Welcome from The Dean of Westminster and Chairman of Governors, The Very Reverend Dr John Hall
T
he Queen’s Scholars were on parade in the South Cloister when The Queen with The Prince of Wales came to the Abbey on Friday 8th June 2018 for the opening of The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries in the Eastern Triforium. After the dedication and a tour of the Jubilee Galleries, The Queen met many of the people who had worked on the Galleries’ design and development and the building of the 7-storey access tower, called the Weston Tower to honour the very generous gift of the Weston Foundation chaired by Guy Weston (CC, 1973-77). Her Majesty, with His Royal Highness, then walked through the Cloisters, meeting Alan Titchmarsh, who had proposed the memorialisation of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown put into effect through a new cistern and fountain in the Cloister Garth. In South Cloister, The Queen spoke briefly to the Under Master and Master of the Queen’s Scholars, having learnt that each of them was leaving to take up a Headship. She was particularly interested to meet the first group of girls to be Queen’s Scholars. Her Majesty had approved the proposal that girls be admitted to College and had sent a warm message for their installation; now she met them in person together with the College boys. The Queen seemed pleased to see their wing collars, white ties with tailcoats and gowns and wondered whether the ‘rig’ was uncomfortable; gallantly the supposition was denied. A group of Westminsters joined the Abbey’s choristers to wave farewell to Her Majesty and His Royal 08
The Elizabethan Newsletter
Highness as their Daimler pulled away from the Cloister entrance, the Royal Standard proudly aloft. The following Friday witnessed another rare and special occasion, attended by a group of Westminsters with the Head Master and Under Master, when the Abbey held a Service of Thanksgiving for Professor Stephen Hawking, interring his ashes in Scientists’ Corner between the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The body of Isaac Newton had been buried in the Abbey, in the North-East corner of the Nave, eight days after his death in 1727. John Herschel had been buried there in 1871 and Charles Darwin in 1882. The ashes of Ernest Rutherford, who in 1920 had predicted the existence of the neutron, had been interred nearby in 1937 and in 1940 those of Joseph John Thomson, whose discovery of what we now call electrons had been announced in 1897. In Scientists’ Corner are memorials to other distinguished scientists, including Paul Dirac, at whose memorial dedication in 1995 Professor Hawking gave the address. The circumstances of the burial of Charles Darwin were these: The Dean of Westminster at the time, George Granville Bradley, a former pupil of Dr Arnold at Rugby School, and Master of University College Oxford, was away in France when he received a telegram forwarded from the President of the Royal Society in London saying “…it would be acceptable to a very large number of our fellow-countrymen of all
