Dennis remained a life long friend of Dennis Orlik (1930-34), who also left School to join his family’s pipe (the smoking variety) business. He died in 2007 at a mere 91. Dennis Frank remains in touch with the other Dennis’s son, Michael Orlik (1957-62), one of Philip Whitting’s history boys and the first of his family to go university. Professor Paul Cartledge (1960-64) has received the Commander of the Order of Honour, one of the highest honours the Greek state can give for his “contribution to enhancing Greece’s stature abroad.” The Greek Ambassador to London, Ioannis Raptakis delivered the honour.
Paul is the author of Sparta: An Epic History, The Spartans: An Epic History, Alexander the Great, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World and Thebes: The Forgotten City.
The former A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge is also a holder of the ‘Gold Cross’ of the Order of Honour (Greece) and has also been recognised as a Son of Sparta and as a “panhellenic δημότης of the Spartans”.
Toc H Altar Found
An article in The Times from 11 May reminds us of Tubby Clayton’s (1897-1905) legacy.
A Second World War memorial altar has been returned to its rightful home after it was discovered by chance in a former brewery.
The altar was found – 50 years after going missing – in the Belgian town of Alveringem. It was lost after being put into storage in 1965 at Talbot House in nearby Poperinge, which was preparing at the time for a visit from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Talbot House had been founded in 1915 by the chaplains Philip “Tubby” Clayton and Neville Talbot as an everyman’s club and home-from-home for soldiers resting behind the lines during the First World War. It was very popular and after the war Toc H branches – Toc being wartime signals code for T – were founded for former servicemen in Britain and overseas.
The altar had arrived at Talbot House in 1945. Soldiers from Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) had salvaged it from the ruins of a bombed out church in Normandy and taken it across northern France as the Germans retreated. The soldiers presented it to Talbot House when they liberated Poperinge as a memorial to their comrades who had died. It was after a reorganisation of the chapel by Clayton to restore its First World War appearance for the royal visit that the altar disappeared.
Simon Louagie the manager of Talbot House said: “Talbot House is a house of people and of stories. The Second World War history of Talbot House never got the attention it deserved and we have now done research on that and this discovery is the icing on the cake. It will provide us with the opportunity to tell the story of the Second World War because that is part of the house and our heritage.” During the German occupation of the Second World War, Talbot House was requisitioned for military use. A neighbour claimed that it was “often nothing less than a brothel” and described “blind drunk” soldiers and women singing along to accordion music at night.
The broadcaster Frank Gillard, the first Briton to enter Poperinge after its liberation on September 6, 1944, told BBC radio listeners: “I’m glad to bring the news that Talbot House in Poperinge, which was a home from home to our troops in the last war, and which was the birthplace of Toc H, Talbot House stands intact, with scarcely a range of glass broken. The Germans who were living in the house left in such speed that a half –eaten meal was still on the table this morning.”
Statue of Philip ‘Tubby’
Clayton
Paulines and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Tim Cunis (1955-60) has shared with Atrium a Philip, Duke of Edinburgh story.
In 1959 when visiting St Paul’s for the School’s 450th Anniversary, Her Majesty The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh took tea and cucumber sandwiches at separate small tables with the prefects. Jim Gobbett (1953-9) who stroked the winning VIII in the 1957 Princess Elizabeth Cup at Henley told Tim in the High House dormitory that night that the Duke remarked: “I never understood rowing: you get blisters on your hands and backside and sit on your arse and go backwards”. Tim comments that, “he forgot to mention that a small loud mouth shouts instructions at you while you do all the work”.
Duke of Edinburgh visit, 1959
Pauline Humanist Pauline Photographer
When Jon Blair CBE (1967-69) sent in his gobbet for the Spring Atrium’s contributors’ page, he played down his Oscar, Emmy (twice), Grammy and Bafta. He also made no mention of his efforts in training to be a non-religious humanist funeral celebrant.
Jon now writes, “I only set my mind to becoming a funeral celebrant a few years ago after I was asked out of the blue by the widow of a friend and colleague who had recently died of cancer whether I would be willing to conduct his funeral. The request surprised me, but since I had also contributed to writing the funeral scripts for my parents and my mother in law, all three of whom died in old age, as well as my much loved sister, who died tragically in a riding accident, and since I had always been told that I was an accomplished public speaker, I thought I would give it a go. Fortunately, several of those present in the packed crematorium said afterwards that I had made an excellent job of it – thank goodness.
Since then I have been formally trained and accredited by Humanists UK and am very happy and privileged to be enabled to do my best to create a non religious ceremony to meet the wishes of many different people from all walks of life. My desire, at what can be an enormously difficult time, is to allow whoever is responsible for organising the funeral to at least be able to relax in the knowledge that the ceremony, when it comes, will be in safe hands.”
Humanist Ceremonies is a network of humanist celebrants trained and accredited by Humanists UK. The organisation offers humanist naming, wedding or partnership, and funeral and memorial ceremonies for nonreligious people.
Paulines Do Not Always Go To University
Leon Lecash did not just leave St Paul’s in 1967; he left school. It was 2 months after his sixteenth birthday. His mother had died the year before and his father’s business had failed. So, having been at a country boarding prep school and then St Paul’s since he was six, the world of 1960s London became his oyster. Armed with his camera, chutzpah and some darkroom skills learnt at the St Paul’s photography club, he took a job as a photographer’s assistant. By the end of the decade he had his own studio off Grosvenor Square and with Harry Evans as his patron he was the youngest photographer ever to ‘shoot fashion’ for The Sunday Times.
By 1973 he was in Paris and then from 1974-76 he was working in Milan. Where there was fashion, there was Leon. In 1979, a contact from advertising (I promise not Don Draper) offered him a commission in Los Angeles. Leon arrived with a tourist visa, set himself up on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, met one of the loves of his life and within a year had a wife and his first daughter. He needed work. LA was not a fashion city but it was the world’s entertainment capital. Leon shot movie posters for Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox but really found his niche as an album cover photographer – his Pat Benatar album cover for Crimes of Passion has recently been named one of the top 100 album covers of all time. Other covers were for David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Jefferson Starship, Melissa Manchester, Ray Parker JR and Barry Manilow.
Leon moved back to London in 1992 and a second daughter was born in 2014. He has now diversified into TV and film production. His company whats it all about? productions produced Michael Jackson and The Doctor: A Fatal Friendship. It had 20 million viewers worldwide. One current project is John Lennon Made Me Toast about a chance encounter with The Beatles when he was at St Paul’s. And, yes – Leon took the first professional photograph of Johnny Depp.
As Leon says, “leaving school at 16 is not recommended but need not be the end of the world”.
Crimes of Passion album cover (shown with the permission of Leon Lecash)
Pauline Statues
A statue for Benjamin Jowett (1829-36) Simon not John
Adrian Wooldridge writing in The Spectator (17 July 2021) surprises with his reasons why there should be a statue of Benjamin Jowett.
“A good person to start with as a candidate for statuary would be Benjamin Jowett – the great 19thcentury Master of Balliol and the subject of one of the most Oxonian of Oxonian bits of doggerel (‘Here come I, my name is Jowett / All there is to know I know it / I am the Master of this College / What I don’t know isn’t knowledge’). True, Balliol has a marble bust of the great man hidden away on its premises. But what is needed is an edgy new statue right in the heart of the public realm: ideally, on the pavement outside Balliol that he trod for so many decades.
Geoffrey Faber’s standard biography of Jowett is full of striking snippets. As a boy, Jowett looked so much like a girl – pretty, gentle and delicate – that his fellow pupils at St Paul’s nicknamed him ‘Miss Jowett’ and protected him from bullying in much the same way that they would protect a sister. His voice never broke and hairs refused to sprout on his chin. As an old man, he looked and spoke like a eunuch. His skin was unusually soft – like the skin of a baby rather than that of an aged scholar. At the height of the age of athleticism he never learned to handle a cricket bat, kick a football or man an oar.
Jowett has perfect establishment credentials for a public memorial. He transformed Balliol from one college among many into the university’s premier powerhouse of intellectual excellence and public service. He did this by using two revolutionary tools: open competition and high moral seriousness. College places were awarded on the basis of academic merit as revealed by open examinations rather than given away on the basis of family connections. Tutors were expected to devote themselves to their pupils rather than to the bottle. And Balliol men were expected to work hard for their privileges: Jowett’s pupils included a future prime minister, Herbert Asquith; a future archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang; and a future viceroy of India, Lord Curzon.
Nor was Jowett just a valet to the offspring of the elite: he was also keen on recruiting bright children from obscure backgrounds, even taking the 11-year-old Frank Fletcher under his wing, paying for his education and acting as his mentor at Balliol. Jowett’s principles eventually spread to the rest of the university, taking an institution that could easily have degenerated into a nest of sinecures and transforming it into a progenitor of Nobel prize winners and social reformers.
Yet there is also another side to Jowett that clinches his case for a new public statue: the preponderance of evidence suggesting that he was Oxford’s first (and at the moment probably only) intersex college head. I was first alerted to this possibility when I was a young Fellow of All Souls in the 1980s by an ancient college fixture called E B ‘Henry’ Ford, a distinguished geneticist who had an odd habit (among many odd habits) of talking about figures from the Victorian and Edwardian era as if they were contemporaries. His favourite subject was Benjamin Jowett on the grounds that ‘everybody knew’ that the celebrated Master of Balliol was a ‘hermaphrodite’, as he called it. He even claimed to know for a fact that Jowett’s relationship with Florence Nightingale had proceeded to a point where the Master of Balliol’s ‘anatomical configuration’ led them to call off plans for marriage.” When advised that a Pauline Milton has three statues in London, Atrium immediately thought of John Milton. However, the much-memorialised Milton is Sir Simon Milton (1975-79), a politician who served as Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning as well as Chief of Staff to Mayor Boris Johnson. Milton died in 2011 aged 49.
Since his death, numerous memorials have appeared across London. The most prominent is in Paddington Basin, where Simon sits on a bench, inviting conversation. A second can be found on Piccadilly, on the corner with Eagle Place. The third, and most recent, acts as a gatekeeper to some new apartments between Tower Bridge and City Hall.
Simon’s father was one of the Kindertransport children brought to England in 1939. After Cambridge where he was president of the Union, Simon started work at the family chain of patisserie shops and bakers (later sold to Ponti’s). But his interest lay in politics particularly London’s and after time as a Westminster councillor, for which he was knighted in 2006, Simon was appointed to the position of Senior Adviser, Planning, in the administration of London Mayor Boris Johnson. From September 2008 he was Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning. In June 2009, Milton was also appointed Chief of Staff to the Mayor, with responsibility for managing the mayoral advisers, as well as the Greater London Authority budgets and administration.
Following his death, the Sir Simon Milton Foundation was established. It supports young and older people of the City of Westminster.
Pauline War Memorials
Graham Seel (History Department 2012-21) was granted a sabbatical in the Summer Term of 2020 to research OPs who fell in the First World War. He hopes to publish his research in 2022 and would welcome contact from any OP or friend of the school who has an OP relative who fell in that conflict.
Graham can be contacted by email at: 123thenorth@btinternet.com He will be giving a series of Master classes at School on ‘How to research the story of an ancestor who fell in the First World War’ on November 1st, 8th and 15th.
Over the course of the last centuryor-so the Pauline community has sponsored the erection of three war memorials: the South African War Memorial (1906), the Memorial Chapel (1926) and the War Memorial (2011). Only the last of these exists on the current site.
In the aftermath of the South African War a committee of the Old Pauline Club was instituted and charged with the ambition to raise subscriptions for a proposed war memorial to the 11 OPs who had lost their lives in that conflict. The resultant eye-catching edifice was unveiled with no little pomp in 1906, adorned with a large Union Jack and with Lord Roberts as the VIP guest. Designed by F. S. Chesterton (188993), who was killed in action on the Somme on 11 November 1916, the memorial was successfully relocated to the Barnes site in 1968, the removal costs of which were met by Leslie Sydney Marler (1913-17). The memorial was duly re-erected at the western extent of the school grounds, where it was anticipated that its ‘classical lines will stand out in isolated delicacy’. Unfortunately, this position, somewhat removed from the main buildings and located close to the river, was vulnerable to those with malign intent. Sadly, it was vandalised and in 1974 was described as in ‘an unhappy state …. the cross and part of the copper roof had been taken and it was beginning to look shabby and derelict’. No school funds were available for its restoration and it faced the prospect of demolition. The OPC thus resolved to endeavour ‘to preserve it at the school or, if necessary, elsewhere.’ It was purchased by an OP who erected it in the grounds of his home in Sussex.
After the First World War there existed a powerful sentiment to commemorate and memorialise OPs who fell in that conflict. The architect not having incorporated a chapel into the design of the school in Hammersmith, OPs and friends of the school set about raising sufficient funds to convert the Old Library into a Memorial Chapel, the names of the fallen to be inscribed on twelve fumed oak panels to be hung on the walls. Leslie (‘Max’) MacDonald Gill was commissioned to produce the panels and to carry out the fitting and decoration of the new Chapel. The panels were completed in 1923 at a cost of £685 (about £30,000 today) and temporarily hung in the Great Hall from Easter of that year ahead of the completion of the new chapel in 1926. When the school moved to Barnes in 1968 the panels were carried to the new site. In their new home they were not hung in the chapel, and perhaps even disappeared into storage for a period of time. Not later than the 1980s they were hung in the centre of the school, on the wall outside the High Master’s office in the old General Teaching Block. When that building was demolished in 2017 – 2018 they were temporarily hung in the Sports Hall Corridor, awaiting translation to their new home on the
Design drawing of the Memorial Chapel
Memorial Chapel Hammersmith buildings
Admiral Sir John Treacher (1938-42) after unveiling the 2011 Memorial
With thanks to the St Paul’s School and OPC archivist for the images wall outside the Montgomery Room in 2020, in which place the overall effect of a spectator pausing at their foot is nothing other than to stand before a great waterfall of names.
In recent years St Paul’s Remembrance Day commemorations have taken place in front of the War Memorial located at the north east corner of the Milton Building. The installation in 2011 of this memorial commemorating all Paulines who have fallen in conflict was substantially the achievement of Joshua Greenberg (2008-13), assisted by support from Eugene de Toit (5th Form Undermaster at the time). The Memorial was funded by OPs and private donations. Its design was in part based on some rough ideas put forward by Joshua which were then passed on to Boden and Ward, a stonemason firm with experience of building memorials who had been recommended to the School. The Old Pauline Club was involved in choosing the wording for the memorial. On Friday 11 November 2011, following an Act of Remembrance held in the Atrium, a Service of Dedication was held in front of the Memorial.
Pauline Books
Eric Jensen (1945-50) Alien Aloft: Unravelling Identity in Pursuit of Peace
Theo Hobson (1985-90) reviews Eric Jensen’s memoirs.
It is fitting that Eric Jensen enjoyed a long career at the United Nations: he was conscious from a young age of straddling national boundaries. He moved to London from Denmark when he was three: his father was a Lutheran minister. When the war started he was sent to a boarding school in rural Wales, which was grim and lonely but at least safe from the bombs.
He then won a scholarship to St Paul’s: he wore his silver fish on his watch-chain, which was part of the uniform, along with ‘stiff detachable collars and collar studs front and back’. He enjoyed drama, especially when he acted in a comic Revue, a fund-raiser for a boys’ club in the East End (an early version of Comic Relief). He performed alongside Jonathan Miller (1947-53), already a comedy star. He remembers Montgomery giving a talk, and giving the 1st XV some advice: ‘you win matches before going on the pitch, he said. As in battle, you won before going into action.’ The Christian Union was commonly known as ‘Pi-squash’ – squash being slang for society and pi short for pious. Jensen attended some house parties, which felt refreshingly informal; ‘Dress was entirely optional’ – a recollection that should not be misinterpreted.
He continued to feel a bit of an outsider; he looked on at English class distinctions and other habits with an anthropologist’s interest. His international outlook was confirmed by stints in Denmark and then Harvard, before he went to Oxford. After further studies in Heidelberg, his life took a surprising turn: he joined an Anglican mission to Borneo. His motivation seems to have been more humanitarian, and anthropological, than religious – above all perhaps he wanted an exotic adventure in the last days of colonial rule. He lived in a longhouse with the Iban tribe of Sarawak, and helped them to negotiate with the new Malaysian state. His advocacy led him to work with the US Peace Corps and other NGOs (as they were not yet called), and soon he found himself drawn to the UN. Before long he was trouble-shooting in various parts of Africa and Asia, and negotiating internal UN politics as well as global politics. He worked closely with Kurt Waldheim, the UN Secretary-General in the 1970s, but was not a fan – ‘he was political to his fingertips’. When Waldheim was caught out for covering up his Nazi past, Jensen was not surprised by his arrogance. He met countless politicians: Margaret Thatcher, no great fan of the UN, struck him as ‘the headmistress of a well-disciplined girls’ school’.
He enjoyed living in New York and then Geneva, as well as travelling the globe, but in middle age he had a niggling sense of being a citizen of nowhere, and was glad to settle in London on his retirement. He concludes his memoir with some reflections on religion’s role in global conflicts, including those he witnessed in Nigeria, Bahrain and Bangladesh. This is a memoir that will interest students of international diplomacy, and perhaps also OPs of the same vintage.
John Chadwick was born in 1920 – the same year as another celebrated Pauline classicist Kenneth Dover (1932-38). After St Paul’s, Chadwick went to Corpus Christi, Cambridge.
In 1940 he left university to volunteer for the Royal Navy, where he served as an Ordinary and later an Able Seaman on HMS Coventry. In 1942 he was transferred to intelligence duties based in Alexandria, Egypt and in 1944, he moved to Bletchley Park, given a crash-course in Japanese, and set to work on reading the encoded messages sent by the Japanese naval representatives in Stockholm and Berlin.
In 1945, Chadwick resumed his studies at Corpus graduating with First Class Honours in Classics with a distinction in his special subject Linguistics starting a highly distinguished academic career including, along with Michael Ventris, deciphering Linear B.
After more than twenty years in the making, The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is set to become instantly indispensable for Classics students as well as an important reference work for scholars. The tome is the result of 23 years of work by a team from the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. The project, which began in 1997, was the brainchild of John Chadwick. The dictionary provides fresh definitions and translations that are rendered into contemporary English – gleaned from the Herculean task of re-reading most of Ancient Greek literature from its foundations in Homer through to the early second century AD.
Peter Jones the former senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Newcastle and co-founder of the Friends of Classics charity concluded his review in The Spectator, “this pioneering lexicon is a triumphant intellectual and educational achievement…L, S and J (Liddell, Scott and Jones) will surely be looking favourably on this CGL revolution from their everlasting places of honour in the asphodel fields”.
In November 1998, aged 78, Chadwick died of a heart attack at Royston station on his way to a meeting in London. 23 years later his idea has become reality.
Jacky Colliss Harvey Walking Pepys’s London
Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The two and a half miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office. With Walking Pepys’s London, the reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys’s life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17thcentury London and the lives of Londoners today.
Colliss Harvey’s new book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Walking Pepys’s London is an exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.
Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres takes the reader on a selected tour of some of the British Isles’ phantom filled venues.
Our interconnection with ghosts is as old as mankind itself, for spirits of the dead have been believed, observed and recorded since the dawn of time. As a boy, a peculiar visit to the private apartments of the Palais de Versailles first encouraged Nick Bromley to seek out the possibility of their existence. Since then, personal experiences have convinced him of their presence, for his stage career has enabled him to bear witness to several fragments of the afterlife. The particular ability of theatres to retain memories and sightings of their past occupants is second to none. This has helped him over the years to assemble a collection of spectral encounters from witnesses on both sides of the curtain, be they actors, backstage workers, managers or front of house staff.
Now, fittingly introduced by Richard O’Brien, the creator of the legendary The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this book presents a new collection of untold supernatural experiences together with historic stories intertwined with the details of the individual theatres where ghosts in many forms have been encountered. Combining both personal memories of the supernatural and the background of over fifty widely different venues, this new illustrated book is an important celebration of the ghosts who haunt our theatres.
Stephen Walker (1975-78) BEYOND
Dan Snow (1992-97) has commented that ‘this book is a triumph’.
9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is about to make history.
Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour – ten times faster than a rifle bullet – Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet.
BEYOND tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its sixtieth anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first – the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire.
Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama – featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.
Guiccardini, Geopolitics and Geohistory, Understanding Inter-State Relations demonstrates that geohistory is a more effective concept than geopolitics in understanding inter-state relations and that Francesco Guicciardini’s thoughts are an efficient medium to demonstrate not only the inadequacies of geopolitics, but that a geohistorical approach can be a more responsible way of understanding international affairs.
The book introduces a fresh approach, based on the individual, on which corporate characteristics and behaviour depend, often in the shape of state interests, which are unable on their own to predict actions driven by human behaviour. It shows how mainstream international relations theories are stuck in paradigms, inadequate in explaining why world politics is moving in a direction that nobody could predict even a decade ago and how ideology can blur clear understanding. In short, the book represents a new and intellectually refreshing approach and method in understanding, and tackling, the vagaries of relations between states.
John Simpson (1957-62) Our Friends in Beijing
John Simpson has been reporting from China for more than 30 years and has had many extraordinary, hair-raising experiences. For fear of putting those involved in danger with the authorities, he’s never been able to include all the details in his reporting. Our Friends in Beijing allows him to finally describe them – with a light dusting of fiction.
Jon Swift is in trouble again. His journalism career is in freefall. He is too old to be part of the new world order and he has never learned to suck up to those in charge. But experience has taught him to trust his instincts.
When, for the first time in years, Jon runs into Lin Lifeng in a café in Oxford he wonders if the meeting is a coincidence. When Lin asks him to pass on a coded message, he knows it is not. Once a radical student who helped Jon broadcast the atrocities of Tiananmen Square, Lin is now a well-dressed party official with his own agenda.
Travelling to Beijing, Jon starts to follow a tangled web in which it is hard to know who are friends and who are enemies. As he ricochets across the country, Jon seeks to make sense of the ways in which China’s past and present are colliding – and what that means for the future of the country and the world. Under the watchful eyes of an international network of spies, double-agents and politicians, all with a ruthless desire for power, Jon is in a high-stakes race to expose the truth, before it is too late.
David Cohen (1960-63) Surviving Lockdown: Human Nature in Social Isolation
The years 2020 and 2021 have been the years of the virus, and it will not be a mere footnote in history. This book reflects on the unprecedented changes to our lives and the impact on our behaviour as we lived through social isolation during the global COVID-19 pandemic. From sociable creatures of habit, we were forced into a period of uncertainty, restriction, and risk, physically separated from families and friends.
Packed with guidance and coping strategies for lockdown, this book explores the impact of this widespread quarantine on our relationships, our children, our mental health, and our daily lives. Benedictine monks, hermit popes, Dorothy Sayers, Daniel Defoe (who made the isolated Robinson Crusoe a hero), Sigmund Freud, and a rabbi’s angry dog are all among the cast of characters as we are taken on a whistle-stop tour through plagues in history and brain science, to the importance of introspection and how to make meaning from lockdown. In his trademark entertaining style, Cohen examines the psychology behind our behaviour during this unusual time to discover what we can learn about human nature, what lessons we can learn for the future – and whether we will apply them.
