The OL Club Review
News from OLs Arthur Hill: Scaling the Heights
As President of the University of Birmingham Mountaineering and Climbing Society, I have taken great joy in combining my passion for exploration with my desire to inspire and educate fellow adventurers in their pursuit of the world’s mountains. My time at Lancing instigated this passion for climbing, with the wide range of extracurricular activities on offer at the College allowed me to participate in multiple outdoor pursuits, eventually finding the climbing club. This group had multiple weekly sessions to local climbing centres as well as regional climbing competitions throughout the year – an event the Lancing climbers became renowned for completing with great success. These formative years in the club taught me the importance of risk management, effective communication and leadership. Little did I know this foundation of knowledge would prove invaluable for leading and ensuring the wellbeing of over
200 members who make up the University of Birmingham Mountaineering and Climbing Society. Being President has allowed me to lead internationally, with ice climbing expeditions in Northern Norway and alpine expeditions in the European Alps. I strongly recommend those of you heading into further education this year to explore a variety of societies that your university has to offer. Climbing, in particular, can lead to the world’s most pristine environments. Imagine climbing a vertical frozen waterfall with 150m of air between your body and the ground below, you and your climbing partner are the only humans for hundreds of miles and it’s -20°C. Whilst this is an extreme example, it highlights the liberating nature of the sport, guaranteed to make you highly alert and forcing a ‘live in the present’ mindset. Arthur Hill (School 2015–2020)
Anthony Jessop Price: Plumbing the Depths
I came to Lancing as a music scholar in 1956. The College nurtured my musical knowledge both academically (I passed Music A Level) and as a performer. Sport was my other love; I played for our U16s at cricket, gained school colours for Athletics, and captained the Football 2nd XI coached by Lewis Brown, and beat our 1st XI twice which annoyed Ken Sherwood intensely. All this created a motivation to do something positive with my life. I was never an academic. Dennis Day wrote a classic final term report: ‘His intelligence has often produced reasonable, yet extraordinary mathematics demanded of him by his having declined to learn easy methods in the past. He has not finally cleared from my mind earlier impressions of charm unmatched by any real effort.’ A choral scholarship to Magdalen College Oxford to read Engineering Science closed my chapter on secondary education. I joined Westminster consulting engineer John Taylor & Sons, and became a partner in 1974. My autobiography, The International Plumber, is not a catalogue of engineering treaties. Instead, it uses my engineering experience as a skeleton upon which to hang extraordinary events when providing safe drinking water to men and women across all six continents, except Antarctica. I frequently found myself in situations which often proved to be farcical, bizarre, and regularly unorthodox through the people I met, from prime ministers to teaboys; all concluding to provide wholesome supplies of water where none existed and to enable those for whom I worked to live a broader, healthier life. Anthony Jessop Price (Second’s 1956–1960) 64
THE QUAD
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SUMMER 2023