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2024–25 No 69
TheFellowship,October2025
2020 MASTER: Sir Christopher Greenwood, GBE, CMG, KC, MA, LLM (1978: Fellow)
2017 PRESIDENT: N Carroll, MA, MB, BChir, Consultant Radiologist in the Department of Gastroenterology
1984 J R Patterson, MA, PhD, Praelector, Director of Studies in Classics and Associate Professor in Ancient History
1987 M E J Hughes, MA, PhD, Pepys Librarian, Director of Studies and University Affiliated Lecturer in English
1990 S Martin, MA, PhD, Tutor, Senior Tutor, Admissions Tutor (Undergraduates), Joint Director of Studies in Mathematics, Professor of Pure Mathematics and University Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
1993 T N Harper, MA, PhD, FBA, College Lecturer in History and Professor of Southeast Asian History (1990: Research Fellow)
1994 N G Jones, MA, LLM, PhD, Professor of English Legal History
1995 H Babinsky, MA and PhD (Cranfield), FREng, Professor of Aerodynamics
1996 P Dupree, MA, PhD, Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) and Professor of Biochemistry
1998 S K F Stoddart, MA, PhD, Director of Studies in Archaeology and Professor of Prehistory (1986: Research Fellow)
2000 T A Coombs, MA, PhD, Joint Director of Studies in Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering, and Professor of Electromagnetism
2001 H Azérad, MA, PhD, Joint Director of Studies in Medieval and Modern Languages and Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature
2003 A L Hadida, MA, PhD, Director of Studies in Management Studies and Associate Professor in Management Strategy
2004 C S Watkins, MA, MPhil, PhD, Tutor, College Lecturer and Professor of British History (1998: Research Fellow)
2004 A L Du Bois-Pedain, MJur (Oxon), Dr Jur (Humboldt, Berlin), Assistant Dean, Joint Director of Studies in Law and Professor of Criminal Law and Philosophy
2005 S C Mentchen, MA, Professor of German Studies
2007 S J Morris, BA (Newcastle), Senior Bursar and Steward
2007 R M Burnstein, MB, BS (Sydney), PhD, Assistant Tutor for Postgraduates, Joint Director of Studies in Clinical Medicine and Head of School of Anaesthesia, Addenbrooke’s Hospital
2008 G P Pearce, BVSc (Bristol), MA, PhD (Leeds), Director of Studies in Veterinary Medicine and Associate Professor in Farm Animal Health and Production
2009 C Brassett, MA, MChir, Tutor, Deputy Senior Tutor, Joint Director of Studies in Medical Sciences and Teaching Professor of Human Anatomy and University Clinical Anatomist
2010 M J Waithe, MA (Leeds), PhD (London), College Librarian, College Lecturer in English and Professor of Literature and the Applied Arts
2010 C D Lloyd, MA (Kent), Development Director
2010 R L Roebuck, BA, MEng, PhD, Joint Director of Studies in Engineering and University Senior Design Engineer (Teaching)
2010 A K Bennison, BA, MA (Harvard) and PhD (London), Director of Studies in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of the History and Culture of the Maghrib
2011 L C Skinner, BSc (Queen’s, Canada), MPhil, PhD, Acting Tutor for Postgraduates, Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Earth Sciences) and Professor of Earth System Science
2014 W Khaled, MSc (London), PhD, Professor of Tumour Initiation
2014 A Ercole, MA, PhD, MB, BChir, Joint Director of Studies in Medical Sciences and Consultant in Neurosciences Intensive Care Medicine and Interim Chief Clinical Informatics Officer at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust]
2015 T Euser, MSc, PhD (Twente), Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Physics) and Professor in Applied Physics
2015 J M Munns, MA, MPhil, PhD, FSA, Associate Professor in History and History of Art
2016 S A Bacallado, BSc (MIT), PhD (Stanford), Joint Director of Studies in Mathematics and Assistant Professor in Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
2017 S Dubow, DPhil, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History
2018 J Orr, MEng, PhD, Acting Tutor for Postgraduate Admissions, Joint Director of Studies in Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering, and Professor in Concrete Structures
2018 S Atkins, MA, Dean of Chapel, Tutorial Advisor
2021 S Ravenscroft, PhD, Tutor, Admissions Tutor (Undergraduates), Director of Studies in Theology, Religion and Philosophy of Religion, and College Lecturer in Theology (2019: Fellow-Commoner)
2021 A E J Mills, MA, BCL (Oxon), Dean, Dias College Assistant Professor and Joint Director of Studies in Law
2021 E Gallo, AB (Harvard), MPhil, DPhil (Oxon), Director of Studies in Economics and University Associate Professor
2022 K Okkenhaug, BSc (Victoria, BC), PhD (Toronto), Professor of Immunology
2022 L Fisher, MA (St Andrews), MBA (Leicester), PhD, Director of Studies in Education and Professor of Languages Education
2023 A Bryan, BA and MA (York), PhD (King’s College London), Director of Studies in Philosophy and Isaac Newton Trust Career Development Fellow
2023 J Hauge, BSc (Trondheim), MSc (SOAS), PhD, Assistant Professor in Development Studies (2022: Teaching Bye-Fellow)
2023 Z Bond, MEng, PhD, Tutor, Director of Studies in Chemical Engineering, Senior Teaching Associate at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, (2022: Teaching Bye-Fellow)
2024 P Asimov, AB (Brown), MSt (Oxon), PhD, Tutor, Director of Studies and Assistant Professor in Music (2021: Research Fellow)
2025 X Moya, MA, BSc and PhD (Barcelona), College Lecturer and Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Materials Science) and Professor of Materials Physics
2025 S Caputo, MSc (Edinburgh), PhD, Director of Studies in History (2019: Senior Research Fellow)
1960 P J Grubb, ScD, Emeritus Professor of Investigative Plant Ecology
1962 R Hyam, LittD, Emeritus Professor of British Imperial History; Archivist Emeritus
1964 P E Reynolds, ScD
1968 His Honour C F Kolbert, MA, PhD
1968 N Boyle, LittD, FBA, Emeritus Schröder Professor of German
1971 R J S Spence, MA, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Architectural Engineering
1979 E Duffy, KSG, DD, FBA, FSA, Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity
1981 M A Carpenter, ScD, Emeritus Professor of Mineralogy and Mineral Physics
1984 N Rushton, MD, Emeritus Professor of Orthopaedics
1984 H A Chase, ScD, FREng, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Engineering
1989 T Spencer, MA, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Coastal Dynamics
1990 B J Burchell, MA and PhD (Warwick), Professor of the Social Sciences
1992 K Patel, MA, MSc and PhD (Essex)
1990 J R Raven, LittD, FBA, FSA, FLS, University Affiliated Lecturer in History
1990 R L Skelton, MA
1996 T H Clutton-Brock, ScD, FRS, Emeritus Prince Philip Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
2001 A R Thompson, MBE, MA, MPhil
2001 S Halper, BA (Stanford), PhD
2004 E H Cooper, LittD, FBA, Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English
2010 E Rothschild, CMG, MA, Honorary Professor of History
2018 P Lane, MA, PhD, Professor of African Archaeology
2019 M C Skott, PhD
2010 P M Steele, MPhil, PhD, Senior Research Fellow in Classics and Principal Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics
2017 A Neumann, MA, PhD (London), Senior Research Fellow in German
2020 A Baez-Ortega, MSc (La Laguna, Spain), PhD, Senior Research Fellow in Biological Science
2020 F I Aigbirhio, MA, DPhil (Sussex), Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Imaging and Professor of Molecular Imaging Chemistry
2022 T Licence, MA, MPhil, PhD, Senior Research Fellow in Medieval History (1999: Research Fellow)
2022 H J Marshall, MA (Brown), PhD, Lumley Research Fellow and Director of Studies in Sociology and Criminology
2022 B Peng, BSc, MSc (Fudan), PhD, Nevile Research Fellow in Physics
2022 A Lefauve, MSc (Université de Technologie de Compiègne), MSc (Ecole Polytechnique, France) PhD, Senior Research Fellow in Mathematics
2022 A Fialkov, MSc and PhD (Tel Aviv), Senior Research Fellow in Cosmology and Astrophysics and Professor of Astrophysics and Cosmology
2023 M-R Ivan, MMath, PhD, Nevile Research Fellow in Pure Mathematics
2023 G Neff, AB (Columbia), MPhil (City University of New York), PhD (Columbia) Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy
2024 W Barrie, MA, PhD, Nevile Research Fellow in Biology
2024 S M Niang, MA (Goldsmiths London), PhD, Lumley Research Fellow in Sociology
2024 D Thomas, MA, MPhil, MBPhD, Senior Research Fellow, Joint Director of Studies in Clinical Medicine and Professor of Renal Medicine
2024 M Taylor, MA, PhD, Armstrong T S Eliot Junior Research Fellow
2025 C Barr, MPhil, PhD, Parnell Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies
2025 A Urry, BA (Yale), PhD, Junior Research Fellow in the History of Science
2025 S M Sibug-Torres, BA (University of the Philippines), MSc (Manila), MRes, Nevile Junior Research Fellow in Physics
2025 A J Wood, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Director of Studies in Sociology and Assistant Professor in Economic Sociology
2023 A I Pesci, MS Physics, PhD (La Plata, Argentina), Teaching Bye-Fellow in Mathematics, Senior Research Associate, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
2024 R Padel, DPhil (Oxon), Royal Literary Fund Fellow
2025 T Joashi, BA, MPhil, Bye-Fellow in Architecture
2025 E Griffiths, BA, Bye-Fellow in Immunology
1997 A I J Valluy-Fitzsimons, Diplômée de l'ISIT (Paris)
2002 J J Hellyer Jones, MA, FRCO, Honorary Assistant Organist
2011 M R W Rands, BSc, DPhil (Oxon), Master of Darwin College
2012 P J Marsh, MPhil
2014 C H Foord, Assistant Bursar
2014 R V Chartener, OBE, AB (Princeton), MPhil, MBA (Harvard), Chairman of the Magdalene Foundation
2015 C V S Brasted-Pike, MSc, PhD, Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological)
2017 H Critchlow, PhD, Outreach Fellow (Sciences)
2020 L Masuda-Nakagawa, PhD (Tokyo), Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological) and Teaching Fellow in Neurobiology (2018: Bye-Fellow)
2020 F Schuery, MA (Clermont-Ferrand), Joint Director of Studies in Medieval and Modern Languages and Associate Professor in Portuguese (2018: ByeFellow)
2022 J M Potter, MA (Oxon), Director of Music and Precentor
2023 C N Spottiswoode, BSc, PhD, FRS, Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology, Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town and Visiting Research Associate, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge (2011: Senior Research Fellow)
2023 D A S Fergusson, OBE, DD, FRSE, FBA, Regius Professor of Divinity (2022: Senior Research Fellow)
2023 M Thompson, MA, PhD, University of Cambridge Director of Undergraduate Admissions
2023 R E I Calvocoressi, CBE, BA (Oxon), MA (London)
2023 C MacKenzie, MA (Oxon), MEd (Sydney), PhD (ANU), Director of Studies in Land Economy (2022: Bye-Fellow)
2024 P Ziar, BA
2025 J Begbie, DD (Aberdeen), BA (Edinburgh), BD and PhD (Aberdeen)
1984 HRH the Duke of Gloucester, KG, GCVO, MA
1992 Professor Sir David Hopwood, MA, PhD, and DSc (Glasgow), FRS
1999 J C F-Simpson, CBE, MA, FRGS
2001 Professor Sir Richard Jolly, KCMG, MA, and PhD (Yale)
2002 Professor Sir John Gurdon, PhD, Hon ScD, Hon DSc (Oxon), FRS
2005 D J H Murphy, MA, Bursar Emeritus
2005 Professor Sir David C Clary, ScD, FRS, Joint Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Chemistry)
2005 The Rt Hon Lord Malloch-Brown, KCMG, PC, MA
2005 R W H Cripps, AM
2009 The Rt Hon Sir Andrew Morritt, PC, CVO, MA
2009 R H Vignoles, BA, BMus, ARCM
2009 The Hon Wong Yan-lung, SC, MA, JP
2012 Khoon Hong Kuok, BA (Singapore), Pepys Benefactor Fellow
2015 Professor Dame S M Springman, DBE, PhD, FREng
2015 C I von Christierson, B Com (Rhodes), MA
2015 HRH Sultan Dr Nazrin Shah, BA (Oxon), PhD (Harvard)
2015 L L Cardozo Kindersley, MBE, Hon LittD
2015 Dame Carol A Duffy, DBE, BA (Liverpool)
2018 A Tennent, BA, MIB
2018 T Cripps, BA, MBA
2020 The Rt Revd and Rt Hon the Lord Williams of Oystermouth, PC, DD, Hon DCL (Oxon), FBA
2020 Professor the Lady Williams of Oystermouth, MA
2020 The Rt Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond, DBE, LLB, Hon FBA
2020 M C Newell, BA
2020 The Very Revd Dr D M Hoyle, KCVO, MBE, MA, PhD, FSA
2020 C B M Derham, MA
2021 M D Moorman, BA (Bucknell), MA (St John’s College, Annapolis), MA (Georgetown), MPhil, Pepys Benefactor Fellow
2021 A P Schultz, MA, MSci, Pepys Benefactor Fellow
2024 P Carne, MA, MBE, Pepys Benefactor Fellow
2024 Professor P J Friend, MA, MD
2024 Professor T G Leighton, MA, ScD, FRS,
2024 Professor C J Lintott, BA, PhD (University College London)
2024 Professor R E M Rickaby, OBE, MA, PhD, FRS
2024 Dame R Whiteread, DBE
Sir Colin Corness, Honorary Fellow, died on 25 June 2025. There will be an obituary in the next College Magazine.
1999 Anthony Bloom 2009 Colin Day
2000 Thomas Monaghan 2010 Margaret Higgs
2000 Christopher Smart 2011 Lady Braybrooke
2003 Claire Tomalin, Hon LittD 2015 Allen Zimbler
2003 Dr Helen Lee 2019 David Fyfe
2007 Dato Isa Bin Ibrahim 2022 Yen How Tai
This issue was prepared by the Editor, Professor Raven, and the Deputy Editor, Mrs Fitzsimons, assistedby Jo Hornsby and Su Nwe.
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To accompany the exhibition ‘Nigel Hall RA Line, Edge, Shadow: drawings and sculpture’, we were delighted to install Nigel’s sculpture ‘Zephyr’ (corten steel, 2023) next to the New Library in October 2024. Both the artist and the College hope that this will become a long-term loan. It is believed that ‘Zephyr’ is the first sculpture to appear in the Fellows’ Garden since the arrival in 1962, courtesy of Jim Ede, of Henry Moore’s ‘Sculptural Object’. Alas, you will not find the Moore in the Garden today; it was returned to Kettle’s Yard because some Fellows noted‘ithada hole init’
ArthurBensonDiarist:Extractsfromthe ACBensonCentenary Lecture,12 March 2025: E Duffy
DavidCClary, Walter Kohn: From Kindertransport and Internment to DFT and the Nobel Prize (2025)by BPeng
SaraCaputo, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel (2024)byJ RRaven
As the academic year draws to a close, I am happy to report that the College is in good heart with much to celebrate. We have had another yearofexcellentacademicresults. Onehundredofourstudentsobtained first-class honours, including three who achieved starred Firsts and six whotoppedtheTriposintheirsubject. Theselastincludedaremarkable feat by our mathematicians who came top in both Part IA and Part IB, a tribute both to the students concerned and to Professor Martin and his team. There was also a good crop of University prizes in Chemistry, Material Science, Engineering, Law, Social Anthropology and Politics, and Psychology and Behavioural Studies. Overall, 86% of those taking the Tripos or a classed Master’s examination obtained a First or 2.1, the bestresulttheCollegehasever achieved.
Magdalene students have also excelled in many other areas. Two of our students have won major music awards this year, a Magdalene post-graduate captained the University golf team to its first win over Oxford in eight years, while another led the Cambridge women’s crosscountry team to their first ever win at the British Universities and Colleges Sports competition. The College Choir enjoyed a very successful tour of Transylvania. Details of many other successes are set outelsewhereinthis issueofthe Magazine.
LastyearitwasagreatpleasuretoannouncethatProfessorHarper had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. This year it gives me equalpleasuretoannouncethatProfessorSpottiswoodehasbeenelected aFellowoftheRoyalSociety. ItisalsogoodtonotethattheUniversity’s SchoolofArtsandHumanities,whereTimHarperissteppingdownafter several years as Head, will still see a strong Magdalene influence as two of our Fellows – Professor Mentchen and Professor Waithe – have been appointedasthenewDeputyHeads.
2025 also saw a highly successful May Ball. Every other year, our May Ball is the highlight of the social calendar and this year it was particularly stylish and enjoyable. One student (from another college) whoattendedthreeMayBallsinas manydaysdescribedtheMagdalene Ball as head and shoulders above the others, while the online comment posted by someone who boasted of having gate-crashed every ball in Cambridge was similarly complimentary about our security. This year,
forthefirsttimeindecades,ourowncateringteamprovidedthedinner, which was a huge success. My wife and I very much enjoyed the 2025 Ball which brought back happy memories of the first one we had attendedfifty yearsearlier.
The major building project of the moment is the restoration of the Pepys Building. All asbestos has now been removed and, as I write, the scaffolding is being put in place for the extensive work which has to be carriedoutontheroofandthestructureofthebuilding. TheCollegehas been exceptionally fortunate in that so many of our members and other benefitshaveralliedroundtoraiseasubstantialpartofthefundsneeded forthisimportantandverynecessaryproject. ThankstotheeffortsofDr Hughes and Ms Sutherland and a team of volunteers, the Pepys Library has been removed to First Court, where the books can still be consulted byappointment. We hope tosee theBuildingreopen inlate2026.
Finally, the College has had the great pleasure of seeing its other prominentdiarist,ACBenson(Masterfrom1915to1925),honouredwith thepublication of a magnificenteditionofselectionsfrom the morethan four million words of his diary. The publication was marked by a very well-attended receptionkindly organized byourHonoraryFellowKatie Derhamatherhome,TreemanswhichwasformerlythehomeofBenson himself. EditedbyProfessorsHyamandDuffy,thiseditionoftheDiaries sheds a fascinating light not only upon the College at a most important point in its history but upon British society over some thirty years. Forthright, perceptive and highly entertaining, the book has received glowing reviews and the ultimate accolade of being parodied in Private Eye
SirChristopher Greenwood
Official Fellow
XAVIER MOYA has been elected an Official Fellow. He is a Professor of Materials Physics in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy. He completed a BA in 2003, and a PhD on magnetic shape memory alloys in 2008, at the Physics Department in the University of Barcelona. He works on the thermal properties of materials, focusing on phase transitions involving structural, electrical and magnetic degrees of freedom. Possible applications include environmentallyfriendlysolid-statecoolingandheating,andtothisend he launched the start-up Barocal Ltd in 2019. He is a member of the UK Young Academy, the International Science Council’s global roster of experts,andaBillGates’BreakthroughEnergyFellow.
Research Fellows
AMELIA URRY has been elected a Lumley Junior Research Fellow in the History of Science. She is a writer and recently completed her PhD in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, with a focus on the sciences of climate and environment. Her thesis developed an account of evolving concepts of scientific uncertainty in twentieth-century Antarctic glaciology, from empty maps to the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. As a Junior Fellow, she will carry out new research into the role of scientific narratives of
apocalypsehaveplayedinshapingthemodernclimatesciences. Amelia has worked as an environmental journalist reporting on coral reefs, plastic pollution, and technology. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and Wired, with recent essays in Dark Mountain and Atmos She is also the co-author of a textbook on math and art, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, Imagined (Yale University Press, 2016) and a poet. When not reading, she is probably swimming.
SARAH SIBUG-TORRES has been elected a Nevile Research Fellow in Physics. She completed her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of the Philippines, followed by a MSc in Chemistry at Ateneo de Manila University and a MRes in Sensor Technologies at the University of Cambridge. Her research career has focused on developing translational sensing technologies with real-world applications, from low-cost tools for agri-pharmaceutical quality control and aquaculture water monitoring, to advanced spectroscopic platforms for healthcare. She is currentlycompletingherPhDinPhysicsattheUniversityofCambridge, where she combines electrochemistry, plasmonics, surface science, and nanomaterials engineering to address key barriers to the widespread application of Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) in clinical diagnostics. Her work bridges fundamental studies on nanoscale interfaces with the development of robust, high-sensitivity SERS platforms. As a Junior Research Fellow, she will advance this research by exploring how molecular interactions at gold nanostructures can be tuned to improve SERS-based metabolite sensing, with the broader goal of enabling early disease diagnostics through accessible biochemical monitoring.
ALEX WOOD has been elected a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology. and will be Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Science (Sociology). Previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, a Lecturer in the Sociology of Work at Birmingham University, and a Senior Lecturer in HRM andtheFuture of Work at Bristol University, he returned to Cambridge in 2024 as Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology. His research focuses on understanding the future of work and the transformation of capitalism. His Cambridge PhD (supervised by ProfessorBurchell)examinedtheconsequencesofflexibilityandinsecure schedules for working conditions and power relations in retail, research whichhasbeenpublishedinnumerousacademicjournalsandin2020as Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace (CornellUniversity Press). Heiscurrentlybringingtogetherhispastten years of platform work research in a further book titled ‘Labour and Platform Capitalism’.
THOMAS JOASHI has been elected to a ByeFellowship in Architecture. He matriculated as an undergraduate at Magdalene in 2017, graduating in 2021 with a Starred First in FrenchandGerman. Afterayearworkingin London, he returned to Cambridge to begin an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies at King’s College as a Cambridge Trust Scholar. Hisdoctoralresearch,fundedbythe Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme, concerns violence and urbanism in late sixteenth-century Paris, looking specifically at Renaissance understandings of ideal built form in relation to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. During the 2024–25 academic
year, he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, where he took classes at the Graduate School of Design. His hobbies consistprimarily of playinghissaxophoneandreading novels.
EMMA GRIFFITHS has been elected to a Bye-Fellowship in Immunology. She completed her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Magdalene College, Cambridge (2020–23) where she focused on immunology with a special interest in asthma and allergic diseases. Her doctoral research investigates the role of the transcription factor ZFP871 in the regulationofILC2cellsinasthma,aiming to uncover novel therapeutic targets for better treatments for asthma and related allergic conditions. In addition toher research,sheenjoysdancing,watchingballetandballroomdance, travelling and music.
PERRAN ZIAR has been elected a Fellow Commoner. He is a Steward and rowing coach of Magdalene Boat Club (MBC), and President and Membership Secretary of the associationofMBCalumninowknownasthe Mallory Club. Perran came up to Magdalene in1968toreadLaw. Aftergraduatinghewas offeredaplacetoreturntostudyArchitecture butinsteaddecided onDentistry andwentto Bart’s Hospital and then on to the Royal Dental Hospital. He ran a general and specialist practice in Cornwall, supervisednewdentalgraduatesandtaughtatthePeninsulaDentaland Medical School. He has always believed in a healthy work-life balance and in 2003 all members of his practice moved successfully on to a fourdayworkingweek. Afterretirementin2012Perranbegancoachingwith Magdalene Boat Club where he recognised the benefits rowing could
bringnotonlytophysicalfitnessbutalsoasacounterbalancetoacademic pressuresandmentalhealthproblems. Hehasworkedparticularlywith those new to the sport as well as helping to reinvigorate the association of MBC alumni known as the Mallory Club. As a Steward he found commercial sponsors for the Boat Club and hopes to live long enough to celebratethe200thanniversaryof MBCin2028.
JEREMY BEGBIE has been elected a FellowCommoner. He was born in Bristol, raised in Scotland, andcompletedhisgraduateworkin Cambridge and Aberdeen. His academic appointments have been at the University of Cambridge,theUniversityofStAndrews,and Duke University, North Carolina. He is currently Thomas A Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology and The McDonald Agape Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, at Duke University. He is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge. In June 2024 he received an Honorary DD from the University of Aberdeen. He holds piano teaching and performing qualifications from the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music respectively. His books include Theology, Music and Time (CUP) and Theology, Music, and Modernity (OUP). He has been invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the UniversityofAberdeenin2026.
During2024-25, we werepleasedtohave with us:
Professor Andrea Zifferero (Dunbarney Fellow), Associate Professor of Etruscology and Italic Antiquities, Department of History and Cultural Heritage and Director of the Archaeological and Art Collections, University of Siena, an archaeologist specializing in settlement systems in ancient Etruria. He focuses on the topography and environmental resource useofEtruscancitiesand theirsuburbanandrurallandscapes.
Professor Richard Peiser, inaugural Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, who examines the response of real estate developers to the marketplace and its institutional environment. His current research focuses on mixed use development, office-toresidentialconversion,PropTech, andnewtowns.
Dr Emma Hughes, Associate Professor in the People, Work and Employment Department, Leeds University Business School. Her researchincludesworking-timereductionandtheimpactofthefour-day working week on organisations, employees, and specific employee groups.
DrSophieScott-Brown,historianofactivistsandanarchists,rebels and radicals, critics and heretics, who explores the histories of political experimentationandtheirsignificance. Sheiscurrentlyexamining'social science satire' inmid-twentieth-centuryBritain andAmerica.
Professor Andrew Bricker, Professor of English Literature, Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University, and Senior Fellow, AndrewWMellonSocietyofFellowsinCriticalBibliography,RareBook School,UniversityofVirginia. His Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792 (2022)focusesonBritishdefamationlawinrelationtowritten, visual, and dramatic satire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Dr Lydia Walker, historian of twentieth-century global decolonisation, with broad interests in the international history of South Asia, Southern Africa, military intervention, and insurgent resistance, and currently writing on the role of UN peacekeepers since the Second WorldWar.
Mr Aaron Taylor, lecturer at the LSE and barrister at Fountain Court Chambers with a broad commercial practice and interests in the law relating to art and cultural property, particularly in the murkier aspectsofthecommercialart market.
TheMasterhasspokenatalumnieventsinLondon,Manchester,Toronto, NewYork,Washington,Singapore,Kuala LumpurandHong Kong
The President co-edited Radiological Anatomy for Radiation and Particle Therapy with Thankamma Ajithukumar and Sara Uppponi (Springer Cham, 2025; paperback, 2026), and published ‘Endoscopic, ultrasound-guided, radiofrequency ablation of aldosterone-producing adenomas(FABULAS):AUK,multicentre,prospective,proof-of-concept trial’ in The Lancet in February 2025; the original hypothesis stems from Dr Carroll’s ownclinicalexperience.
Professor Hyam and Professor Duffy (co-editors) published The Benson Diary: I: 1885-1906; II: 1907-1925 (Pallas Athene,2025).
Professor Spence chaired a session and presented a paper on the International Macroseismic Scale at the General Assembly of the EuropeanSeismologicalCommission inCorfuinSeptember2024.
Professor Burchell was awarded the UK Research and Innovation ESRC Outstanding Business and Enterprise Impact Award for his researchonthefour-daywork week.
Professor Babinsky gave the Larmor Lecture, ‘Surging Cylinders, Flapping Wings and Gust Encounters: Force Production in Unsteady Flows’ inOctober2024.
ProfessorRavengavetalksinCharlestononitsliteraryhistoryand aton-linelaunchesforforeignlanguageeditionsofhisrecentbookswith follow-up interviews for national newspapers in China, Korea, Mexico and Turkey; he was awarded the 2025 National Wenjin Book Award for the Chinese translation of the Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. As Chair of the Lindemann Trust, he extended its science days for primary schools(heldasusualin Magdalene)toLondon,Belfastand Edinburgh.
Professor Dupree has been recognised as a Highly Cited Researcherfor2024, markinghisninth selection inthepastdecade.
ProfessorStoddartwaselectedasaCorrespondingMemberofthe German ArchaeologicalInstitute.
Dr Hadida hosted and chaired the first Mallen PhD Symposium andthe 25th AnniversaryMallen ScreenEntertainment Conferencewith 70 global screen entertainment scholars and leading professionals (including in film, television, streaming and video-gaming) in Cripps Court in September 2024. In June she was presented with a MBA
Teaching Appreciation Award in recognition of her outstanding commitment toteachingon theAdvanced Strategycourse(Easter2025).
Professor Mentchen and Professor Waite have been appointed DeputyHeadsof the Schoolof Artsand Humanities.
Professor Brassett continued as consultant to the LEANBody project(seepp55-57).
Professor So was elected a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Dr Ravenscroft published: ‘Cultivating the art of living: What I learned from Ivan Illich about friendship, discipline, and celebrating the present’, ABC Religion and Ethics (2024), ’Travel notes: On writing, surprise and the self through time’, Transposition (University of St Andrews 2024), ‘Humour, transcendence, and selfhood: An essay on lightnessand truth’, Modern Theology 41(2025).
Dr Mills published: ‘Judgement and judgments: The role of courts in proportionality challenges in the United Kingdom’, European Human Rights Law Review 374 (2024), ‘Committees giving reasons: Attribution and sufficiency’, Public Law 124 (2025), ‘Visibility of processes and the visibilityof justice’, Judicial Review (2025),andhasbeenmadeaFellowof theHigherEducation Academy.
Dr Bryan published ‘Responsibility fictionalism’, Inquiry (2024) and ‘Better but not enough: On the limitations of reformed temporary labor migrations programs’, Journal of Social Philosophy (2025). He organised a workshop on ‘'Group Agency in Political Theory' at the Manchester Centre for Political Theory annual conference in September 2024.
Dr Hauge published (with J Hickel) ‘A progressive framework for green industrial policy’ in New Political Economy (2025), two policy reportsfortheUNIndustrialDevelopmentOrganisation,bothtitled‘The future of industrialization’ (2024 and 2025), and gave numerous public interviews and lectures including at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, for the OPEC Fund for International Development, Novara Media, the national newspapers Klassekampen (Norway) and China Daily, andthe CambridgeJournalofPoliticalAffairs. His FutureoftheFactory (2023; review, Coll Mag 68) featuredin a Guardian editorial.
Dr Asimov was awarded the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for his article ‘The Melakartas and the “République modale”: Naturalizing Indian scales in French musical modernism’, in
the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2024); and awarded the 2025 Adele Katz EarlyCareer Researcher Awardfrom theSociety for Musical Analysis.
Dr Steele convened an international conference ‘WAVE: Writing As Visual Experience’ (September 2024), fostering new collaborations between academics and writing practitioners including calligraphers, graffiti writers,artistsandtypedesigners. She leda panel discussionon ‘CreatingNewScriptsfortheWorld’forWorldEndangeredWritingDay, January 2025. She launched a new resource for writers and speakers of minority languages: https://viewsproject.wordpress.com/assess-yourlanguages-writing-needs/.
Dr Caputo won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for best first book in British or Irish History and received an Honourable Mention at the North American Society for Oceanic History John R. Lyman Book Awards. Hersecondbook, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel, appeared in its US and Italian editions,reviewedbelow(pp 129-31). Shepresentedherresearchonthe BBC’s‘ThinkingAllowed’and‘HistoryExtra’podcast,theItalianRadio3 Scienza,RAI3Kilimangiaro,SkyTG24,andattheLondonBookFairand Hexham Book Festival. She was appointed an Editor of the Historical Journal andAssociate Reviews Editorofthe American Historical Review
Dr Baez-Ortega and colleagues published ‘Horizontal transfer of nuclearDNAintransmissiblecancer’, Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci.U.S.A.122(18) (2025), reporting the first ever detection of horizontal transfer of nuclear DNAfromcelltocell inanaturallyoccurringtumour. Heorganisedthe second Benson Ghost Night held in the Parlour after dinner on Sunday 27October,narrated bygueststoryteller, RobertLloydParry.
Dr Marshall won the BSC Brian Williams Prize 2024 for her article ‘Child criminal exploitation and the interactional emergence of victim status’publishedin the British Journal of Criminology.
Mr Peng has been awarded the Institute of Physics Sam Edwards PhDThesisPrizeforhisdissertation'Onthetopologicalpropertiesofthe vibrationsofsolids'.
Professor Aigbirhio and colleagues developed a new PET tracer technique that enables faster, safer diagnosis and treatment of primary aldosteronism, amajorhiddencauseofhighblood pressure.
Dr Fialkov co-authored a public science and outreach article in Scientific American (2024) and published 17 papers in scientific journals.
She gave a public lecture at the prestigious Paradoxes in Physics, organized by the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics at Oxford and six invited conference presentations and five seminars and colloquia inChina,Japan,India,Switzerland,IrelandandtheUK.
Dr Giovannetti-Singh’s article ‘Colonial worldmaking and global knowledgesattheearlymodernCapeof Good Hope’, based onresearch during his Lumley Research Fellowship, will appear in Past & Present, and his PhD ‘Globalising China: Jesuits, Eurasian exchanges, and the early modern sciences’ won the Dissertation Prize of the Division of the HistoryofScience intheInternationalUnionofScienceandTechnology. He co-organised an international conference on ‘Cross-contextualisation as method: beyond the global history of science’ at the Department of HistoryandPhilosophy ofScience.
Dr Ivan has been appointed Szego Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, published `Turan densities for daisies and hypercubes' in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society (settling a fifty-year old conjecture) and 'Turan densities for small hypercubes' in the SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics, and solved a long-standing question of saturation for the diamond in ‘The saturation number for the diamond islinear'.
Dr Niang gave the keynote at the 2025 Society for French Studies Graduate Conference, King’s College London, and two further talks, ‘In DefenceofWhat’sThere:NotesonScavenging’atEdinburgh(2024),and ‘Thinking Scavenging as a Queer and Feminist Methodology’ at Cambridge (2025); she published ‘On Flamboyance: Refusal and worldmaking in Rébecca Chaillon's Carte noire nommée désir’, Journal of Modern & Contemporary France (2025), and a co-written article in Openworks. Her essay 'Haunting in the Undead Empire' was jointly awarded the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Essay Prize for 2025 She co-convened the Ambivalent Archives research network andtheCatalystsfor Decolonisation ResearchLab,hostedbyCRASSH. ProfessorPadel published Girl (Chatto & Windus, 2024).
MrSkelton,Fellow-Commoner,hasbeenelectedaLifeFellow.
DrSpottiswoode has beenelectedaFellowoftheRoyalSociety.
Mr Potter has been appointed Musical Director of the Harlow Chorus,fromSeptember2025.
Mr Calvocoressi published with A Clark The Combative Life of DouglasCooperCollectorandFriendofPicasso (YaleUniversityPress,2025).
Mr Simpson hosted a January evening of recollections, ‘Leaders and Lunatics’, in support ofthePepys Restoration Fund(seep57).
Professor Clary published Walter Kohn: From Kindertransport and Internment to DFT and the Nobel Prize (World Scientific Publishing, Singapore,2025),reviewedbelow(pp127-29)thefinalbookinhistrilogy onscientistsand the SecondWorld War.
LidaCardozoKindersleypublishedwithSGarrett ASuitable Stone (Cardozo Kindersley, 2024), exploring the properties and qualities of British rocks and stones and looking at their colouration, density and responsetothechisel. Shealsolaunchedsalesofaposterandteatowels.
ProfessorLeightonbecameEmeritusProfessoroftheUniversityof Southampton and Honorary Professor of University College London, served on the Therapeutic Ultrasound Winter School faculty, lectured at the Les Houches School of Physics, University of Grenoble Alpes, and attended the European Wound Management Association conference, Barcelona. He was appointed advisor to the International Standards Organisation following a milestone publication on unwitting public exposure to airborne ultrasound and its adverse effects: ‘Validity of the 1984InterimGuidelinesonAirborneUltrasoundandGapsintheCurrent Knowledge’, Health Physics (2024), having advised the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection since 2021. He published ‘Sensory unpleasantness of very-high frequency sound and audible ultrasound’, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 156:3 (2024), and a study on the useofunderwatersoundtoguidefishawayfromwaterextractionpoints in Frontiers of Freshwater Science, 2 (2024). He filed a provisional patent forhiscompanytomanufactureatscaleadrug-freedevicetohealcurrent incurable wounds.
Professor Rickaby was awarded an OBE for services to Biochemistry inthe NewYear Honours List2025.
Dame Rachel Whiteread was the inaugural headliner at the Goodwood Art Foundation's first exhibition on the Goodwood Estate in Chichester in May and which shows several of her cast sculptures in the newlydeveloped landscapetogether with adisplayofherphotographs.
338studentstookpreliminaryandTriposexaminations. Thenumbersin eachclasswereasfollows:ClassI:100;Class2.1:190;Class2(undivided): 3; Class 2.2: 30; Class 3: 6; Pass/Allowed to Progress: 6; Fail: 3. The number of Firsts awarded by subject were: Asian and Middle Eastern Studies: 1; Architecture: 3; Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology: 7; Classics: 3; Computer Science: 4; Design: 1; Economics: 1; Education: 1; Engineering: 13; English: 5; Geography: 1; History: 2; History of Art: 1; Human,Social,andPoliticalSciences:6;LandEconomy:3;Linguistics:1; Law: 3; Mathematics: 14; Medical Sciences: 4; Modern & Medieval Languages: 3; Natural Sciences: 14; Psychological and Behavioural Sciences:5;Philosophy:4.
UniversityPrizes were awardedasfollows: RClarke(PBSPartII): Cambridge University Prize for Outstanding Research Project;SDauris(NaturalSciencesPartIIIChemistry): Examiners’Prizefor Outstanding Performance; F Kirk (Natural Sciences Part II Materials Science): Central Electricity Generating Board Prize for Materials Science and Metallurgy;CLam(EngineeringPartIIB): RicardoPrizeinThermodynamics; B Mark (Law Part IB): Clifford Chance C. J. Hamson Prize for the Law of Contract.
SeniorTutor’sReport
We had 338 students taking Tripos this year. The raw number of Firsts across all years was exactly 100 or 29.6% (the fifth successive year in which wehavehadthepercentageofFirstsjust under 30%). Infact,this represents the second highest percentage of Firsts in the last ten years. The percentages of Firsts across the years were: Freshers 33%, second year21%,third/fourthyear;combined34%,givinginall1902.1s(or56% of the total). Combining the third and fourth years, 86% attained a First or a 2.1, a singular measure of success. Six students topped their respective Triposes, three students were awarded starred Firsts and five Universityprizeswerereported,awarded in foursubjects.
Thefollowingelections weremadeby the GoverningBody:
Senior Scholarships:Y HMCheung, MDHelm
BundyScholarships:ABanerji,JBennion,RBhimsaria*,EBradley*,ECain, RClarke, GCobb,SS Cowley, ACusack, SE Dauris,IJFFee, AGrant, I A A Holt, U C C Horder, K Kahn-Harris*, C Keeping, M T Kyaw, C W Lam, S R Lambert, Y Liu, T Liu, J A C Mather, M Möbus, M T Mowzer, W Painter, J Pithers*, K Sivakumaar*, A Strain, E E G Styles, A Trifanov, EDGViney,B AWessels, XXu. * in residence
Scholarships: Y Ali, A Allmand-Smith*, Y Baek*, N Bansal*, Z Chai*, K Chan*, A M Chandra, A S Chitre*, E Cowell, N Crossley*, A L S Davies, ODeal,DDjenabzadeh,AGavshon*,HCHardma*,YHe,MHo,ZHu*, THughes-Wilson, JJacob,RJones, FKirk, HKirkwood,HF Kitindi, SA Knight,O TA Knox, RKumar,C YKwok*,CHLa*, HHY Lau,PLi*, Y Q Liu*, Y Li *, B Mao, S Martin, M Marzec, G Mayhead, E Mcewen, C P McKenna,JLMeinck,STB;Mulholland,HLNg,MSNg,YXNg,LNi, B I Pacciani, D L Page, G Pan, D Simon-McBride, R Sisodiya, W T A So*, T Stanbridge, J A Tham, B Tibrewal, G Wang, C E Wood, J R Wright*, N JWright*,SXu*,CHYiu,MAYu*,CYuan*,RZhang,JZhu.* re-election
Exhibitions: M Ahmed, E Bufton O'Shea, L Chen, G Chen, J Gaskell, B Graves, C Li, O Longton, E Morgan, M Ran, R Scarfiello, M Schad, S Sekhon,JWilson,L Zhang.
College Prizeswere awardedasfollows:
Architecture: O Deal (David Roberts Prize), G Mayhead (David Roberts Prize)
Architecture:SMartin(Lutyens Prize)
Asianand Middle EasternStudies: EStyles(Peskett Prize)
Chemical Engineering: D Simon-McBride (Pilkington Prize), A Chitre (Pilkington Prize), A Yu (Pilkington Prize), M Marzec (Pilkington Prize), C McKenna (Pilkington Prize), J Meinck (Pilkington Prize), R Zhang (Pilkington Prize)
Classics: KKahn-Harris(Davison Prize) A Allmand-Smith,B Pacciani
Computer Science: A Trifanov (Andrew Clarke Memorial Prize), Z Hu, Y Liu,J Wright
Design:MSNg (Lutyens Prize)
Economics:ASo(Schoschana Wrobel Prize)
Education: MKyaw
Engineering: S Cowley (Christopherson Prize), C W Lam (Christopherson Prize), T Liu (Christopherson Prize), T Hughes-Wilson (Christopherson Prize),NCrossley(Christopherson Prize),HKirkwood(Lewins Prize),YAli (Foo-SunLauPrize),AChandra(Foo-SunLauPrize),ECowell(Foo-SunLau Prize), R Jones (Foo-Sun Lau Prize), H Kitindi (Foo-Sun Lau Prize ), G Pan (Foo-Sun Lau Prize),B Tibrewal(Foo-Sun Lau Prize)
English:ABanerji(C S Lewis Prize),GCobb(Newton Prize:),EMcEwan(I A Richards Prize), N Wright (I A Richards Prize), H Law (WinterWarmington Prize:)
Geography: CWood (Clarabut Prize)
Historyof Art:U Horder (Duncan Robinson Prize)
Human, Socialand PoliticalSciences: ACusack,A Grant,A Gavshon,H Hardman, RSisodiya,GWang
History:EViney(DunsterPrize),DPage(NicholasStJohnWhitworthPrize)
LandEconomy: XXu,DDjenabzadeh,M Ho(Cleary Prize)
Law: S Lambert (Orlando Bridgman Prize), W Painter (Orlando Bridgman Prize),SMulholland (Thomas Audley Prize)
Linguistics:YX Ng(Peskett Prize)
Mathematics:MCheung(Edward Waring Prize),KChan(Walton Prize),C H Lam (Walton Prize), Y Liu (Walton Prize), I Sharon (Rae Mitchell Prize), N Wang (Rae Mitchell Prize), S Xu (Goldhaber Prize), C Yuan (Goldhaber Prize),B Mao(Dennis Babbage Prize),H L Ng(Dennis Babbage Prize)
Medical Sciences: N Bansai (Martin Hughes Prize), J Jacob (Iris Rushton Prize),O Knox(Iris Rushton Prize),J Tham (Iris Rushton Prize)
Modern and Medieval Languages: J Mather (Peskett Prize), S Knight (Peskett Prize),TStanbridge(Peskett Prize)
NaturalSciences:SDauris(JKBurdettPrize),IFee(TedderPrize),RKumar (Maurice Goldhaber Prize, R Bhimsaria (Keilin Prize), M Mobus (Keilin Prize), J Pithers (Keilin Prize), E Bradley (Martin Hughes Prize:), K Sivakumaar (Martin Hughes Prize:), Z Chai (P M S Blackett Prize:), F Kirk (Newton Prize:),C Y Kwok (B C Saunders Prize:), ADavies(Christie Prize), LNi(Christie Prize),J Zhu(Christie Prize)
Psychology and Behavioural Sciences: J Bennion, R Clarke, A Strain, Y Baek
Philosophy: ECain, CKeeping, PLi,YHe
Other Prizes wereawardedas follows:
Arthur Sale Prize:JWright
Davison Essay Prize: E McEwen
Garrett Prize:R Taylor
George Mallory Prize: SSekhon
Gill Prize: JBennion, AGavshon,A Grant, PLi, YQLiu,CH Yiu
Hart Prize :A Gavshon,MHo, PLi
Jim Ede Prize:M Benedict
Macfarlane-Grieve Prize:EHinchliff
Master’sReadingPrize:HJones
Mynors Bright Prize: GCobb,AStrain
Newman-Turner Prize for Country Running: NBridson-Hubbard
Thefollowingelectionsweremadeby the GoverningBody:
Donner Scholarship: S Owen-Flood; Roosevelt Scholarship: E Parker; Cambridge Matters & Magdalene College Studentship: G Armstrong, F Gilliat; Lady Lincoln Studentship: E Curry; Vice-Chancellor’s & Magdalene
Leslie Wilson Scholarship: F Morley, A Goddard; Jardine Scholarship: D Nuraini, A Savitri; Goulandris Scholarship: G Xenikakia; Clutton-Brock Scholarship: A Mavura; Mandela Magdalene Cambridge Scholarship: A McIntosh; Moorman Scholarship:DEdan
Thefollowingresearchdegrees(PhD)wereconferredin 2024–25: S Amirova (Archaeology); S Barrass (Biochemistry); S Bayraktar (Medicine); J H Blümel (Engineering); G Borsari (Cancer Research UK CambridgeInstitute);K-JButkow(ComputerScienceandTechnology);S Dixon (Criminology); F England (Welcome Trust Stem Cell Institute); K Felton (Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology); M Gearen (History); C Gordon (Earth Sciences); A Gunton (Chemistry); A Hales (Applied MathsandTheoreticalPhysics);RHallMaudslay(ComputerScienceand Technology); K Ishida (Biochemistry); B Jones (Molecular Biology); A Khitrov (Sociology); W Knapp (Earth Science); E Kwan (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies); N List (Divinity); R Liu (Sociology); B Liu (Physics); S Malcomson (History); G B Marras (Archaeology); P McCornick (Divinity); E Murambwa (Politics and International Studies);
M Newis (English); G Politi (Architecture); F Riche (Engineering); A Samartzis (Law); R Scowen (Physics); D Shanahan (English); O Stupart (Clinical Medicine); C Swords (Physiology, Development and Neuroscience); L Taylor (Public Health and Primary Care); P Vaishnav (Biochemistry);LVassiliu(TheoreticalandAppliedLinguistics,MML);S Wlliams(Divinity); Y Zhu(MaterialsScienceandMetallurgy)
Junior Combination Room.
President: K Dias; Vice-President: E Grayston; Treasurer: M Taylor; Secretary: S Cole; Green and Charities: R Sisodiya; Ents: B Sills, A Burdon-Williams; Welfare (Male and Non-Binary): T Walters and T Stanbridge; Welfare (Female and Non-Binary): S Tang; LGBT+ Reps: C Tallahands, N Paish; Women’s Officer: G Mayhead; International Students’ Officers: J Jung, A Yu): Rep (Female and Non-Binary): P Kelly; Freshers’Rep (Male andNon-Binary):F Connelly; ClassAct: FPatchesa; Catering and Accommodation: O Courney; Access and Academic: S Barker;ITOfficer:D Page.
The new Committee members enthusiastically embraced their roles: EntertainmentOfficers,BradandAusten,hostedBaldyBop,thefirstbop oftheLentTermboastingimpressivecostumes,manyimitatingGrusand Minions from Despicable Me. Equal creativity appeared at the end-ofterm Heroes and Neros bop. For LGBT+ History Month in February, Celeste and Naomi organised celebratory events including a mosaic tile craft night, an outing to Everybody’s Talking About Jamie at the ADC, and fact-files in The Magdazine (the JCR newsletter), highlighting lesserknownLGBThistoricalfigures. TheSecretary,Sophie,putherstampon newsletter with puzzles, poems and wry wit. Freshers’ reps, Fabian and Pippa, created a full events calendar for incoming students, also organising their ‘marriage’ Formal. Vice-President Emily supported other Committee members and created a new Freshers’ pack, outlining theroleoftheJCRandthesupportavailabletostudents. Olivia,Catering and Accommodation Officer, worked on themed Formals including Lunar New Year, LGBT events and International Women’s Day. Grace, Women’s Officer, revitalised the 1988 Club (see p 33) and International Officers, Julie and Alex, supported Magdalene’s strong international student community by hosting movie and hot pot nights. Sam, Access and Academic Officer, organised storage facilities for students unable to move belongings between terms. Welfare Officers, Sophia, Tristan and Tom,supportedstudentswithfreeKnoopshotchocolate,Week5welfare packs, and the continued JCR Prescription Scheme covering NHS
prescription costs. Douglas, IT Officer, updated the JCR website and enabled its wider use. Class Act Officer, Finn, hosted a welcoming pub quiz with Class Act Officers at other colleges. The Easter Term brought courseworkandexamsforJCRmembers,buttheCommitteeorganiseda range of fun events to celebrate the end of term. Highlights included a BBQ, a summer fete, and a walk to Grantchester meadows. All proved very popular with the student body. Treasurer, Max, oversaw budgets andmanagedJCRfinances,making alltheseeventspossible
President: S Johnson; Vice Presidents: F Rigby, D Xu; Treasurer: H Clayton; Secretary and Admiral of the Fleet: W Mills; Secretary: G Valentin Datcu; Welfare Officer: L Nutall; Sports Officer: L Drummond; Academic Officers: B Muffet, U Hall; Catering and Swaps Officers: J Cameron, M McLean; Guardians of the Chamber: J Beckenstrater, M Helm; LGBTQ+ Officer: M Cooper; Women and Non-Binary Officer: N Thompson; Social, Women and Non-Binary Officer: B Trobridge; InternationalOfficer:RAl-Akiti.
The MCR is proud that the Magdalene postgraduate community is among the most active in Cambridge. The Committee has worked hard to facilitate a range of events throughout the year. A large incoming committeekeptthemomentumgoing,extendingthehighofMichaelmas to well-attended activities to the end of the Easter Term. Highlights includedanannualChristmasBanquetwithfestivecarolsinging,andan Easter Banquet with a Bridgerton theme, each followed by parties in BensonHall. TheMCRturnedoutinlargeandenthusiasticnumbersfor the annual Magdalene-Magdalen Sports Day, held in Oxford this year. Dancing evenings attracted great demand, with two ceilidhs and an evening where our South African members taught participants sokkie, a typeofballroom dance. The termlypub quiz in theCollege Barremains a favourite for all members and was led by Vice-President Frances with creative, engaging categories. The Easter Term brought warmer spring airbutalsomoreessays,dissertationsandexams;furthereventsenabled students to return to studies recharged and celebrate once deadlines passed. AverysuccessfulSummer GardenParty launched MayWeek
The Editor received the following reports for 2024-25:
Christian Union. This year the group has met weekly to read the Bible and pray together. In the Michaelmas Term members worked through some of Jesus's parables and in the Lent Term they studied the Psalms. MagdaleneCUalsorana‘DialaDoughnut’eventintherun-uptoevents weekwhereanyoneinCollegecouldaskaquestionaboutChristianityin return for a Krispy Kreme doughnut and an answer. Several College members,includingsomenotattendingtheweeklysessions,helpedwith running the talks that took place during events week in February. The grouphasbeenmuchencouragedoverthepastyearthroughtheseevents andweeklystudies.
Collegium Magdalenae. This newly formed, college-based chamber ensembleisdedicatedtohistoricallyinformedperformanceofmusic,and enjoyed great success this year. The ensemble’s inaugural concert at the end of the Michaelmas Term included Telemann’s Tafelmusik, as well as selected works by Couperin and Rossi. The performance was well received, and the Collegium held a subsequent concert at the end of the Lent Term, performing Lully’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite and selected vocal works by Bach. Following expansion to include the viol and the recorder, the ensemble organised highly enjoyable (but chilly) rehearsals each week in Benson Hall. In the Easter Term, the Collegium Magdalenae performed a selection of baroque music at the Magdalene MayBall, aswellas hostingsmaller recitalsby individualmembers.
MagdalenePoetrySociety. (President:JWright). TheSocietywasfounded last year to provide a friendly and inclusive community for people with different levels of engagement with poetry. Whether participants enjoy a couple of poems from their GCSE syllabus or are fully-fledged writers looking for feedback on new work, the belief is that such a mix is beneficial for all. The Society ran weekly events: usually themed open mics,whereeveryonebroughtalongapiecetheyeitherreadorwrotefor discussion – orjustenjoyedlistening. Thegroupalsohosted workshops from writers in Cambridge and guest speaker readings from wellregarded poets including Mary Jean Chan, Rowan Williams, Isobel Dixon, Katrina Porteous, Tamar Yoseloff, Claudine Toutoungi, Hannah
Copley, Ruth Padel, Theophilus Kwek and Vona Groarke. All events were free and open to anyone in the Cambridge area; about half of the members came from Magdalene. The aim is to make Magdalene one of the focal points for poetry in Cambridge, drawing on the College’s rich literary history. Next year Magdalene Poetry Society will have two new co-presidents, Maaria Rajput and Francis McCabe, and the future looks extremelypromising.
Magdalene Boat Club. (Captain of Boats: J Gibson). 2025 was a year of changeatMagdaleneBoatClub. Withmanyseniorrowersgraduatingin 2024, younger rowers stepped up to keep MBC competitive on the Cam. The Michaelmas Term began with novice recruitment and races, culminating in strong Fairbairns performances: the M1 IV showed other colleges that they weren’t going down without a fight, finishing 7th out of21;M2finishedaveryimpressive3rdoutof12;andtheW1IVfinished 5thout of18. Aftersuccessfulrecruitment,thefirst IVstransitionedinto VIIIs in the Lent Term, with novices joining senior crews and several novices making the leap to M1, just in time for Lent Bumps where they began 2nd on the river. Newnham Head Race in February produced reassuring results ahead of Bumps, and soon after, W2 qualified for Bumps via the Getting-On Race – a huge achievement and testament to their hard work. Lent Bumps brought hail, sunshine and everything in between. W1 impressively went +2, bumping King’s and Darwin W1. M1 were ultimately bumped each day but put up far stronger resistance than other clubs expected, holding off Caius for an impressive stretch. M2andW2alsohadstrongcampaignsbutultimatelyendedtheweek -4 and -3 respectively. Following Lent Bumps, the club headed off to Slovenia for the annual training camp, thanks to the generosity of the Mallory Club, the club’s alumni. MBC is able to trailer its boats across Europe,foranintenseweekofrowingonthepicturesqueLakeBled.The camp proved a huge success, with rowers clocking up over 150km over six days of training with up to three sessions each day and concluding with a club meal at a traditional Slovenian restaurant. The Easter Term began with fun at the knockout-style Small Boats Regatta, where a women’sdoublereachedthefinal. W1alsotravelledtoNottinghamCity Regatta, where, in their first experience of multi-lane racing, they beat Emmanuel W1 to reach the final of the development VIII’s competition, finishing4thoutof6. Afterayearofgreatgrowthfortheclub,theEaster
TermconcludedwithMayBumps,arguablythehighlightoftheyear. All five crews rose admirably to the challenge. Following a tough first day for both M2 and M3, both boats pursued positive – both bumping twice, and then rowing over on the final day. M1 and W2 were unfortunately bumped each day, both beginning in competitive positions. W1 were bumped on days 2 and 3 but completed two tough row-overs on days 1 and4tofendoffFitzwilliam and King’s W1.
The 1988 Club. Magdalene College’s feminist society is run by the JCR Women’s Officer and a committee of dedicated students. In the Lent Term, the society held mug painting sessions, movie nights and made a collaborative artwork centered on female rage and resilience. In collaboration with the Green and Charities Officer, the society helped with the organization of the charity Bakesale to raise money for Cambridge Women’s Aid and Jimmy’s Cambridge. Regular, laid-back activitysessionshaveencouragedengagementacrossallyeargroupsand an opportunity for all to share opinions and experiences that help the College community sustain intersectional feminism. A new website for the 1988 Club provides a platform for College women to share artistic, literary and other work in ‘Magdalene Women’s Gallery’, as well as media recommendations, health tips and resources regarding harassment and violence. Magdalene’s International Women’s Day Formal Hall, held on 11 March, included a performance by The Jazz Disciples, and offered time for the society to reflect, unwind and celebrate. It was one of the busiest Bar nights the College has seen, and the society and its extended community are hugely appreciative of the generous alumni donation that contributed to the evening. Having strengthened the community within College, the society enjoyed further opportunities intheEasterTermtobranchoutandsupportjointdebates with other collegesandhostpicnics with rounders.
Women’s Football. (Captain: I Luke). Magdalene members of this jointcollege team were light on the ground at the beginning of the year, but theygottoknowtheotherplayerswell,andbytheendoftheseasonthe team achieved substantial flow and unity. New football shirts were orderedunderthenameof‘BirdsofaFeather’(chosenbecauseitproved difficult to combine four college names into anything witty), and this apparently injected new confidence because a week later the team won its first match of the season. The Magdalene v Magdalen sports day whipped up further enthusiasm, with a total of fourteen players taking to the pitch. With blood, sweat and tears, many of the new players returned to the team for the remaining matches of the season, and the finaltwowerethebestyet,givingClareHall/Clarearunfortheirmoney (despite an intimidating number of Blues players in their team). Many members attended the Varsity football matches, and overall, it was a season of great development; the women’s football team continues to thrive.
Ladies’ Netball Team. (Captain: M Farrow). The Magdalene Ladies’ Netball team started the Michaelmas Term in division 2, following their division1demotion attheendofthe last season. Theteam wonthefirst match and drew the second, giving some hopes for a successful season.
Unfortunately,theseasonendedwithanotherdemotionwitheveryother matchlost. IntheLentTerm,therefore,theteambeganindivision3. The first three matches were narrow losses, but in the second half of the season the team was undefeated. This resulted in third place in the division, narrowly missing promotion. A highlight of the year was the annual Magdalen-Magdalene Sports Day when Magdalene delivered a confident victoryof22-14. The thirdquarter ofthematchfeaturedsome superbplaywiththirteengoalsinsevenminutes,andtheresultgavethe teamvictory over Oxfordforthethirdyearinarow.
Mixed Netball Club. (Captains: Emily Robinson and Hannah Townson). In a spirited and eventful year for Magdalene Liquid Netball, camaraderie andenthusiasmonce again broughtcolour andprideto the College. Balancing matches, social events, and the highly anticipated Magdalene v Magdalen sports day, the team displayed the best of Magdalene’s tradition of commitment, cheer and character. In the Michaelmas Term the season ended with an astonishing 28-16 victory againstQueens’CollegewhichheldMagdalene’splacefirmlyin division 3oftheleague. IntheLentTermtheteamekedouta9-8wininasurprise match with Queen’s College, Oxford, on their Cambridge tour. Victory came after a notably festive evening and was helped by a cheering
sideline of College supporters. A few weeks later, the Magdalene v Magdalen game resulted in a 7–11 loss despite a remarkable second-half comeback. A 10-2 loss against Trinity in Cuppers was followed by a fiercely contested match against Robinson, and the efforts of all team membersledtoafinalCuppersstanding:offourthoutoffive notquite silverware, but plenty of spirit in a year of more than ten intercollegiate fixturesand twenty newplayers.
Magdalene Squash. (Captain: F McCabe). After the graduation of its previous captains,Magdalene’s squashcame to a near stand-still. This Lentterm,however,first-yearsFrancisMcCabeandAlexanderDavies (2024) revived the College team, enabled by JCR-funded rackets for generaluseandbyanapproachtotheUniversitySquashRacketsClub toreintegratewiththeuniversityscene. Anintra-collegetournament encouragedbothundergraduateandgraduatestudents,andweekend sessionsofferedfunatallskilllevelsandfortrainingformatches. As a result, the team participated in Cuppers and the inter-college
leagues. The team began again with automatic placement in the lowest division (6), but steadily worked its way up and gained promotion for next year. In Cuppers, a hard-fought battle against Sidney Sussex ended in a 3-2 loss, with strong performances from James Wilson (2024) and Finn Patchesa (2023). Two (slightly more resounding) defeats followed against Trinity and Queens (both boasting Blues players), and victory also proved elusive at the Magdalen-Magdalene contest, despite excellent performances from Jamie Lai (2021), Tom Ford (2023 and Giles Cooper-Wilson (2024). A rematch next year on home turf is eagerly awaited by the revived Magdalene Squash team, full of hope and anticipation as it looks to progressingevenfurther nextyear.
ThefollowingobtainedFullBlues(*)orHalf-Bluesduring2024–25:
K Baker Mixed Lacrosse*
C Bazyk Sailing*
T Beales Rugby League
A Chawia Tennis
L Drummond Eton Fives
J Elliott Real Tennis
M Ho Waterpolo
L Jaxkson-Sarova Equestrian
S Johnson Waterpolo
P Kelly Women’s Cricket*
J Lai Eton Fives
C Rijkse Rowing (Blondie)
CRoyston Golf
KSivakumaar Badminton
EShriker Lacrosse(women)*
RSolomons Waterpolo*
BSpragg ClayPigeonShooting
AVangelatou Volleyball
EWakefield Lacrosse(men)*
The Editor is grateful to Mrs Marsh and Matt Moon for verifying this list.
TheCollegeArchivist,KatyGreen,increasedhertimeinCollegetothree days; the Graduate Trainee Librarian (2023–24) was appointed Library Assistant at the Cambridge Theological Federation Libraries; and the 2024–25traineeisConnorJohnston,whorecentlytookaMaster’sdegree atWolfsonCollege. CurrentCambridgestudentscontinuedtovolunteer in the Library in the Michaelmas Term, with one gaining a position as a Library Graduate Trainee in Oxford. Two school students carried out theirworkexperienceinJune.
InMarch,theAssistantLibrarian,AishahOlubaji,presentedatthe ‘Decolonising through Critical Librarianship’ workshop in Oxford, and again at the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa conference in June,addressing the theme‘Throughthe generations:youth, ageingand AfricanStudies collections’.
The Special Collections Librarian, Catherine Sutherland, attended a week-long rare books course in June, supported by the College. Catherine(withoccasionalcoverbythePepysLibrarian)hasbeenlargely responsiblefor invigilatingreaders.
The Arts Society joined library staff to assist with the removal of the Pepys books and presses from the Pepys Building, overseen by Catherine Sutherland. The Master and Lady Greenwood generously hostedapartyto thankthevolunteersfor theirtimeandcare.
ThisyearanInstagramaccountwasestablishedforMagdalene Libraries (@magdlibs) and has been used to highlight behind-the-scenes work, to feature items from the Archives and Special Collections, to advertise book displays and of course to show images of the New Library. In line with College policy, Bluesky has replaced X as the main social media platform.
IntheCollegeLibrary,theFestiveMysterybooksschemeranagain in December and 73 requests arrived from students and staff. After a wellbeing request from the JCR, the library set out jigsaw puzzles in the socialspaceduringtheEasterTermtoencouragestudentstotakeapause duringrevision.
Students are involved in curating the book displays, contributing to four themes this year: Halloween, Pink Week, National Poetry Month with the Magdalene Poetry Society, and ‘Books to get you through’ for Mental HealthAwarenessweek. Connor has also been collaborating with the Head of Student Wellbeingonaninitiativetocreateacommunalcrochetblanketover the courseoftheyear.
Without doubt, the major project for the historic libraries has been the ‘decanting’ of the Pepys Libraryinpreparationforthe building programme. The year began with a particularly busy period of tours and readers’ visits as news spread of the imminent closure.
The Pepys and Old Libraries temporarily closed to visitors and readers from the end of August. The Old Library, where the staff are now based, reopened for enquiries in November and for readers in January. This was a remarkably speedy
recovery from such a major operation. The decision had been made in theplanningstagetomaintainaccesstothecollectionsandtokeepthem on site. The College pulled together on this difficult and somewhat stressful process. Professional help was sought for the removal of the Pressesthemselves,butthelibrarystaff,especiallyCatherinewhotooka major and invaluable role in the management of the project, along with maintenance,housekeeping,andtherestorationteam,showedenormous resourcefulnessandcare. Currently,everythingisstableandtheprocess ofdecantingiscomplete. Ofcourse,itwillallhavetobedonebackwards nextyear!
The Pepys and Old Libraries continued to promote the very successful ‘Back a Book’ scheme, with items for conservation in 2025. Descriptions ofitemswhichareapriorityforconservationhavebeenputtogether,and this year, for the first time, included a portrait – that of Mary Skinner (Pepys’scompanion ofhislater years).
Recently,theElizabethanLicenceinMortmain(1589)hasreturned from the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium (of which Magdalene Libraries are full members) having been conserved, opened flat (probably for the first time in centuries), and housed in a speciallymade archival standard box. The partial seal which is still attached has beensupportedandhousedproperly. Thelicence,grantedbytheQueen, allowstheCollege to ownproperty inperpetuity.
The Haward spinet, widely identified as the instrument Pepys bought in 1668 and a much-valued legacy from Charles West Wilson (died2021),hasbeenreturnedfromtherestorer,MilesHellon. Thespinet – already beautifully maintained – has been restored to playable condition and will be a highlight of the Pepys Library once the current building worksarecomplete.
The centenary of the death of A C Benson was marked by an exhibition in the Cripps Gallery curated by the Pepys Librarian with substantial assistancefromtheCollege Archivist, MrsKatyGreen(see p 61).
A pop-up exhibition for College members was held in the Old LibraryontheFrenchinfluencesfoundinthecollections. Theexhibition drew on Connor’s degree in French language and literature and his research for the Old Library blog on former Fellow of French Literature, Richard(Dick)Ladborough. Theone-dayexhibitionwasattendedby118 guests.
ThePepysLibrarianhasspokenatseveralspecialevents,including the MML dinner and a conference on anatomy organised by Professor Brassett (see pp 55-57). Public tours of the Pepys continued until September 2024 when the building was closed; tours of the Old Library continued,generally onrequestformembersoftheCollege.
AletterfromOlaudahEquianotoPeterPeckardwaslenttothe‘RiseUp’ exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. A full-size reproduction of the Maggi Map of Rome from the Pepys Library was on display at an exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris, the exhibition entitled ‘José de Ribera(1591–1652),LoSpagnoletto’.
Old Library, Ferrar Paper 2273 letter from: Peter Peckard Olaudah Equiano to Peter Peckard, c 1789
Cataloguing and Classification
The College Library’s Reserve Stock was removed from the Pepys Building. This meant listing, packing and moving 160 boxes of some 2,000 books across College with the help of the Housekeeping and Gardeningteams. Reclassificationworkcontinuedinthecollections,this time focusing on History and Modern Languages. A completely new structure was devised for most of the History section, introducing more nuance to the scheme. This included dispersing existing homogenised
sections and moving books to newly created regional sections, split into localisedtimeperiods,makingtheshelves mucheasier tosearch.
Work continues to add records to the online Archive catalogue (which was launched last year with the Mallory archive) including the photographiccollectionandtheacademic andtutorialrecords.
The busy summer of 2024, with scholars visiting prior to the Pepys Library closure, was followed by a staff-led service to readers and enquirers from January 2025 enabling the continuation of this important partofpublic-facingwork. Eighteenreadersmadeforty-ninevisitstothe OldLibrary,twenty-eightmadefifty-fivevisitstothePepysLibrary,and 1,560 members of the public attended at regular opening times over just twomonths(1July – 31August2024). 117visitorsarrivedineleventour groups. As of 1 May, 51 separate enquiries have been made to the Archives,mostlyfromscholarsandresearchersfromoutsideCollege,but also including requests from the Maintenance Department, the Magdalene Boat Club and the editors of the Benson Diaries. In addition to seventeen readers in the Archives, numerous visits were made by the editors and publisher of the Benson Diaries in preparation for publication.
There have been many generous and illuminating donations of books as well as archival papers. Among these, Professor Hyam’s papers are an important addition to the records. We received the Diaries of Leonard Colburn from his family, and additional material from Dr Tony France about his days as a medical student; items belonging to Guy Otter from 1928to1940;andaboxpreviouslybelongingto ACBensonwhichcame tousfromarelative ofFrankSalter.
The Friends continue to meet in College. This year the annual trip was toBrampton, tothe house once ownedby Pepys’s family.
MEJHughes
Sacristan: KarenDias. Ordinand:FrAdam Bak
BeginningwiththepopularFreshers’services,theChapel’sworshipand communitycontinuedinexcellentheartthisyear. SundayandThursday Choral Evensong have been well supported; the termly Corporate Communions (including Ash Wednesday) and twice-termly candlelit Complines are sought-after student favourites; and the popular Sunday morning Holy Communion thrives, giving space for people to discover their gifts and attend to the world beyond Magdalene. Morning Prayer, for years a very quiet affair, has enjoyed a revival. The Precentor, Choir andOrganistshavebroughtexcellentand varied music weekbyweek.
EvensongpreachersweredrawnfromourownFellowshipaswell asCambridgetheologiansandministersfromarangeofdenominations. For our annual Peckard Commemoration we hosted Bishop Alastair Redfern,DirectoroftheClewerInitiativeonmodernslavery. IntheLent Term, Evensong preachers considered St Benedict’s vows, including a memorablesermonfromSisterJaneLivesey,andabroadCollegereading group explored his Rule as a way of life. The highlight of the term was the Day of Divine Offices of Prayer which proved a fascinating day of communalreflection fortheCollege.
The new icon
In September 2024 the College suffered the theft of the beautiful icon of the Mother of God of the Passion or Our Lady of Perpetual Comfort. Security was reviewed. We record our heartfelt gratitude for the exquisite replacement icon lovingly offered to the Chapel and dedicated at an ecumenical service in May. It was made by Fr Demetrios Vernezos, brother of the Greek priest Fr Nikolaos Vernezos, a beloved alumnus of this College and student of Professor Duffy, who died in the coronavirus pandemic.
Alongside the Choir’s magnificent offerings, the characteristic Advent, Christmas and Passiontide services included poetry from a rangeofauthorsincludingourRLFWritingFellow,ProfessorPadel. The Dean led a Christingle and Christmas party for Magdalene families. Midnight Communion on Christmas Eve and a chilly riverside Dawn serviceonEasterDaymarkedthesegreatFeastsoutofterm. Thealfresco worship continued with Ascension Day Choral Matins and a suitably breezy Pentecost Communion in the Fellows’ Garden. The Graduands’ service (held twice) overflowed with departing students and guests. St MaryMagdalenewascommemoratedon22July. TheChapelhostedthe important annual College occasions of the Act of Remembrance in November,andtheCommemorationofBenefactorsonWhitsun. Alumni ReunionshavecontinuedtobeginwithashortserviceinChapel. InJuly, we welcomed the primary school choir of St John’s Walham Green, Fulhamand filled theChapelwithyoung voices singingEvensong.
In the Lent Term, Rowan Williams returned to conduct an inspiring service of Baptism and Confirmation for ten candidates from the JCR and MCR, as well as one Reception into the Church of England. A further Finalist was baptised on Trinity Sunday. The Chapel held one marriage blessing, one Church of England wedding and one Roman Catholic convalidation over the summer. There were no funerals or memorials.
The Chapel and the multi-faith prayer room have been well-used, day and night. The Dean’s support for all faiths has included a College visittothenewCambridgecentralmosque. FisherHouseheldaCatholic Mass in Chapel in October. The student-run C S Lewis Society gathered students of many disciplines and opinions. The Dean led forty students ofmany beliefs ona pilgrimageto thesourceoftheCam inMayweek. Collections were taken for Whitworth House, the Mulala Fund, Safe Passage, Christian Aid’s Myanmar appeal, and, at the Commemorationof Benefactors,theCollege StudentHardshipFund.
SAtkins
ChoirReport
Organ Scholars: JayZheng,AliceSmith
At the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, high turnover resulted in many new faces joining the Choir. The customary Matriculation
Service took place in Freshers’ Week, the Choir then embarking on its usual pattern of twice-weekly services of Choral Evensong, as well as twice-termly Sung Compline and Corporate Communion. After the ever-popular Advent and Christmas Carol Services (the latter held in St Giles’),theChoirtravelledtoLondontogiveaCarolConcertforCollege alumni and guests in the beautiful surroundings of the Church of the Annunciation,MarbleArch.
ThefirsteventintheNewYearwasajointChoralEvensong,sung with the Imperial College Chamber Choir, and their director Patrick Allies, in Holy Trinity Church, Prince Consort Road, London. The Lent Term proper also included events introducing new repertoire and experiences to the Choir. Towards the beginning of term, the Choir was joined in St Giles’ by local chamber choir New Cambridge Singers for a service commemorating Candlemas. A theme of the services in College Chapel was contemplation of the College’s Benedictine origins. As part of this, the Choir offered the Daily Office, singing six monastic offices to Latin plainchant, one every three hours, beginning with Lauds at 6am and concluding with Compline at 9.30pm. The offices gave an insight intotherhythmof lifeenjoyedbytheformer inhabitantsofoursite.
For the celebrations surrounding Samuel Pepys’s birthday, the Choir made a feature of music by Dr William Childe, a Restoration-era composer whose meeting with Pepys is recorded in the Diary. For the ‘entertainment’followingthePepysDinner,theChoir pursuedthetheme of‘PepysandtheSea’includingseveralseashantieswhichpromptedthe enthusiastic participation of the Hall. The term concluded with a performance of Pergolesi’s Lenten classic Stabat mater, with professional baroque instrumentalists alongside our own Organ Scholars and membersoftheChoirprovidingstep-out soloists.
In early April, the Choir toured to Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the capital of the Transylvania region, where members were hosted generously by a local choir, Visszhang kórus. The two choirs sang separately and together, in concerts in Cluj and nearby Alba Iulia, and were conducted both by the Precentor and Dr Botond Molnár of BabeșBolyai University. The College Choir also sang for mass in St Michael’s Church, Cluj-Napoca, visited a local salt mine, and was treated to a guidedtourofthecity. TheChoirrelishedtheopportunitytolearnabout and sing alongside the members of the Transylvanian choir, in a celebration ofmusicalandculturalexchange.
The Choir performing in St Michael's Church, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 3 April 2025.
(Photo: Vakarcs Lóránd)
At the kind invitation of Honorary Fellow and former Dean of Chapel, Dr David Hoyle, the Choir enjoyed the privilege of singing Choral Evensong in Westminster Abbey in late April, followed by an alumni reception in the Abbey Cloisters. This event allowed current members of the Choir to mix with Choir alumni and others, and to sing inone of thecountry’smostfamiliarsacredspaces.
Highlights of the Easter Term included a service commemorating the centenary of A C Benson, complete with a performance of Land of Hope and Glory, his famous ode set to music by Edward Elgar. Outdoor Choral Matins in the Fellows’ Garden celebrated Ascension Day, followedintheeveningbyChoralEvensong,theCrippsandSupervisors’ Dinner, and a well-received recital of madrigals and songs. Despite the examinationperiod,musicalofferingsinChapelcontinuedstrongly,and theCommemorationofCollegeBenefactorsincludedtheperformanceof a Te Deum byHonoraryFellowBenjamin Britten.
Dirtydays hathSeptember April,JuneandNovember; FromJanuaryup to May Therain itrainetheveryday. All theresthave thirty-one Without ablessedgleamofsun; Andifanyof themhadtwo-and-thirty They'dbe just aswet andtwiceas dirty.
‘The Clerk of the Weather’, first published in the Dublin [Evening] Mail and reprinted in ‘Varieties’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, January 10, 1873
Sadlyforus,theclerk’spredictionofraineverydayfromJanuarytoMay wasmostcertainlynottruethisyear. BeforeJuly,thelasttwoconsecutive daysofrainfalloccurredinmid-February. Thislackofrainfallcombined with high temperatures has led to a very difficult year so far, with hosepipesonovertimetopreservethisseason’splantings. Whatrainhas fallenhasoftencomeinshort,sharpdownpoursandrunsoffthealready desiccatedsoil. ManyofthelawnswereparchedbyMayandwerestrawlike by June. I fear that this is the way of things to come, and our styles of gardening will need to adapt in future years in order to cope. The rainfall figures below illustrate the sixth driest Spring on record since 1836.
January 27.7mm
February 22.0mm
March 8.0mm
April 22.7mm
May 21.5mm
June 18.0mm
(https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/weather/index-period-text.html)
Asoftenoccurswithextremesofweather,somethingssufferwhile others take advantage. The wallflowers, in First Court, performed particularly well this spring, as did the numerous cherries we now have inCollege.
Unfortunately, we have also had several occurrences of the phenomenonknownas‘summerbranchdrop’. Occasionally,apparently
healthy and stable trees shed large limbs during the summer for no obvious reason. This appears to be associated with certain weather patterns, but the inter-relationship of factors is not fully understood. As ‘summer branch drop’ is believed to be associated with calm weather conditions following a heavy rain shower which terminates a period of increasing soil dryness, the trigger may be water stress; this is known to cause cracks in conifer stems and may be responsible for producing an analogouscondition inbroadleavedtrees.
During early summer, the weight of fresh foliage and new shoots, combined with the weight of developing fruits, may be increased so much by surface water following a rain shower that branch fracture results. Incipient decay may also reduce the strength of the wood and could account for the short fracture sometimes recorded. In College, we have lost several large limbs from the mulberry in the Fellows’ Garden, aswellasadecentsizedbranchfrom the ashinBuckingham Court.
The bedding scheme this summer comprises purples, pink and blue. We have used lobelia and the cute little Brachyschome daisy interspersed with salvia ‘Purple n’ Bloom’ and salvia ‘Big Blue’ which shouldflower well intothe autumn.
The herbaceous border in Second Court, planted in December2023,hasestablished nicely and looked very fine indeed for General Admission. The opposite border will be replanted in winter 2026 after the restoration of the Pepys Building has been completed. As I write, scaffolding is being erected at great pace and with River Court closed for the duration of the building work, the Gardens Department is feeling particularly hemmed in atpresent.
In the Scholars’ Garden, Sam has managed to produce a bumper crop of Tay berries, currants and, in particular, strawberries of which he isrightfullyproud.
The team spent much of late winter and spring re-establishing the riverbank planting and lawns through the Fellows’ Garden and down into the Scholars Garden. Dozens of tonnes of soil were moved by the barrowful to regrade the ground, and several hundred square metres of sward were regenerated. Several genera of ornamental grasses were planted. These include Miscanthus gracillimus, Miscanthus giganteus, Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foester’, Arundo donax ‘Macrophylla’ and the stalwart golden oat Celtica gigantea formerly known as Stipa. These were selected to add height, movement and autumn colour. We look forwardto themestablishingover thecoming seasons.
This year has seen a wide variety of visitors to the garden, some more desirable than others. Rabbits appeared in February, both in the Scholars’ Garden and in the Master’s Garden setting up residence under thecornerofChapel. ThiscreatedmuchexcitementforHattietheSpaniel who spent many an hour waiting and chasing. Our favourite visitors have been a family of foxes that established a home on Monks’ Walk in spring. AlthoughIhaveseentheoddsolitaryfoxovertheyearswehave never, to my knowledge, had a den before. The foxes were seen especially in the morning and at dusk and seemed particularly to enjoy basking inthe long grass.
Vulpine appreciation ofmodernartanda proclivityfortheft were also evident. Gloves seemed a favourite, especially builders gloves. Undergraduate wallets and purses were also fair game, as a member of theMay BallCommitteefoundoutto hercost.
MarkScott
Vulpes vulpes admiring Nigel Hall’s ‘Zephyr’ in the Fellows’ Garden. Perhaps a case of garden karma in a May Ball year…
(Photos: Mark Scott)
In the Academic Office, Tess Bottomley was appointed Schools Liaison Office, with Natalie Thompson as Widening Participation Officer; Lucy Hartley resigned after maternity leave; her cover, Jo Woodman, was appointed as Undergraduate Admissions Officer; and Angie Jewell served as Academic Registrar until Cei Whitehouse returned from parental leave. There were several retirements and leavers from the Porters’Lodge:Paul White, KeithFuller,IanPrice,AnnaBellis-Kennedy and Steve McHugh (who remains as a relief porter). Ben Ennion-Smith joined as Senior Porter together with new porters Victor Mangas, Makenzie Reed, Adam Beggs, Monika Zadura and David Salter. Barry Graves, College Electrician, retired, Abdul Basit Kahn moved to the College Office, and Natalie Prytherch became HR Coordinator. The College welcomed Su Nwe as President’s PA following Ishbel Bruce’s departure. In the Development Office, Talulah Thomas was appointed Communications Graduate Trainee, Yi Wu succeeded Richard Morgan as Database Officer, and Owen Brown was appointed as Development Officer (Regular Giving). In the Buttery, Karolina Wiffin (née Chalecka) and Elena Ionescu took maternity leave, Elena and her partner George (from the College kitchen) then returning to Romania. Karolina Skiba wasappointedasDeputyButteryManagercoveringmaternityleave,and JackStearngainedpermanencyontheButteryteam. TheCollegebadea sadgoodbyetoArinaVotinseva,stalwartofboththeButteryandBarfor many years. Peter Fabian, Jorge Luis Gomez Sobrino and Jacek Barczak joined the College catering team and Antonio Galata made a welcome return. The Conference team welcomed Charlotte Davis, and Kasia Niesterczuk was promoted to Housekeeping Manager and Kay HardinghamtoSeniorSupervisor. Joiningthehousekeepingteamwere: Malgorzata Czarnecka, Oliwia Nijak, Petya Gramatikova, Joao Da Costa LuzandVanyaPetkova,replacingDaisyRippingale,AndrewCarterand Klaudia Nijak. Dominika Marcinkowska (Deputy Buttery Supervisor) wasawarded theannualstaffachievementaward.
Withgreatsadness,theCollegereceivednewsofthedeathofPeter Fulton, long-time College Porter. Always cheerful and ever helpful, he will be remembered for his kindness and his ready humour, his can-do approachto life, and hiswillingness tosee thebestinpeople.
CHLFoord
MCR/SCRSEMINARS AND PARLOUR TALKS.
Hosts:DrBaez-Ortega,Brittany Muffet, UrsulaHall andDiarmidXu
October 2024:
MicahHyman,PhDstudentinHistoryofPhilosophyofScience,Darwin College, ‘Opening the Box of Chocolates: a Chocolate History and Tasting’
SirJohnDaniel,firstVice-ChancelloroftheOpenUniversity,‘Reflections ofaRoamingScholar’
November 2024:
Robert Tibbo, former legal representative of Edward Snowden, ‘HighRisk Human Rights Work and International Protections for Refugees, AsylumSeekersand PoliticalDissidents’
February 2025:
ProfessorAndrewBricker,andDrSophieScott-Brown,VisitingFellows, ‘The History of Satire, Visual Humour and Defamation Law in Britain, EuropeandAmerica’
Professor Simon Schaffer, Emeritus Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, ‘The Politics of Proxies: Climate Science and TalkativeTree Rings’
June 2025:
Professor Andrea Zifferero, Visiting Fellow, ‘Archaeology of the Grapevine andWine Production inEtruria’
Spatika Jayaram, PhD student in Neurosciences, ‘To Text or Not to Text –TheSocialBrainof Today’
THE LEANBODY PROJECT. From October 2021 to December 2024, Professor Brassett served as consultant to an EU-funded Erasmus+ project,thebrainchildofAssociateProfessorAndrásNagy,ananatomist at the University of Pécs, Hungary. He had participated in anatomy teaching sessions when he was a Marie-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, 2014-16. Under the title ‘LEAN in Medical Education: Reaching for Quality Management Tools to Teach Human Anatomy Effectively in a Multicultural and Multilingual LearningSpace’,the proposalwasranked firstamongalltheEU-funded
Erasmus+ projects in Hungary. Dr Nagy had conceived the idea for this projectaftertheWorldFederationforMedicalEducationhadintroduced anaccreditationprocessforinstitutionsprovidingamedicaleducationin English,whichincludes manyCentralEuropeanmedicalschools.
Over the past three years, workshops, seminars and conferences tookplaceinCambridge,Brno,Pécs,andZagreb,whereparticipantshad opportunities to visit one another‘s departments and observe how teaching and assessments were conducted. The project partners were staff teams from three Central European medical schools: University of Pécs, Hungary (led by Dr Nagy), Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic (led by Professor Marek Joukal), and the University of Zagreb, Croatia (led by Associate Professor Ana Hladnik). The Cambridge workshop was hosted at Cripps Court, Magdalene in August 2022, with the additional highlight of a talk and tour of the Pepys Library by Dr Hugheswithselectedanatomicalandmedical bookson display
A needs analysis comprising the results of a survey among anatomistsinHungary,theCzechRepublic,andCroatiahadshownthat, despite their long and excellent teaching traditions, many anatomists in Central Europe did not have a good knowledge of the international quality standards of medical education. They were also unfamiliar with concepts such as student-centred pedagogy, assessing the development of professionalism, and mental health management. Dr Nagy therefore invited Dr Amani Eltayb and other educational developers from the Karolinska Institutet to provide training in medical pedagogy to enable the alignment of Central European anatomy teaching with global educational sustainability goals. The project was divided into five topic areas: global standards in medical education, professional behavioural values and attitudes, teaching traditions in human anatomy, studentcentred pedagogy, and management of mental health. Regular online meetings were also conducted where feedback and new ideas were discussed. Multiplier events were held to share project results with a wider audience beyond the immediate project partners, aiming to disseminate project outputs, promote best practices, and encourage collaborationandnetworking.
During Professor Brassett‘s visits to the anatomy departments of the project partners, she was struck by the similarities between practices and especially pleased to see the clear recognition of the importance of hands-oncadavericdissection,aswellastheeffortsbeingmadetoretain
this way of learning despite the financial implications. She reported positively on how body donors were respected by both staff and students, and how bodydonationprogrammes wereestablishedin their countries. The use of demonstrators to teach small groups of students was also similar, as well as the involvement of clinicians in helping students apply their anatomical knowledge to clinical situations. The ability to develop and form good personal relationships with counterparts over a long period of time through both online and inperson meetings proved invaluable to the exchange of ideas and fostering of future collaborations. Those who find difficulty in simply managing to use one language can also only be full of admiration for those who teach different classes in their native tongue, English, and oftenathirdlanguage.
Details of the outcomes of the project and continuing challenges areavailableon: https://projects.pte.hu/en/leanbody/project
‘LEADERS AND LUNATICS’ (31 January 2025). BBC World Affairs Editor and Honorary Fellow, John Simpson CBE (1963), offered an evening of memoriesbyoneofthemostdistinguishedforeigncorrespondentsofour time. The packed audience in the West Road Concert Hall heard accounts of encounters with enigmatic figures such as Putin, Xi Jinping, bin-Laden and Thatcher, but also first-hand descriptions of major conflicts, war and famines, and the consequences of climate change. A question and answer brought out further fascinating recollections of life asareporterunder bombingandconstant danger(includinga terrifying account of how lots were drawn by the mujaheddin on whether to executehim – asbin-Ladenrequested). MrSimpsongenerouslydonated profits from this powerful and entertaining event to the Pepys RestorationProject.
A C BENSON DIARY CENTENARY LECTURE (12 March 2025). Professor Duffydeliveredanillustratedlecture toa packedaudienceintheCripps Auditorium (with a very large number attending by live-stream). The lecturecelebratedthepublicationofthetwovolumesofthe Benson Diary edited by Professor Duffy and Professor Hyam, with a reception held in the accompanying exhibition in the Cripps Gallery (p 63); see pp 83-92 forextractsfrom the lecture.
BENSONDIARYLAUNCHPARTIES (15and28June2025). Nearlyfiftyguests andmorethanfortysubscriberstothe BensonDiary attendedtheSunday 15 June book launch at Treemans, West Sussex, one-time home (as Tremans)oftheBensonfamilyandcurrenthomeofKatieDerham(1988) Honorary Fellow and her husband John Vincent who most generously hostedthe event. Afteradelightful teaonagloriouslysunny afternoon, the Diary was launched with a talk about its compilation and editing by Professor Duffy, introduced by the President, and with the publisher Alexander Fyjis-Walker and members of Pallas Athene, the College Development team and many Fellows and friends of the College welcomingthislandmarkpublicationanditsfirstappearanceinthemost appropriate of venues. The in-house launch of the Diary followed on Saturday 28 June in the Master’s Garden, with further speeches and celebrations.
party
SIR GRAYSON PERRY’S TALK (3 July 2025), was an illustrated lecture in the Cripps Auditorium to launch the Robert Cripps Gallery exhibition ‘Throes of the ModernistDream: Prints by Rachel Whiteread, Grayson
Perry and Sarah Morris from the Paragon Press'. Introduced by Mr Calvocoressi (2023, Fellow Commoner), Sir Grayson informed and entertained a capacity audience with a witty, engaging and free-flowing talkaboutthe many waysinwhichhehaspursuedprint-makingduring his career. After a fascinating question-and-answer session, he joined audience membersat a PrivateView in theGallery.
October–December 2024: Nigel Hall RA, ‘Line, Edge, Shadow: Drawings and Sculpture’ showcased his intricate drawings and small-scale sculptures. Knownfor abstractandgeometricsculpturesinCortensteel, painted steel and bronze, Hall’s art plays with three-dimensional space, massand line, andrevealsadeepengagementwithformandlight.
‘Drawing 1932’ 2022, Charcoal and Acrylic (by kind permission of the artist)
January–March 2025: EbuEstandar,‘DreamsoftheSoul:Paintings,Prints and Textiles’. Ebu Estandar hails from Namasia, an Aboriginal village nestled in the mountains of Taiwan. Drawing on her experiences, emotions, memories and inspirations from her homeland, Mexico and Britain, her shifting surroundings shape an artistic journey of unique perspective. Inoiloncanvas andinexplorationsinothermediums,Ebu’s exhibitions in the three countries reflect the diversity and uniqueness of herlifeand work.
‘Midday at Namasia,’ 2024, Acrylic (by kind permission of the artist)
March 2025:‘ArthurChristopherBenson, Diarist: ACentenary Exhibition’.
From 1885 to 1903 Benson taught at Eton. This cartoon by 'Spy' (the artist Leslie Ward (1851-1922)), entitled ‘Fasti Etonenses’, appeared in Vanity Fair in June 1903.
Arthur Christopher Benson, son of Archbishop Edward White Benson and his remarkable wife Minnie Sidgwick, was a Fellow of Magdalene from 1904, President from 1912, and the College’s Master from 1915. At his death in 1925, his diary, begun in 1897, comprised 180 volumes and almost five million words. Opened by a lecture by Professor Duffy, editorwithProfessorHyamoftheneweditionofthediary,theexhibition illuminatedBenson’slife,theEdwardianliteraryscene,andtheacademic worldbefore,during andin theaftermath oftheFirstWorldWar.
July – August 2025: ‘Throes of the Modernist Dream: Prints by Rachel Whiteread, Grayson Perry and Sarah Morris from the Paragon Press’. This exhibition featured prints by three renowned contemporary artists published by Paragon Press: Rachel Whiteread (Honorary Fellow), Sir Grayson Perry and Sarah Morris. Connected by their portrayal of modernity and the consequences of the modernist dream, Whiteread’s Demolished commemorates cycles of urban development and decay, Perry’s The American Dream presents the crises of the global present, and Morris’s brightly geometric Department of Power and Water speaks to our synthetic,complex, mechanical world.
A small group of sculptures by Whiteread and ephemera from Perrywerealsodisplayed.
Rachel Whiteread: ‘Demolished, Aiii,’ 1996, Screenprint. @ Rachel Whiteread and Paragon | Contemporary Editions Ltd
Grayson Perry: ‘Sponsored by You,’ 2019. Colour etching.
@ Grayson Perry and Paragon | Contemporary Editions Ltd
Sarah Morris: ‘Bye Bye Brazil, Academia Militar,’ 2014. Digital inkjet print.
@Sarah Morris and Paragon | Contemporary Editions Ltd
On21September2024,a10th,25thand50thAnniversaryReunionDinner washeldfor2014,1999and1974 matriculants. 130peopleattended,and the after-dinner speech was given by the Master (1973). On 22 March 2025 a Reunion Dinner was held for 1982-1984 matriculants. 64 people attended and the after-dinner speech was given by Professor Timothy Leighton (1982, and Honorary Fellow). On 5 April 2025 matriculants from 2018 returned to the College to receive their MA Cantab and attend their MA Reunion Dinner. 80 people attended, and the after-dinner speech was given by the Master. On 17 May the College hosted a Reunion Lunch for those who matriculated in the years up to, and including, 1966. 54 people attended, and the toast was proposed by the Master.
JJAdams(1983):PrimeWardenof theWorshipfulCompany of Basketmakers
CBourne(2017): launchofdebut album Triquetra
EFConnell(2019):PeterLipton Prize 2024(DeptofHistoryand Philosophy ofSciences
TheRtHonTEggar(1970):CBEforServicestoEnergy
LordGrossman(2008):MasteroftheWorshipfulCompanyofCarpenters (2024–25)
GHart(2018): Royal Commission Fellowshipat theUniversity of Warwick
HHyland(2023):winnerofUniversityof Cambridge‘Take it tothe Bridge’popularmusiccompetition(in backingband)
LLei(2023): member ofthegold medal winningteamatthe2024iGem GrandJamboree
ILuke(2022): winner ofUniversityofCambridge‘Take it tothe Bridge’ popularmusiccompetition
DrGJNicholls(1988):ExecutiveMedical DirectoratJustice Healthand ForensicMentalHealth NetworkNSW
MajorGeneralMAJMcHOverton(1993):CompanionoftheOrderofthe Bath(CB)
DrNPapadogiannis (2006):FutureLeaders Fellowship
DrBSolaiman(2016):ScienceandSustainabilityAwardinQataratStudy
UK AlumniAwards2025
DWalker (2022):Oxfordand Cambridge ClubMusic Prize
ProfK Wang(2006): £5000kgrantforresearchintosinglecelled organisms
*MAbbott(1981): Greek Myths Retold in Myrthful Verse (2024)
DrMBotcharova(2005): TheCambridgeGreen:AStudent’sStory (2025)
*DrDFBur(1985): Peace, Order and Good Government: The Abuse of a Tricolon (2024); Law of the Constitution: The Distribution of Powers, 2ndedn(2024); Laws of the Constitution: Consolidated (2023)
DrKPConnelly(1965): A Lass Unparalleled: A Portrait of Susan Fleetwood (2025)
*EFeuchtwanger (1944)andACox: Kinderbriefe aus dem Exil: Edgar Feuchtwanger in England 1939 (2024)
*WFraser (1995): Cloister (2025)
SirRupert Gavin(1972): Amorous or Loving? The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English (2025)
*CHague(1963): Cup Finals: The Greatest Football Stories Ever Told (2025); withRRodger, Campaigning for Edinburgh: The Cockburn Association 1875-2049 (2025)
*DrGHarper(1963): Biosphere Crisis: The Condorcet-Mill-Vernadsky Solution (2024)
*JHone(JuniorResearchFellow,2016–19): The Paper Chase: The Printer, theSpymaster, and theHunt for Rebel Pamphleteers (2020); The BookForger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the World (2024)
RevdDrRMacSwain(former YipFellow): Essays Anglican and Analytic Explorations in Critical Catholicism (2025)
MTO’Hara(1988): Austerity Bites: 10 Years On (2024)
*BStaveley(1974): The Language of Contract (2024)
*GWaller (1966): Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque (2024)
*MWheeler (1967): William Ewart Gladstone: The Heart and Soul of a Statesman (2025)
*TWright: SpeedMonarch:TheShortLifeofEricFernihoughandtheWorld’s Motorcycle Speed Record (2024) [EFernihough(1923)]
*We are grateful to these authors for presenting copies of their works to the College Library
4. MEMBERS’ DEATHS (reportedto mid-July 2025)
T P Bannon (1945); Prof R Goldsmith (1946); B H Sandelson (1946); D E Ayres (1949); N A Kirke (1949); Sir John Anson KCB (1950); J Gloag (1950);SirColinRCorness(1951)*;NJRJames,(1951);MKSwales(1951); Dr P Weston (1951); H G Cholmondeley, Baron Delamere (1952); M J le Fleming (1952); A J Redman (1955); P D Pedley (1962); The Revd Canon P Hobson (1953); A E Buxton (1954); L H Lapham (1956); G W S Barry (1955); Prof D Harris (1955); J White (1955); P H Burns (1956); T H Smith (1956); Dr J Waller (1957); W P G Burges (1958); Prof M L H L Weaver (1958); G H Butler (1959); N G Gambier (1959); R Harcourt (1959); Dr T W Liardet (1959); Dr J M Waller (1959); G Weaver (1959); C J T Nangle (1962); Dr F A Kirk (1953); Sir P C Norriss (1963); C F Robinson (1963); The Revd J R Turpin (1963); T D Llewellyn (1966); E W Gretton (1967); P G R Howarth (1971); J M Miles (1973); R F Perrin (1973); R L Stratford (1973); Brigadier A C Mantell, OBE (1975); P J Carr (1976); R W WadeSmith(1977);RLEBiggs(1979);DERowe(1980);TJWeaver(1980);DS Parrack(1987);R A MCranswick(1993); DrCJDVMeiring(2010)
*There will be an obituary of Sir Colin Corness in the next College Magazine.
Emeritus Professor Michael Loraine Herbert Laity Weaver (28 March 1937–24 June 2024), Bye-Fellow 1964–65. Mike Weaver,borninPenzanceandeducated at Truro School, came to Magdalene in 1958 and took first-class honours in both Parts of the English Tripos. After commencing his postgraduate studies, he was elected to a Donaldson ByeFellowship in 1964 and a year later accepted a Fellowship at the American Council of Learned Societies at Yale. Between 1966 and 1970 he co-edited Form: A Magazine of the Arts, while his doctoral research, completed in 1969, concerned the poetry of William Carlos Williams, his study of Williams appearingwithCambridgeUniversity Press in1971. Forthirtyyears,he lectured in American literature at the University of Exeter where he
founded the Department of American and Commonwealth Arts, and then from 1978 at the University of Oxford as Reader and Professorial FellowatLinacreCollege.includingtenyearswhenhewasVisitingTutor inFilmat theRoyal College ofArt inLondon.
Mike was best known, however, for his pioneering research and publications in the history of photography. His work established photography as a serious form of art whose interpretation required an appreciation of both its aesthetic and intellectual content. Pioneering contributions include his essay about the practice of Ansel Adams in CreativeCamera in 1975andhisground-breaking workon Julia Margaret Cameron published in an exhibition catalogue in 1984. Successive publications ranged from studies of Talbot, Cameron and Coburn to thoseofStrandandMapplethorpe. OfCameron,hearguedthatherwork reproduced‘types’thatcorrespondedtofiguresfromtheBible,suchthat Arthur and his Knights inhabit a kind of parallel universe to the biblical one. He repeatedthismodeofinterpretation inanessayabout thework of Roger Fenton in a 1989 anthology he edited, British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition. Other books include The PhotographicArt: Pictorial Traditions in Britain andAmerica (1986), TheArt of Photography 1839-1989 (1989), a book about Alvin Langdon Coburn, and an anthology of texts by and about William Henry Fox Talbot, presentinghimas an artistas muchas ascientistand inventor.
From1978to1983,MikechairedthePhotographyAdvisoryGroup of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and from 1991 to 2000, with his partner Anne Hammond, co-edited the journal History of Photography. They brought the journal from the USA to Britain where it still resides, and through will and devotion, established it as the go-to source for the studyof photographichistory,
MikewasVisitingDonaldCGallupFellowinAmericanLiterature attheBeineckeRare BooksLibrary,Yale, 2012–13,anddespitehisclaims to the contrary, was also a photographer in his own right. He andAnne made photographs together, with several in the collections of the PrincetonUniversityArtMuseumandtheLosAngelesCountyMuseum ofArt.
Jack Vettriano, (17 November 1931 – 3 March 2025)HonoraryMember2003,wasbornJack Hoggan in St Andrews, Fife. The son of a miner, he worked in the pits from the age of fourteen and before that in a series of sales jobs. Hislifechangedwhenagirlfriendgave him a box of paints for his twenty-first birthday. Self-taught(theEdinburghSchool of Art rejected him), he continued painting while building a part-Bahraini property business. By the 1980s buyers of his paintings of elegant couples and romantic scenes hugely outnumbered his many detractors. An astute marketeer, he described his art as ’strictly for voyeurs’. Appointed OBE in 2003, his New York exhibition proved a ticketed sell-out, and his 2008 portraitofZara Phillipstriggered further high-profilecommissions.
Sir John Anson KCB (3 August 1930–11 November 2024), the younger son of Sir Edward Reynell Anson, 6th Baronet and his wife Frances, was educated at Winchester CollegeandmatriculatedatMagdalenein1950 where he read Mathematics and won the University’s distinguished Smith’s Prize. He joined the Treasury in 1954 and became Financial Counsellor at the British Embassy in Paris, 1968–70. Assistant Secretary and then and Under-Secretary to the Cabinet Office, 1971–74, before moving back to the Treasury as Under-Secretary, 1974–77, Deputy Secretary, 1977–87, and Second Permanent Secretary (Public Expenditure), 1987–90. He served as Treasury Delegate and Economics Minister at the British EmbassyinWashingtonandasUKExecutiveDirectorattheIMFandthe World Bank, 1980–83. He chaired the Public Finance Foundation, 1991–94,andtheRetirementIncomeInquiry,1994–96.JohnwasalsoHonorary Treasurer of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, 1990–92, andChairoftheHouseofLaity,SouthwarkDiocesanSynod,1996–97.He wasappointedCB(1981)and KCB(1990).
HughGeorgeCholmondeley (18 January 1934 – 7 October 2024) 5th Baron Delamere, presided over a family described by The Spectator as‘theKennedysofKenya’,partly because of its wealth and glamour but also because of a proclivity to scandal. Hugh arrived at Magdalene from Eton to read Agriculture in 1952. His graduation year was clouded by publicity over his father's third marriage to a celebrated socialite whose affairs when married to her second husbandhadbeencomplicatedbyhistrialforthemurderofherfavourite lover (her husband was acquitted but then shot himself). In 1979, Hugh succeeded his father to the remaining but very substantial part of the 200,000 acres acquired by his grandfather at Soysambu on Lake Elmenteita. Althoughtestedinhisrelationshipwithhisstepmother(who hadestablishedat Soysambu a ménageàtrois withHugh’sfatherandher lesbian lover), Hugh and his wife Anne lived a quieter life with noted paintings on the walls, including a Brueghel (albeit ruined by an aunt who added extra snowballs to the scene), a twenty-strong staff for the house alone, and, his pride and joy, a gigantic model railway which he built himself and operated wearing his station-master’s hat. Hugh grew tea and coffee, farmed 15,000 head of cattle, and turned 48,000 acres into awildlifeconservatory. Heattemptedtoattracttouristsdespitehisfruity languageandimaginativelynon-PCviews. Whenbannedbythedistrict commissioner from shooting zebra, he complained: ‘It's ridiculous. Of course, what I should have done is shoot the district commissioner but that's bloody illegal too’. His later years were overshadowed by two trials for murder by his son and heir (who predeceased him) and which reawakened resentment over large colonial landholdings, but he remained committed to Kenya where he proved a noted supporter of localschools. Besides,hesaid.‘therearenobuffalotoshootinEngland’.
Professor Rainer Goldsmith (25 December 1927 – 28 October 2024) was born Rainer Goldschmidt in Leipzig, Germany, to Jewish parents, his family fleeing to England in the autumn of 1933. Educated at Charterhouse, he arrived at Magdalene to read Medical Sciences in 1946, qualifying asadoctoratStBartholomew’s Medical School before completing NationalService. In1955,havingtravelled to Australia as a ship’s doctor, Rainer answered an advertisement in The Times to be doctor, dentist and veterinarian to Sir Vivian Fuchs's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. This completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica as attempted by Shackleton in 1914–17. After their ship, the Theron, broke uptheseaiceupon whichtheirstoreshadbeenunloaded,theylosttheir prefabricated hut and had to live by day in a Ferguson tractor crate (9 x 9 x 8 feet) and by night in tents in temperatures as low as -52°C. Fuchs said that ‘apart from Scott’s marooned northern party, theirs was the mostsevereordealinthehistoryofAntarcticexploration’. WithKenneth Blaiklock, Rainer became the first to survey what became the Theron Mountains where a glacier was named after him. In 1958, he was awarded the Polar Medal by Queen Elizabeth and joined the Medical ResearchCounciltoinvestigate(inresearchwhichstillunderpinscurrent understanding) the challenges of heat and cold stress to human physiology. His fascination for the Antarctic continued in further expeditionsin1960-61with OperationDeepFreeze Vtoisolate thevirus of the common cold, and in 1980 with the International Biomedical Expedition. He helped establish Nottingham University’s Medical School, the first purpose-built teaching hospital in the country, and, as ProfessorofPhysiologyatChelseaCollege,he ledseminarsdescribedas ‘challenging’ and ‘exhilarating’. Rainer was known as a man of strong opinionswithagreat readinesstosharethem.
RogerHarcourt (26July1939 – 11February2025), a celebrated headteacher who led an extraordinary Shakespeare camp for fifty-five years, was born in Enfield from where a scholarshiptothePerseSchool,Cambridge,led himtoreadEnglishatMagdalenein1959. After a further degree at Reading University, he taught English at Glyn Grammar School in Epsom, before becoming Head of English at Gateway School, Leicester, and Deputy Head at Raynes Park High School. In 1974, he took up the Headship of Ward Freman Comprehensive School in Buntingford, described as ‘the worst school in Hertfordshire’, but where, for thirty years, he taught Gerard Manley Hopkins and T S Eliot even to those in the lowest academic sets. He put on ambitious performances of Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen and Shakespeare from his classroom theatre, the Arden Room. The school became renowned for its productions, but it was Roger’s Shakespeare camp, started in the 1970s and continuing to 2024, that confirmed his reputation. The camp brought hundreds of students to a field outside Stratford-upon-AvontowatchRSCproductions,engageinseminarsand stagestreettheatre. TheBritishShakespeareAssociationawardedRoger anhonoraryfellowshipin2018,theRiversidecampsiteallowedhistents there long after it had become a caravan park, and the staff at the RSC awarded him his own seat in the Swan theatre, acknowledging that no other theatregoer was likely to have seen more RSC performances in the last half-century. In retirement, he rediscovered Dickens, regularly recreating original performances in the church at Strethall near Saffron Walden.
Revd Canon Patrick John Bogan Hobson (15 August 1933 – 29 September 2024) arrived at Magdalene to read Law in 1953, aged 20 and with an MC following recent National Service in the Korean War. Born at Kingston-uponThames, he was educated at Tiffin Boys’ Grammar School and reported for officer training in March 1952. Commissioned into the King’s Regiment (Liverpool), he was
deployed as a platoon commander in Korea in the 29th Infantry Brigade Group where he held an isolated position under Chinese bombardment by the River Imjin. His operational MC recognised this stand and his leadingreconnaissanceandfightingpatrols. Duringoneofthese,helost an eye. After graduating from Magdalene, Patrick joined the Colonial Service and served for three years in Tanzania (then Tanganyika), before working for ICI and GKN in personnel management. In 1971, he was licensed as a lay reader before studying for the priesthood on the Southwark Ordination Course and at Queen’s College, Birmingham. In 1980,hewasordaineddeaconandservedasacurateinWorcesterandas rector of the rural parishes of Clifton upon Teme, Lower Sapey and the Shelseys. Asa team rector at WalthamAbbey,Essex,heraisedfundsfor orphans in the Balkans and was awarded the freedom of the town. As a canon emeritus of Chelmsford Cathedral, he retired to Oxford in 1995 where he took a degree in history of art at Oxford Brookes. He played thetromboneandFrenchhorn,hadafinesingingvoice,andenjoyedflyfishing on the River Dovey in Gwynedd, where he and his wife had a holidayhome. Hisson,Andrew,matriculatedatMagdalenein1981,also readingLaw.
Norman Alec Kirke (4 June 1929 – 1 November 2024). The son of Alec Robert Kirke, a district insurance manager, Norman remained a proud Scot throughout his life, even though he was born in Isleworth, brought up in Osterley, Middlesex, and attended ColetCourtPreparatoryandStPaul’s School, London. Having completed eighteen months’ National Service with the Royal West African Frontier Force, and with his place at Magdalene secure, the College’s Senior Tutor and classicist, Francis Scott, ensured Norman’s release from a further six months with the army in Nigeria to enable his arrival at Magdaleneintheautumnof1949. As
Norman Kirke's preferences on his application form, 1948
the nineteen-year-old wrote to Scott, ‘I can only ask you to do your best to bail me out’. With an Open Exhibition, a £69 annual grant from the Ministry of Education, and Francis Turner as his tutor, Norman read HistoryinPart1andthenchangedtoLawinPartII. Despite,inhisown estimation, a modest result in both subjects (and where his tutor had to plead‘incuria’forhavingtaughthimapapernotexaminedthatyear),he pursued further legal study and then secured a place to read for the Bar in 1954. Thereafter, his entire career was spent in the commercial sector, most notably in the distilleries of his ancestral homeland (in his original application form to Magdalene, he had expressed a possible preference for Economics). In 1986 Norman was appointed OBE for services to the Scotch whisky industry. Together with his beloved wife, Pamela (who predeceased him by some years), he was a passionate rugby supporter, remembered his Magdalena days with great affection and avidly followed College news and events, even as he combatted deteriorating health in recent years. He has left the College a most generous multimillion-poundbequestinsupportof thestudyof law.
LewisHenryLapham (8January1935–23July 2024) interviewed for the CIA at Yale in 1956. Thefirstquestion,posedtodetermine his suitability was: ‘When at the 13th tee of the National Golf Links in Southampton, New York, which club does one take from thebag?’ Heknewtheanswer(a7-iron),but found the question off-putting, dropped his spy ambitions, and went to Magdalene to readHistory. Thereafter,heshiftedfocusto journalism. Areporterforthe SanFranciscoExaminer and NewYorkHerald Tribune, he also wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine. He became editor of Harper’s in 1971, and editor-in-chief, 1976–81 and 1983–2006, introducing features like ‘Harper’s Index’, a one-page and popular synopsis used as editorial commentary. As a left-leaning aristocratic populist, he also penned the ‘Notebook’ column targeting upper-class frivolities, corruption and obsessions with money and power. In 2006, he founded Lapham’s Quarterly, addressing topics such
asclimate, intoxicationandnight,andreferencingwritersfromAristotle to Dickens as well as Magdalene’s C S Lewis and Heaney. Many of his fifteen books derived from his Harper’s writings He won the National MagazineAward in 1995 and was inducted into theAmerican Society of MagazineEditorsHallofFamein2007. HeremainedloyaltoMagdalene and spoke at the New York Dinners in 1993 and again in 2008, when despite a loss of notecards, his eloquent toast continued effortlessly. He diedin Rome.
Timothy David Llewellyn (30 May 1947 –23 December 2024). Educated at St Dunstan’s College, south London, Tim matriculated at Magdalene in 1966 where he read History and Fine Arts. After College, he joined Sotheby’s: Old Master Painting Department, becoming Director in 1974, Managing Director in 1984, Chief Executive in 1991, and Deputy Chairman, Europe, in 1992. In 1994,heacceptedtheDirectorshipofthe Henry Moore Foundation where over thirteen years he developed its headquartersatPerryGreenandoversawconstructionoftheSheepField Barn Gallery and its library and archive. With the Moore family, he restoredandopenedMoore’shome,Hoglands,andarrangedexhibitions in China, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Austria and the USA, among others, alsochampioningtheFoundation’stransitiontothedigitalage. Between 1986 and 2002, he served as Chairman of the Friends of the Courtauld Institute of Art, was a Member of the Council of Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti, 1996–2005 and oftheWalpoleSociety1994–99,andalong-servingTrusteeofmanyother institutions and charities including the Elgar Foundation, the Gilbert Collection Trust, the Metropole Arts Trust, Creative Foundation, the Burlington Magazine Foundation (where he was Director 2006–16) and the Samuel Courtauld Trust. He served on the British Council’s Visual ArtsAdvisoryCommitteefor nineteenyearsandbetween 2013 and2017 chairedtheCouncilofthe BritishSchoolatRome,havingbeenamember
since2000. HereturnedfrequentlytoRomeasafoundingAshbyPatron, alongside his wife Elizabeth. In Cambridge, Tim was an acclaimed Trustee of Kettles Yard, 2007–15, and a very generous benefactor to Magdalene. Among his publications he edited Owen McSwiny’s Letters, 1720–1744 (2010). TheSouthamptonInstituteawardedhimanHonorary DLitt in 1998. He was appointed to the Order of Cultural Merit, Poland in1986, andOBEin2007.
Air Marshal Sir Peter Coulson Norriss (22 April 1944 – 22 July 2024) was born in Bolton, educated at Beverley Grammar School, and read Modern Languages at Magdalene, 1963–66. A member of Cambridge UniversityAir Squadron, he won the Hack Trophy as the best aerobatic pilot, and joined the RAF in 1966, training cadets at Cranwell. He assessed the present king, then a cadet, as ‘above average’. In 1971, Peter joined No XV Squadron, flying Buccaneers at Laarbruch, Germany, and in 1974 was appointed Chief Flying Instructor at Honington, Suffolk and awarded the AFC. After serving as personal assistant to the Under Secretary of State (RAF), he returned to Laarbruch to command 16 Squadron where he formed and led the ‘Black Saints’, the RAF’s only ever Buccaneer display team. In 1984,heassumedcommandoftwoTornadostrike-attacksquadronsand the Victor air-to-air refuelling force at Marham, Norfolk. Appointed ADC to the Queen, in 1988 he returned to London with consecutive procurementappointmentsasagroupcaptainand aircommodore,with responsibility as Director-General to the MOD Procurement Executive forallaircraftdeployedintheFirstGulfWar. In1995hebecameDirector General Aircraft Systems, and a year later, Controller Aircraft and DeputyChiefofDefenceProcurement(Operations)forallthreeservices. In retirement, he undertook reviews for the Office of Government Commerce and was non-executive chairman of Microturbo Ltd and director of Chemring Group PLC. A Fellow and then President of the RoyalAeronauticalSociety,hewasafoundermemberandthenPresident
oftheBuccaneerAircrewAssociation. Heorganisedcharitygolfmatches forHopeandHomesforChildrenandfortheRAFBenevolentFund. He wasappointedCB(1996)and KBE(2000).
Dr James Waller (29 May 1938 – 25 November 2024) was a plant pathologist specialising in diseases affecting tropical crops. Born in Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, he attended Cambridge High School for Boys and won a scholarship to Magdalene but first undertook national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps with the 48th Gurkha InfantryBrigadein HongKong,where he shared a barrack with Oliver Reed. From 1957, he read Natural Sciences (Botany), followed by a diploma in agricultural science in 1963 and another in plant pathology in 1964 from Imperial College London. Thatyear,JimjoinedtheOverseasDevelopmentMinistryandwasposted tonewlyindependentKenyatoworkondiseasesofarablecrops. In1967, as plant pathologist with ODM, he was seconded to the Coffee Research InstituteatRuiru,north-eastofNairobi,toresearchcoffeeplantdiseases. ReturningtoBritainin1971,heestablishedaplantpathologyliaisonunit at the Commonwealth Mycological Institute at Kew which became an essential stopover for international scientists involved in agricultural development. The CMI excelled in plant-disease diagnostics, bringing together mycologists and pathologists with the world-famous fungal herbariumandculturecollection.Itplayedakeyroleinunravellingplant diseases such as Sumatra disease of cloves and coffee berry disease, and Jim’s published work earned him a PhD from Cambridge. After official retirement in 2000, he continued to undertake consultancies and mentor students and staff. He was an enthusiastic allotment holder, a keen fishermanandanaltosaxophonist,playingina localjazzband.
We welcomed a wonderful 3,155 Members and guests to a Magdalene event over the course of the past academic year. Highlights included a first College Dinner in Manchester, a marvellous choral event at Westminster Abbey and an ‘Evening with John Simpson’ in Cambridge. Further afield, the College dinners in Toronto and Kuala Lumpur were wonderful occasions, as were the annual dinners in Hong Kong, Singapore,New YorkandWashingtonD.C.
The alumni relations team worked with the Pepys Librarian to organise a celebratory ‘Pepys’ weekend in September 2024 to mark the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the Pepys Collection; tickets sold out almost immediately, and the occasion was a wonderful success, greatly enhanced by a specially curated musical programme performed in Chapel,adelightfulPepysianfeastcreatedbyourHeadChef,MrWayne Johnson and a most enjoyable open air theatre performance in the Fellows’Garden.
The 300th anniversary encouraged the College to embark on raising funds from Members and Friends for the Pepys Restoration Project. WearegratefultohavebeenawardedagenerousgrantfromThe Wolfson Foundation which together with all the gifts received and pledgedhasresultedinawonderful£3.6millionraisedforthisimportant endeavour. WorkisnowunderwayandthosevisitingtheCollegeduring the next ten months will not fail to miss the large scaffold surrounding thePepysBuildingtofacilitatetheexternalworks. Wearemostgrateful fortheinterestandsupportMembershaveshownintheprojectandplan toreopenthebuildingintimeforMichaelmasTerm2026.
This year we have raised £4.5 million in total thanks to a truly generous legacy from N A Kirke (1949), a proud post-war Magdalene man who regarded his time at Magdalene as transformational and created a fund during his lifetime to ensure the College could finance a research and teaching position in Intellectual Property Law after his death (see pp 72-73). Indeed, we have also been successful in raising more than a quarter of a million pounds for the Dias Law Fund and are now close to reaching the endowment level required to fund fully the DiasLawFellowinperpetuity,aprojectparticularlyclosetotheMaster’s heartgivenhislongfriendship with MrMickeyDias(1955).
RegularreadersofourAlumniandDevelopmentpublicationswill know that raising funds for our students is an ongoing objective for Magdalene and we are so pleased to have raised £470,000 for both undergraduateandpostgraduatestudentsupportthisyear. Allinall,we receivedatotalofjustunder£2.4millionfrom1,132donors,asignificant increaseonlastyear. ThisfigureincludesMembers,FriendsandFellows who have chosen to support the College. We feel very fortunate indeed that alumni from all around the world continue to answer our calls for support. Every gift, large and small, makes a difference to the resident College community every day. We simply couldn’t provide for our studentsandstaffor look afterthe estate inthewaywe do withoutyour donations. The continued and remarkable generosity of our Members and Friends means we can focus on our core mission of educating our students to the very best of our ability. That includes strengthening our teaching and pastoral care, extending our provision for student welfare and mental health, offering financial assistance when it is needed, improving the facilities we offer and working to safeguard our historic estate for our successors. Your gifts help to ensure that the College will
continuetoofferanurturing,safeenvironmentandaclose-knit,scholarly communitytoallow ourstudents tothriveandachieve theirverybest.
We are also fortunate that so many Members serve their College by volunteering on committees, hosting events, offering careers advice, mentoring students, attending networking events and encouraging prospectiveapplicantstothinkofMagdalene. Thereare toomanytolist here, but it would be remiss not to mention Mr Tom Milroy (1979) who generously hosted the dinner in Toronto; Dr Frank Crantz (1969) who once again sponsored the Washington D C. Dinner; Mr Henry Pang (1986) who graciously hosted another Chinese banquet in Hong Kong earlier this year; our Honorary Fellow, The Sultan of Perak, Dr Nazrin Shah (2005), who generously hosted a truly memorable Magdalene Dinner in Kuala Lumpur; our Honorary Fellow, The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle KCVO, MBE (1998), who hosted us in Westminster Abbey, and last but by no means least, Mr John Simpson CBE (1963), Honorary Fellow, for not only performing but also donating all proceeds from the 500 tickets sold for the ‘Evening with John Simpson’ to the Pepys RestorationFund.
We visited North America in November 2024 and as always, met upwitholdfriendsandnew,andweallenjoyedcatchingupandsharing newsoftheCollegewithourMembers. TheannualdinnersinNewYork andWashingtonD.C.andtheTorontoDinner,thefirstonefortheMaster as we had not been back since the pandemic, were all well attended and muchenjoyedbythosepresent. Pleaselookoutfornotificationsoffuture events in the USA, Southeast Asia, Europe and the UK as we endeavour tobring Magdalenetoyou!
The Magdalene College Foundation, ably chaired by Mr Robert Chartener OBE (1982), Fellow Commoner, has contributed to the College’s fundraisingsuccess bychannelling millions of donateddollars to Magdalene over the years. The work involved in this endeavour is wonderfully well supported by the Directors, Mr Geoffrey Craddock (1977), The Honourable David Brigstocke (1971), Ms Suzanna Jemsby (1990),DrJasonHafler(2006)andMsClemencyBurton-HillMBE(2000).
Hundreds of Members took up the invitation last autumn to subscribe to the definitive selection from A C Benson’s Diaries edited by Professors Duffy (1979) and Hyam (1960). The enthusiasm of the subscribers allowed us to underwrite the project and we were able to thank many of them with an invitation to the launch of the Benson
Diaries at Treemans owing to the wonderful hospitality of Honorary Fellow, Katie Derham (1988) and her husband John Vincent who by wonderful coincidence made Treemans their family home many years ago(seep59).
We are hugely grateful to all our dedicated volunteers; to our indefatigable supporters, enthusiastic contributors and to all Members who choose to get involved with their College. Please visit the new website www.magd.cam.ac.uk, to see what’s on, update your details, find out about your alumni benefits and to sign up for one of the events we organise, either at Magdalene or elsewhere, you really are most welcome and we delight in keeping in touch with the global Magdalene community.
A complete list of Members who have supported the College with a gift in the past financial year (1 July 2024–30 June 2025) will be published in the Impact Report, which will be issued in the autumn.
I was extremely surprised and touched last year to be invited by the Collegetohavemyportraitpainted. Itturnedouttobeamostinteresting experience. Frankly,Iwasinitiallyalittleapprehensive. Ihadheardthat the artist chosen, Eileen Hogan, was just completing an earlier project: a full-sizedpaintingofthekingathisdesk. So,Iwastobeinratheraugust company!
The impetus behind the invitation was that I was the first female President of the College, a position which resembles that of Vice-Master elsewhere. Although we don’t have a huge number of paintings of women, Magdalene has more than one might think: among them there aretwoimagesofourbenefactressMarthaPeckard;asubstantialportrait in the Parlour (bearing an uncanny suggestion of William IV in drag) of the Countess of Portsmouth under whose searching eyes we hold our bestdinnersand worstmeetings;a much-lovedimageoftheeighteenthcentury College laundress Elizabeth Briggs; and, most recently, a very fine painting by Mary Minifie of Helen Vendler, our first female HonoraryFellow, whichnow hangs inHall.
EileenturnedouttoberathermorerelaxedthanIhadfeared. After an initial meeting at which photographs were taken and schedules compared,therewerethree orfoursittingsmostly inmyrather dimlylit College rooms in the Lutyens building; but for the final meeting we removedourselvestoHall,whichprovidedEileenwiththesuggestionof a panelled background in green with the distinctive gold outline. The enhanced light coming in through the Hall windows changed the image considerablyandEileen wasmuchhappier.
Something one accepts, as the subject of a portrait, is that the narrativeisveryproperlysetbytheartist notthesitter. Otherwise,why not just use Photoshop? Eileen told me after the portrait was finished that she wanted to show me as a ‘strong woman’. Personally, I am not very enamoured of this term which I find a bit circular – if you get promotion in your career, you must be strong, so we know someone is ‘strong’because…. well,youseemypoint! However,whenIWikiedthe term‘strongwoman’, Ifounditmorepromising:itdefinesawomanwho performsfeatsinacircusorvaudeville. Especiallyonewhodoes‘human juggling’. Thisisnot amillion miles away frombeingPresident.
The other intriguing and unexpected aspect of these sittings was that Eileen works alongside her partner, the social historian Cathy Courtney. Cathy records interviews with the subject of the portrait duringthesittings. ThetapesarelodgedwiththeBritishLibraryandwill be evidence of the thoughts, opinions and lifestyle of people now, for researchers in the future. There is a fifty-year moratorium. This remindedmeoftheexcellentVictoriaWoodfilm, Housewife 49,basedon the Mass Observation project; a project in which a founding figure, by coincidence, was Magdalene poet Charles Madge. There were many questions about my childhood – how many siblings I have, where we wentonfamilyholidaysandsoon. Ittookforevertogettoadulthood(a pacewhichaccuratelyrepresentedmyteenagerfeelings,too)andwegot rather behind as Eileen separately pressed on in her work. But with an extra session (while Eileen went to the local bookshop), we finally reachedthepresent day. Thisproject isvery excitingmajorly becauseof the slow burn. In a time when everything is so immediate, the British Library’saim tothink fiftyyearsahead is prettyamazing. Recently,my hangingtookplace inthe PeckardRoom.
MEJHughes
EXTRACTSFROMTHEAC BENSONCENTENARYLECTURE. 12MARCH2025
C
Arthur Christopher Benson, 27th Master of Magdalene from 1915 until hisdeathin1925,wasoneofthemostpopularofEdwardianwriters. His volumes of sentimental essays, with titles like The Thread of Gold and Beside Still Waters, sold in their thousands, but were derided by critics such as Arnold Bennett for embodying ‘the astonishing calm assurance ofmediocrity’. Bensonhimselfwroteruefully‘inmybooksIamsolemn, sweet, refined; in real life I am rather vehement, sharp, contemptuous, a busymocker.’ And heknewthatapartfromhislyricsfor‘LandofHope andGlory’,none ofhiswritings wouldstandthetestof time.
The unpublished diary he kept from 1897 until his death, was, however, a very different matter. In its pages, Benson gave free rein to sharp observation and a conversational talent for vivid characterization and derisive phrasing, with all the ‘flippancy & brutality’ lacking in his published works. Begun in depression in the 1890s, at a time when he thought of himself as ‘one of those unhappy invalids who keep diaries’, it became a life-long project, a regular, copious and vivid record of his daily doings, likes and dislikes, personal encounters and assessments, and, often, of his vexations with friend and foe alike. It ultimately swelled to more than 23,000 manuscript pages in 180 volumes, perhaps closertofivethanfourmillionwords. Bycomparison,thecompletediary of Samuel Pepys is just over one million words, the Authorised Version of the Bible, a mere 783,137 words. Although his life seemed relatively uneventful,hissuccessiveroles –sonandbiographerofQueenVictoria’s favourite Archbishop of Canterbury, the most prestigious housemaster in the most prestigious of late Victorian public-schools, editor of Queen Victoria’s letters, best-selling popular philosopher and eagerly soughtafter public speaker, Master of a Cambridge college, alderman of a city liverycompany – theserolesgavehimuniqueentréetolateVictorianand Edwardian society. The diary abounds with notable set-pieces – an extended royal Christmas with royalty at Claremont House, the funeral of Gladstone, dinner at Windsor with Queen Victoria, the coronation of EdwardVII,adaywiththepoetSwinburneandhispreposterousminder Theodore Watts Dunton, a weekend at Lamb House with the novelist Henry James, a visit to Thomas and Emma Hardy at Max Gate. Among the major and minor celebrities who figure in the diary were Queen Victoria,EdwardVII,GeorgeV,andQueenMary:every PrimeMinister fromGladstonetoWinstonChurchill,thepoetsHardy,Housman,Yeats, Bridges,andRupertBrooke,the novelists HenryJames,HG Wells,and E M Forster, the artists William and Ben Nicholson, Max Beerbohm, and John Singer Sargent, the musicians Edward Elgar, Ethel Smyth, Hubert Parry,CharlesVilliersStanfordandArnoldDolmetsch,andmanymore. But the diary is far more than a who’s who of late Victorian and Edwardiancelebrity. Itderivesitsunique flavourfromthe opinionated, sardonicandirreverentpersonality ofthe diarist. Benson once listedhis requirements for a truly entertaining conversation – ‘I want prejudice, preference,humanity,humour,malice,salinity,ahundredlittlespicesin my dish… I must be interested’. That was why he relished the
conversation of his favourite aunt, Emmeline, ‘a great friend of Lewis Carroll’and‘agallantoldthing’,becauseitwas‘fullofzest,partisanship, fury,envy,jealousy,vindictiveness –allverywholesome’. Hisdiarywas ‘wholesome’ in every one of those ways. In his biography of Michael Ramsey, Owen Chadwick recalled the undergraduate joke that Benson ‘spent the morning doing nothing and… the afternoon writing about what he had done in the morning’. The joke not only obscures the immense labour Benson poured into answering every one of the daily ‘cataract’ofthirtyorfortylettersfromadmirersthatinfacttookupmost of his mornings (each reply took him up to a quarter of an hour), and it misses the sharp observation, humour, malice and saltiness that punctuatethediary, andmakeit, vastas itis,soentertaining toread.
Bensonthediaristwasmercilessinhisdisregardforstatus. Though hevaluedhisfriendshipwithmembersoftheroyalfamily,andthesense their patronage gave him of being ‘in the inner circle’, with ‘a finger in the pie’, he had no illusions about royal faults and foibles. They were ‘a bourgeois&unintelligentfamily’onwhomthetreasuresoftheroyalartcollectionswerewasted. EdwardVIIwasan‘ungraceful,small-minded, gross, kindly man’, who enjoyed practical jokes like putting a raw egg into a royal guest’s bed ‘hoping he would squash it’, a man with ‘no personal dignity or romance about him’, for whom the coronation was
notconsecrationtoalifeofservicebut‘theapotheosisofbuttons’. When, after Edward’s death, a preacher declared that the King had gone ‘to the eternalRestofGod’,Bensonwaswithering–‘Hedidn’twanttogothere a bit; he wanted to go to Newmarket’. George V was ‘every inch a cad, indiscreet, voluble in the wrong places… hating public work & appearances’; Queen Mary had ‘no majesty of mind, or ease or stateliness’: the charming Princess Ileana of Romania (rumoured to be a possible bride for the future King Edward VIII), was ‘too good for that littlerip’.
The dignitaries of the Church fared no better. Archbishop Randall Davidson, whose sister-in-law, Lucy Tate, lived with the Benson family andsharedBenson’s mother’sbed, washimselfa close familyfriend,for whom ACB had a long and deep affection, (‘I like him as much as I can like a Scotchman’). But he too came under the diarist’s unblinking appraisal. Benson approved of Davidson’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1903 – he thought him ‘fearless and high-minded and there is no nonsense about him’, and he approved of Davidson’s lowchurch views. Yet Benson found it strange that someone who was, he wrote ‘not exactly a great man’, should be ‘the chief exponent of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth’. Davidson was ‘more of a statesman than a priest’, a ‘Secretary of State for Religion’, ‘God’s butler’, who ‘would havelistenedtoXtpolitely,butwithoutinterest,&thenwouldhavegone back to the Sadducees, & arranged a little matter of legislation. He is a Sadducee… he is a good watch dog, and he respects emotion, even thoughhedoes notfeelit. Iwrotehima veryfrank&careful letter’.
No-one in Benson’s circle escaped. Τhe great medievalist, M R James,ProvostofKing’sCollege,hisoldestfriendandalways‘verydear to me’, ‘so affectionate’ was, nevertheless ‘so stubbornly Tory, so inaccessible to all ideas, so hating discussion & speculation’ that ‘if it werenotforhishumour,hewouldbefrozen,dull,inaccessible,thevery worst kind of Don’. James’s prodigious learning, he conceded, was ‘extraordinarily accurate & minute’, and yet his mind ‘has nothing constructive in it’: ‘I don’t suppose anyone alive knows so much, or so little worth knowing!’ In short, he was ‘a perfect second-rate man’. And despite a warm twenty-year friendship with the novelist Henry James, whom he loved as ‘a fine, choice, charming spirit infinitely civilised’, Benson felt‘histalk wasboring &hisbookswereworse’.
Benson Diary, Vol 102, p 66, 10 August 1908.
The drawing is of Richmond parish church with shops built against its walls.
If his verdict on close friends could be so disparaging, those with lesser claims on his regard could get very short shrift, no matter how distinguishedtheworldmightconsiderthem:AEHousman,‘thisfunny little prim, fussy, particular, conventional man, with his little digs & pokes & ironies’; Winston Churchill, a ‘horrid little fellow… like some sort of a maggot’, who ‘looks like a drug-taker, or at least as if there was something wrong to be ashamed of’. He gleefully recorded a story of Churchill, when Home Secretary, spending an evening denigrating ArthurBalfourtoaladydinnercompanion,knowingwellthatshewasa great friend of Balfour. At the end he said ‘Now I hope you will tell all this to Mr Balfour – I should prefer it – I am not ashamed of my view. Will you tell him from me?’ – ‘Certainly’ she said – ’what name shall I say?’
Benson was proud of his capacity for close observation and a ‘somewhatmicroscopic’eye,ofamindsensitive‘asacamera’. Thediary abounds in sharply observed detail - the ‘30 or more little parasites’ that ‘descended from [the] body’ of a mosquito he swatted during an Eton class in 1902, and who, when he squashed them ‘for fear of malaria…. cracked sharply, so that they were like little nuts of horn’. Or the ‘innumerable fish, perch, dace, & even big surly pike’ gasping in the shallows of an oxygen-depleted reservoir in a July heatwave, lying ‘in hundreds with dorsal fins above the water’ until ‘the rush of a pike, or the flight of a bird over the top’ made ‘the place burst into a storm of motion:the onlysound theincessantrush offish inthewater’.
That ‘microscopic eye’ is at its most characteristic in a vividly recorded stroll in the Fens in the summer of 1906. The dyke he was walkingalonghadbeenrecentlyheapedalongitstopwithtruckloadsof blueclay –‘gault’. Hepickeduponeofthespadefulsofclayandnoticed that it had been compressed and laminated ‘on its way to become slate’, so that it ‘splits in thin sheets’. Breaking the block open, he found that ‘there, just as they had fallen on the ooze of the great freshwater lake, Godknowshowmanymillionyearsago,laylittleshells,spiral&bivalve, of great delicacy though crushed to a fine flatness; creatures like woodlice;thingslikehorns&spines,andevenitseemsinoneplacestalks ofwater-weed.… Everysinglelaminaoftheblockrevealedafreshlayer – everyblock that Itriedhadthesamespectaclewithin it – Iturnedover the sections like the pages of a book’. The experience triggered a
characteristic Bensonian reflection – ‘They must have had their hour, thesecreatures,falleninto theslime, and lain therequietlyeversince… it was to me transportingly wonderful & terrible, to see these signs of ancient far-away life – to see the same thing going on today… the inconceivable scale of it all… not guessing or knowing in the faintest degree,what it isall about…’
Predictably, his close observation was often unflattering. The Cambridge historian Oscar Browning, with his ‘evil face, as if loosely moulded out of dirty dough & smeared with train-oil, leering vilely at some detestable thought’, or the ‘inexpressibly dreary’ philosopher, James Ward, with ‘a huge aquiline nose, a faraway look and a very faint… voice’, his deadening conversation ‘like the falling of soft rain, or volcanicdust’.
Benson’s almost Dickensian eye – and ear – for telling detail is often wielded to comic effect: Theodore Watts-Dunton, the poet Swinburne’s companion and minder, in hasty embarrassment moving the poet’s damp brown socks off the drawing room fender where they were drying after a rainy walk; the ‘terrible sight’ of H M Gwatkin, the DixieProfessorofEcclesiasticalHistory,‘eatinglikeawild-beast,looking like Cyclops, with his whited eyes & fringed with grisly hair’, making each piece of food that he put into his mouth ‘look like a worm or grub’, ‘flinging’ it at his mouth so that it caught‘ in the hair on his face, & he wouldpullitin&swallowitsomehow’;thehalf-blind IrishmanWilliam Ridgeway, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, with his recedingchin,racytalkandslovenlyutterance,his‘hey?’andhis‘what?’ at the end of sentences, the table round him littered with dropped morsels of food, drinking out of flower vases and shovelling up empty forkfuls, or G K Chesterton at a College dinner, perspiring so profusely thatwhenheheldhiscigardownwards,‘thesweatrandownandhissed at the point’. The diary abounds in social comedy: after lunch at the Athenaeum, he watched a dignified melancholy old man ‘with a parchmentcomplexion& awhitemoustache’whofellasleepoverabook ‘& was awakened by a sneeze so sudden & so violent that his pince-nez flewfromhisnoseintothemiddleoftheroom’. Lookingroundruefully, hewenttopickitup,andBenson,behindhisnewspaper,‘shook forhalfan-hour withsecret laughter’.
Benson usually shied away from anything ‘improper’ – he was scandalised when A E Housman unbent sufficiently at a dining club
evening to tell him ‘two of the most obscene French stories I have ever heardinmylife – notfunny,onlyabominable. Whataqueercreaturehe is – so prim, so kind, so passionate, & so indecent. I think he is really a veryuncivilised man,wearinga maskbecauseheistimid &unhappy.’ But occasionally Benson himself could not resist ribald farce, as in his accountinAugust1916ofaconversationatlunchintheAthenaeumwith theeditorofthe DictionaryofNationalBiography,SirSidneyLee.Asawellintentionedcontributiontothewareffort, Leewasguidingdrunkenand (asitemerged)priapicAustraliansoldiersonfurloughroundthecultural sights of London – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Temple Church and the like. Lee complained to Benson that the men seemed to have no interest whatever in these improving excursions, instead being lured away from Lee’s reluctant crocodile of bored troops by ‘shameless’ ladies of the streets, who ‘come up, take a man’s arm, & away they go together’, the menofcourse contractingthereby‘unpleasantillnesses’. Leeplaintively asked their sergeant to go and enquire if they were coming back, but, he lamented, ‘the sergeant says he thinks it is hardly worthwhile!’. And all thiswhile,Bensongleefullyrecorded,‘Leeincrackedtonesisexplaining thehistory ofCleopatra’sneedle’.
Hecouldinjectsocialcomedyandcharacterintoaphrase. Thediary teems with examples: the ‘gloomy whiskered man’ observed in a hotel dining-room ‘with brows drawn up & corrugated with care, who feeds himself carefully & compassionately & takes salt with his banana’; the reclusive Lord Canterbury, ‘who lives in a small house at Seething & drinkswithhiscoachman’;HenryJames’selaboratetalk,‘likethesteady plunge of a cataract of rich gravy’; Asquith’s ingratiating politician’s inclination‘toshakehandswithallthecoatshanginginthehall’;the‘cad’ Lloyd George, a man ‘of strong features and no knees’, ‘stepping gleefully along… full of himself & elated by publicity’; the Liberal politician Lord Courtney, half blind and flamboyantly dressed in a chocolate-colouredcoatandscarlettie,‘akind,well-informed, cocksure, complacent, good-natured, rather boring old man, with a high belief in hisownperfections, rather like theNonconformistidea ofGod’.
Entries like these entitle Benson to a place as one of the very best diaristsofthetwentiethcentury. Buthewasnotalwaysrebarbative,and the sharp eye and pen were sometimes at the service of the kindliest of observers. So, to end, here are two characteristically idyllic encounters on afternoon cycle- rides, recorded twenty years apart, the first while he
was still a master at Eton, the second, much briefer, while President of Magdalene,in themidstoftheFirstWorldWar:
7October1897
IheardonThursdaythreeboysinSloughplaysimplemusic on a piano-organ (in a donkey-cart) and two common little brassflutes. Iheardthepianoatadistancewithapartbeing putinaboveitverydeftlyandairily. ComingnearerIfound the piano, & a boy playing it, very gravely fixing his eyes likeanaccompanyistontheprincipalperformer. Hewasan ugly,vulgar-lookingboyof18,fair,red-faced,cockney,very ill-dressed – butplayinghiswhistlewiththeabandonofthe artist. He strutted about with odd, absorbed gestures, playing beautiful arpeggios, grace-notes, tremolos, with a passion & a verve that was quite amazing. The other boy played correctly enough but with less spirit. I gave them a shilling & said that they were real artists. They seemed pleased, & began to move on. I said ‘Shall I have the pleasure of hearing you again?’ They stopped & said, ‘We will give you two special pieces’, which I heard leaning on my bicycle with a crowd around. ‘I know not what they sang’ but it was some old-fashioned piece with Handelian steadiness, & all transfigured by this curious embroidery above it. Ishouldhavelikedto talkto thembut wasshy.
Andfinally:
20February1915
…. rode out by Maddingley [sic] & Toft. I saw a young soldier petting ajolly younghorse&holdingoutsomehay.
‘Let’s have a kiss!’ he said endearingly – the horse at last aftertryingtoreachthehay,brushedhischeekwithitslips. Theyoung man huggedit, &gave meachildlikesmile.’
EDuffy
A fully annotated 350,000-word selection from the diary of A C Benson, edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, was published in June 2025 by Pallas Athene Books.
Arecenttree ringanalysis – thescienceof dendrochronology – datesthe rooftimbersin theLeftCloister of thePepysBuilding to1677, consistent withtherecordeddatesforthebuilding’sconstructionbetween1670and 1703. 1677 was also the year that the College approached Robert Hooke fortherevisedbuildingdesignwhichtransformedtheappearanceofthe west front and extended the roof design (further timbers from this frontagehavebeenprovisionallydatedto1683andthewinterof1694/5).
SamuelPepys’sLibrarywasmovedintothefirst-floorfrontroomin1724 andthereitstayeduntilmovedintothefirstflooroftheRightCloisterin 1834. Stephen Dykes Bower’s alterations in 1959 focused on the reformation of the front room to rehome the Pepys Library, removing nineteenth-century partitions and fireplaces and introducing new ceilings, doors and cornices. In the 1970s, the main College Library was movedintothegroundandfirstflooroftheRightCloister,withcornices, fireplaces and panelling removed to expose the original brick walls. Later,arefurbishedundergroundpassagelinkedthegroundfloorsofthe Right Cloister and the Left Cloister (housing the Law Library). The freeing up of this space with the construction of the New Library, completedin2021,gaveimpetustothelong-neededrefurbishmentofthe Pepys Building as a whole. The planned interventions do not seek to replace the lost features described above but rather to restore sympathetically the fabric and to allow the space to be read and used moreclearly.
Externally, the Pepys Building will look as it does now, under a renovated, properly insulated roof, with new roof tiles (and bat friendly access points) and rainwater goods. The greatest changes will be to the Right Cloister. A new entrance door, albeit where a hidden archway indicatesanearlierentrance,willbeformedattheriverendofthePepys Colonnade. This will lead into a new foyer, with storage facilities for visitors and a passenger lift to allow less mobile visitors access to the Pepys Library on the floor above. At the rear of the ground floor, a new Seminar Room will be constructed. At the front of the first floor, a new interpretationspacewillbecreated,togivevisitorsmorebackgroundon Pepys and his world before they enter the Pepys Library itself. In a
second phase, a new office space and a research room for Pepysian scholarswillbecreatedattherearofthefirstfloor. Theoldlibraryspaces on the ground floor of the Left Cloister will be reconfigured into an accessible administrative hub (tutorial and admissions) for the College. The Fellows’ rooms on the first and second floors of the Building will all be refurbished; throughout the Building there will be modern heating, lightingand ITprovision.
The rear of the ground floor Right Cloister in January 2025, to become the new Seminar Room but currently a contractor-ready ‘empty shell’. The two pillars supporting the beams to the first floor will be replaced with a horizontal steel frame, spanning the newly opened space. (Photo: Matt Moon).
Theseplans,andhowwepayforthem,havehadalonggestation. A great deal of progress was made in 2019 with the appointment of a conservation architect (Oxford-based Robert Montgomery) and a design team(nowpartoffjcstudio,alsoinOxford)andthestartofalongprocess of gaining Listed Building Consent (achieved in August 2024). FundraisingwasinitiallytiedtoourFutureFoundations Campaign, and
the first gifts were received as long ago as 2016. The pandemic and the need to complete the New Library set everything back and caused us to re-evaluate the costs, phasing and fundraising strategy. But by autumn 2022wewerereadytogoagain,withamuchbetterideaofthebuilding’s condition,thedesignteambackinplace,amorerealistictwo-phaseplan and a re-focussed fundraising strategy (which has now raised £3.6 million, includingasubstantial grantfrom theWolfsonFoundation).
TotallyclearingtheBuilding – the ‘decant’– beganinOctober2023 andbyAugust2024alltheresidentFellows,theirbooksandbelongings, had been re-housed elsewhere and the remaining books from the old College Library moved out also. Most importantly, there was an elaborate choreography of meticulously decanting the Pepys Library books and Pepysian furniture to another safe and secure location in College,withtheopportunitytocarryouttherestorationofPepys’sbook presses as part of this process. With the building empty, the next set of taskswas to undertakea‘soft strip’of the oldCollegeLibrary bookcases and desks, and the removal of asbestos board, revealing the Building’s complete timber and brickwork skeleton for the first time since the alterationsundertakensixty-fiveyearsago.
Following a competitive tendering process, a contractor (Regent Construction Ltd.) was approved by the Governing Body in June 2025. We now start the construction phase. All being well, we shall have our iconic Pepys Building up and running again, and ready to welcome a greatly increasedflowofvisitorsfromlatesummer 2026.
TSpencer Chair,Pepys Restoration Project July2025
LateOctober.
Atthisfarendoftheworld
Theopening rosebudstossinthespringrain. Downheresnowhasclosedtheroadsto thewest
Asfalling flakesoftimeerasethepast. Buton theCoromandelseashoreyou aresitting Amidthefernsandscentedrhododendrons
Lookingthroughpebbleglassestotheeast –Notto thealienpurgatorywhereyouended Butintothesunofboyhoodholidays. Foryoutoo,behindthesnowdrift ofyourhair, Thewestward roads arecut: Totermtimein theschoolwhose songyou wrote; ToOxford’srewards andfairies;to‘theonetruegenius Ievermet’;to Gwynethandtheboys; Tothe leathercliffsofbooksin AdamsRoad Andin thedarkroomthatwas later my roomalso, Withfuchsiasandgeraniumsatthewindow Andthebellpealing intheglowingcourt Onasummer eveninginthe wintertime. LikeyouIknewthat, soletus together Awaitthe sunshine ofalast AllSouls’Day That melts thetimebetweenaliveand past Andopenstheroads backintothe inaccessible Familiarplaces.
Seeyou,Jack.
South Island, October 2024
J A W Bennett (1911–81), Fellow 1964–78
J A W (‘Jack’) Bennett, C S Lewis’ first successor in the Cambridge Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English, was born and educated in Auckland, New Zealand. He came to Magdalene from Oxford,wherehewasajuniormemberoftheInklings’group(herevered Tolkien), and where he collaborated with Hugh Trevor-Roper on an edition of Richard Corbet’s ‘Farewell, Rewards and Fairies’. With his mane of white hair and thick glasses in their pink frame, he was an unmistakeablefigureinFirstCourtwheneverheemergedfromhisbookfilledroomsinE1,wherehehadJohnStevensimmediatelyabovehimin the so-called ‘Monk’s Room’, and Arthur Sale on the top floor – a manystoreyed mountain of literary learning. After retirement, and the death of his wife, he set out for New Zealand in order, he told Arthur Sale, to sitagainontheCoromandelcoastwherehisfamilyhadholidayedwhen he was a boy, but while waiting to change planes in Los Angeles he suffered a heart attack and died in an airport hotel. In September and October 2024, having myself finished a substantial piece of work, I went to visit family in Australasia. In New Zealand I found myself permanentlyaccompaniedbymemoriesofhimandcouldnotrestuntilI had written some sort of memorial meditation on a good friend both to me and, perhaps surprisingly, to Arthur Sale. ‘What a wealth of knowledgewent out oftheworldwithhim,’Arthursaid. . NBoyle
Canceris adisease, orrather a collection ofdiseases, that touchesallour lives. Cancer is responsible for nearly a third of all deaths in the United Kingdom. Someone receives a cancer diagnosis every two minutes. We all mourn friends and family who were taken away from us too soon. Manyofusalsolivewiththedisease. Thetreatmentcanbealmostasvile as the disease, but more people survive now than in the past. For instance, childhood leukaemias now have excellent survival rates of more than 90%, and in general, about 50% of patients with a cancer diagnosiscanexpecttoliveforafurthertenormoreyears. However,for sometypesofcancers,suchaspancreaticcancer,thestatisticsarebleaker; almost nobody survives for five years beyond their first diagnosis, despiteintensive medical intervention.
Historically, there have been three different treatments for cancer: surgery,radiationandchemotherapy. Overthelastfifteenyears,afourth cancer therapy has emerged: cancer immunotherapy. The premise of cancerimmunotherapyisthat theimmunesystemcanbedirectedtokill cancercells,inmuchthesamewayitnormallykillsvirallyinfectedcells. Thedifficultyisthatwhilevirusesarerecognisedbytheimmunesystem as‘foreign’,cancercellsstartoutlookingverymuchlikethehealthycells from which they derived. They are therefore initially difficult for the immunesystem torecogniseand kill.
During our development, starting when we are still in the womb, aspecialisedcellsubsetcalledTcellsemerge,firstfromtheliver,thenthe bonemarrow. Thesecellstraveltothethymus1,asmallglandularorgan that sits on top of the heart. The thymus offers a particularly rigid education: it is estimated that 95% of aspiring T cells are discarded as useless,2-3%discardedas beingharmful(moreonthisbelow), andonly 2-3% graduate and exit the thymus to populate our lymphatics and peripheralorgans. Whowould sendtheirchildrento aschoolorcollege with a 97% failure rate? (fortunately, the prospects for Magdalene studentsareconsiderablybetter). Thesurvivingthymocyteshaveunique
1 The function of the thymus, and indeed T cells,was discovered only in the late 1960s by Jacques Miller and colleagues; earlier, surgeons considered the thymus a vestigial organ routinely disposed of during heart surgery.
receptors on their surface which recognise small fragments of proteins, digested and presented on the surface of our cells as part of Major Histocompatibility proteins (MHC). Developing T cells considered harmful because they recognise self-proteins, are purged from the repertoire such that only T cells that recognise fragments from foreign proteinssurvive. Whenone of ourcells isinfected bya virus, fragments of that virus will be presented on the cell surface in complex with MHC. Assuchproteinsarenotencounteredduringourdevelopment,theTcells are given the green flag to kill such infected cells; they are sacrificed to preservethefunctionofwhicheverorgantheyarepart. Theinfectedcell is sacrificed for the benefit of the organism. To make things more complicated,therearethreemajorbranchesofTcells:helperTcells,killer TcellsandregulatoryTcells(forthoseinterestedinlearningmoreabout immunology, see What the Body Knows: A Guide to the New Science of Our Immune System by mypredecessor in the Department of Pathology, John Trowsdale).
Cancer cells are derived from normal cells. Initially, they are therefore ignored by the T cells. However, cancer is a genetic disease caused by errors in the DNA (mutations), and as the cancer grows, the cells acquire more mutations that change the proteins in the cells (all proteinsareencodedforbyyourDNA). Themoretheseproteinschange, the more likely they are to be recognised as foreign by the immune
system. This makes the cancer cells vulnerable. It has long been speculated, but not fully proved, that as we age the immune system protectsusfromcertaincancer events.
Neverthelss, almost a third of us will eventually die from cancer, sotheimmunesystemclearlydoesnotfullyprotectus. Partofthereason for that is that the initial tumour raises protective barriers against the immune system. The question, then, is how can we remove those barriers?
The immune system retains tremendous power to eliminate pathogens. Without it, we would not survive beyond the first couple of years after birth. The story of ‘the boy in the bubble’ illustrated the vulnerability of children without immune systems (David Vetter was born without a functioning immune system and spent most of his life in a plastic bubble to protect him infections). HIV patients who develop AIDSalsosuccumbtoinfectiousdiseasesasthelossoftheirhelperTcells render them unable to fight infections. But the immune system also has the power to turn against ourselves by attacking the organs and tissues that keep our bodies functioning. This is despite the strict education providedbythethymus. Sothereareadditional mechanisms toprevent self-harm, including regulatory T cells that suppress the function of helperTcellsandkillerTcells. Inturn,tumoursrecruitregulatoryTcells to protect themselves against the onslaught of helper and killer T cells. Regulatory T cells are rare: they constitute less than 1% of all the white
blood cells. However, they are also essential. Babies born without regulatory T cells suffer from a disease called IPEX and do not survive beyondtwoyearsofageunlesstheyhaveabonemarrowtransplant. We simply cannot live without this additional level of protection from an attackbyourownimmunesystem. Tumoursprotectthemselvesinother ways as well. Helper and killer T cells express proteins on their surface that act as breaks to prevent over-exuberant immune responses. Two of these are called PD1 and CTLA4. When any of these mechanisms fail to protect us, we can develop autoimmune diseases. Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus all arise as a consequence of the failure to protect ourselves against potentially harmful T cells that escaped censorship in thethymus.
James Allison, a gruff Texan and excellent harmonica player, had worked on CTLA4 since the mid-1990s. He showed that if you block CTLA4 in mice, experimental cancers were rejected by the immune system. Allison immediately saw the therapeutic potential of this observation, but many in the pharmaceutical industry remained sceptical. It’s easy to cure cancer in mice, more difficult in humans. Scepticism was not unwarranted. Until then, many had worked on cancer immunotherapy, but the treatments were either ineffective, too toxic, or both. When I started my PhD in 1994, I had just read The Transformed Cell byStevenRosenbergattheNationalInstitutesofHealth inBethesda,Maryland. Hehadbeenencouragedby apatient hetreated early in his career who spontaneously recovered from metastatic melanoma. This was almost unheard of, and Rosenberg suspected that the immune system might be at play. Rosenberg pioneered many trials, either injecting patients with a molecule called interleukin 2, and/or by isolating T cells from cancer patients, expanding them in tissue culture, andreinjectingthembackintothepatient. Thisworkedinsomepatients, but not in most. So, by the mid-1990s, many were giving up hope and most cancer researchers considered the study of the immune system a distraction.
Allison did not give up, however. Eventually, he persuaded the pharmaceutical company Bristol Meyers Squibb to test antibody against CTLA4 patients with metastatic melanoma, a skin cancer caused by exposure to too much sunlight. Once these cells leave the skin and metastasise to the lungs, liver or brain, the disease was invariably lethal.
The trial was a success, but not obviously so to the uninitiated. The majority of patients succumbed to the disease, regardless of the treatment. However, therewasasmallsubsetofpatients,about10-20%, whose cancers did not progress, and even some that regressed such that the melanomas that had originally been detected at various sites in the bodywerenolongerdetectable. Cancermedicsareveryreluctanttouse the word ‘cure’. However, there are still patients alive today from that initial trial who as far as we can tell, are disease-free. The story of this development is described in the film: Breakthrough, by Jim Haney. Subsequently, antibodies against PD1 (discovered by Tasuku Honjo) or its ligand, PDL1, have been shown to be even more effective. In some trials of melanoma, 40-50% of patients respond favourably and a good proportion of those can be considered cured. Moreover, anti-PD1/PDL1 have now been approved for about another dozen cancer types, including lung cancer, kidney cancer and some forms of breast cancer. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology orMedicinein2018fortheirdiscoveryofcancertherapybytheinhibition ofnegativeimmune regulation.
Onceanti-CTLA4andandti-PD1/PDL1hadbeenshowntowork, many nay-sayers were converted and started promoting immunotherapy. Rather than gathering in side-rooms, immunologists started to present as plenary speakers at major cancer conferences. Around the same time, Steven Rosenberg, as well as Carl June from the UniversityofPennsylvaniaandtheirrespectivecolleaguesdemonstrated that adoptive transfer of genetically modified T cells could also cure certain blood cancers. Immunology became firmly established as the fourthpillarofcancertherapy.
It remains the case that most cancer patients will not respond to immunotherapy. A deeper understanding of the principles governing these immune responses against altered self is needed. This in turn should leadtonewtherapeuticsbenefitingmorepatients.
My lab’s contribution to this field centres around enzymes called phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks for short) and regulatory T cells. PI3Ks are evolutionary conserved enzymes that modify lipids in the cell membrane. Such modified lipids (phosphorylated on the third position of the inositol ring to generate PIP3), act as second-messenger signalling molecules inside the cell. As such, environmental cues outside the cells are relayed as biochemical signals inside the cell which instruct the cells
to divide, grow, migrate to other sites, and effect a plethora of other biological responses. There are several varieties of this enzyme and we work on a particular form called PI3Kδ – or PI3K delta. PI3Kδ is uniquely expressed only in the cells of the immune system, so when I joined Bart Vanhaesebroeck’s lab at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London in 1999, I reasoned that this enzyme should exhibit interesting immunological roles. We used genetic engineering to breed mice in which the PI3Kδ enzyme was inactivated by a single point mutation. Thiswas,infact,thefirsttimeamousemodelhad beenmade withsuchselective inhibitionof akinase.
One of our earliest discoveries was that these mice developed colitis – inflammation of the large intestines. Fiona Powrie at the Dunn School in Oxford had previously shown that regulatory T cells play an importantrolepreventinghelperTcellsfromreactinginappropriatelyto the rich microflora in the gut. So I suspected that PI3Kδ played a role in regulatory T cells and Dan Patton, my first PhD student, demonstrated this in one of the first papers I published as an independent scientist at the Babraham Institute just south of Cambridge. This turned out to be oneofthemostpivotaldiscoveriesinmycareer. Subsequently,asecond PhD student, Dalya Soond, made the remarkable observation that when we injected tumours into PI3Kδ-deficient mice, they either stopped growing, or melted away. This came as a surprise as we had expected
inhibitors of PI3Kδ to block immune responses, not to stimulate them. However, Soond was able to show that when we inhibited PI3Kδ specifically in regulatory T cells, the anti-tumour effect was even stronger.
When I had left Vanhaesebroeck’s lab to take up my post at the Babraham Institute, he generously let me take the PI3Kδ genetically modified mice me. But we did not want to become competitors! So we agreedthatIwouldworkonimmunology,andhewouldworkoncancer. That plan became more complicated when a few years later at a conferenceinColorado,wefoundoutthatwewerebothworkingonthe emerging field of cancer immunology. We decided to join forces and publish our observations together in a paper that was accepted by the journal Nature in2014. Aclinicaloncologist,ChristianOttensmeier,took note of the results and decided to run a clinical trial in human patients with a PI3Kδ inhibitor. We already knew that similar inhibitors were effective against a form of cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). CLL is a cancer of the B cell lineage (the cells that normally generateprotectiveantibodies). BcellsexpressPI3Kδanddependonthis enzymetosurvivein thelymphnodes. Henceit wasrewarding,butnot altogether surprising, to see PI3Kδ inhibitors work in this disease. Their use has been limited, however; because patients often develop inflammation of the colon and diarrhoea, just as the mice with inhibited PI3Kδ. Nevertheless, thepotentialtoinhibitregulatoryTcellstounleash an anti-cancer response motivated Christian Ottensmeier to initiate a clinical trial for a PI3K inhibitorin head and neck cancer.This is not a cancer of the immune system and hence the cancer cells themselves do not express PI3Kδ. Rather, the premise was to unleash the power of the immune system against these cancer cells. Early data suggests that this may have worked. When the tumours were removed by surgery after a periodoftreatmentwiththePI3Kδinhibitor,Ottensmeierandcolleagues observedinfiltrationofkillerTcellsandareductionofregulatoryTcells. Thisbodeswellforaneffectiveanti-tumourresponse. Infact,inthecase ofonepatient,thetumourcouldnolongerbefoundwhenhecameinfor surgery. However,thetrialwashaltedasmanyofthepatientsdeveloped severe skin inflammation. This probably means that we did not get the dose or drug schedule quite right. Nevertheless, the results were sufficientlypromisingtobepublishedagaininthejournal Nature in2022.
Our lab continues to work on how to best use PI3Kδ inhibitors to stimulateimmuneresponsesagainstcancer.
Morerecently,togetherwithmycollaboratorRahulRoychoudhuri (whoreadMedicineatMagdalenefrom2000to2003andisnowProfessor of Cancer Immunology at the Department of Pathology in Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College), we have switched our attention towards preventing metastasis following removal of the primary tumour. Jie Yang, a postdoc in the Roychoudhuri lab used another genetic mouse model that had been identified by David Adams and colleagues at the Sanger Institute as being resistant to develop lung metastases. Jie discovered using this mouse model that thromboxanes produced by platelets suppress T cells. The enzyme that generates thromboxanes in platelets, COX1, is a target of the oldest and one of the best-known drugs we have in our arsenal: aspirin2. Initially used as a painkiller and anti-inflammatory drug, aspirin is now commonly used, at low doses, to prevent heart disease. Yang showed that inhibiting the enzyme inside T cells that responds to thromboxanes renders mice resistant to develop metastatic cancer. These results were published in Nature earlier this year and received considerable attention from the press.
2 Salicylic acid, the precursor of aspirin, was extracted from willow bark; aspirin was the first drug to be synthesised in the lab and was first marketed by Bayer in 1899.
Morerecently,wehaveteamedupwithRuthLangleyatUCLwho hadalreadycoordinatedalargeclinicaltrialtotestifaspirincanbeused topreventcancerrecurrencefollowingsurgery.Thestudyinvolvesabout 10,000 cancer patients with four different types of cancer; details can be seen at the AddAspirin website (https://www.addaspirintrial.org/).
Should aspirin turn out to be effective at reducing the chance of relapse inanyofthesecancers,thenwewouldhaveacancertherapeuticathand which every health care system in the world can afford to provide. Aspirin costs only pennies per pill (so no-one will get rich from this discovery!). Both the CRUK and MRC are funding our efforts to help better understand the potential of aspirin and related drugs to prevent cancermetastasis.
Research into cancer immunotherapy is progressing at pace, and new treatments are offering hopes to patients who in past would have none. However, there is much work yet to do before the majority of cancer patients benefit from this fourth pillar of cancer therapy. I feel fortunate to work in a field which is both intellectually stimulating and, atthesametime,has thepotentialtooffer newtreatmentsforcancer.
KOkkenhaug
Watching the wide, dusty landscape, mountains shimmering on the horizon, I saw, through the windows of the coach I was travelling in, a smallsquareshrine,itswhitewasheddomemottledochrewithage,wild daisies and poppies clustering at its base. Many such buildings dot the ruralandurbanlandscapesofMorocco;somearetiny,humblestructures of adobe nestling in village graveyards and some are great urban shrine centres with gleaming, green tiled pyramidal domes. Their ubiquitous presence reflects the deep attachment of North African Muslims to their holymenandwomen,atendencythatdatesbackoveramillenniumand finds expression in an intriguing twelfth-century hagiographical dictionary, called Kitāb al-Tashawwuf fī Rijāl al-Taṣawwuf or the Book of Inquiry into the Men of Mysticism. ThismedievalArabicwork,pennedby Ibnal-Zayyatal-Tadili,amanfromtheMiddleAtlasregionofTadla,isa rich source for scholars of Islamic mysticism but it also helps us think about social mobility and opportunity in the Middle Ages, particularly formenwithoutaccesstoeducation,peopleofcolourandwomen. Italso gives us glimpses of how popular piety was practised and how it reshapedthelandscape.
Throughout my career, I have worked on medieval and early modernArabicchroniclesfrom Morocco. Politicallegitimationhas been a major theme of my work, from jihad rhetoric to monumental construction, and, for several years, I have focused on how such chroniclesdepictaruler’sinvestmentincitiesandhowdifferentregimes legitimised themselves through such activities. Did the monarch found an entire city? Did he commission a palace, a great mosque or other religious institutions? What meanings do chroniclers give to these projects? Conversely, can we find traces of building activities that backfired and roused popular ire or negative commentary on a ruler’s projects? Grandeur sometimes came to be seen as decadent luxury, and theforcedpurchaseanddestructionofpropertiestomakewayforaroyal commissionsometimesgeneratedyearsof resentment.
I first dived into al-Tadili’s dictionary for discussions of urban projects that did not come from the pen of historians writing for a dynastic patron. The biographies in the Kitāb al-Tashawwuf are full of
anecdotessetinlargecitiessuchasFesandMarrakeshaswellassmaller towns and the countryside. I found that they rarely address major projects directly. On the contrary, they give a bottom-up view of the ruling class and the religious infrastructure that served ordinary people, including smaller neighbourhood mosques and cemeteries, where shrineswereoftenlocated,addingnewdimensionstomyimpressionsof the medieval city. I was particularly struck by the society the dictionary depicted, and this encouraged me to look at the text in a loosely quantitative as well as qualitative way. Who were the holy men and women described and what were their social as opposed to religious characteristics?
The context for al-Tadili’s writing of his book was the spread of Islamicmysticismintheeleventhcenturyandthewiderrecognitionthat one could approach God directly through fasting, praying and contemplation, as well as through book-learning. He wanted to introduce North Africans to what Muslims in the east called Sufism or Islamic mysticism but also to prove to eastern mystics that North Africa was full of mystics. This development of a person-centred rather than text-centredapproachrevolutionisedreligiouspracticeacrosstheIslamic world. In the case of Morocco, many of al-Tadili’s biographical entries stress the limited education of the holy personage and his or her direct, charismatic communion with God which enabled them to bypass the conventional, lengthy education in Classical Arabic texts required to become a religious scholar (ʿālim) or a jurist (faqīh) trained in religious law. This allowed the indigenous population of North Africa, many of whomspokeaBerberorAmazighlanguageratherthanArabic,finallyto push through the glass ceiling blocking their access to religious status and become what I term ‘religious professionals’ alongside the highly educated,prosperousmalescholarlyelite.
Justglancingthroughthebook,Iwasalsostruckbythenumberof individualsdescribedas‘black’(aswad)butalsoasmembersoflocaltribal communitiessuchastheSanhaja,asignificantBerberorAmazighgroup, complicating the idea that black people were normally non-tribal migrants or enslaved populations from sub-Saharan Africa. The dictionary also includes a small number of women, the half of the population most obviously ignored by the majority of medieval Arabic texts. Although the number of women’s biographies is disappointingly small,theydomakeobliquereferencestolargescalefemaleparticipation
in popular pietistic practices, including visiting shrines and religious retreats. Theburialplacesoftheseindividualsbecamesitesofveneration for local communities, and they gained a particular architectural form, thesquare,domedmausoleum,whichremainspartofthelandscapeand thereligious topographyofMoroccotoday.
Shrine outside the Kutubiyya Mosque, Marrakesh
Ishallnowturntosomeexamplesofthesocialmobilitycontained withthe Kitābal-Tashawwuf togiveatasteofitsvividandhighlypersonal contents. The idea of the illiterate but divinely inspired mystic is beautifully captured in the life-story of Abu Madyan (Entry 162), a hugely important, foundational figure in the history of mysticism in North Africa. Abu Madyan was a poor boy from what is now southern Spainwhostartedlifeasashepherd. Hisfatherdiedwhenhewasyoung and he ran away to try his hand as a day labourer and soldier across the StraitofGibraltarinMorocco. Hewasdrawntothecirclesofscholarshe saw in great mosques, especially in Fes, a thriving centre of scholarship andcommercein the eleventhand twelfth centuries.
However,althoughcolloquialArabicwas hismother tongue,Abu Madyan was not literate and nor did he understand Classical Arabic, so hefoundscholarlyconversationfrustratinglyopaque. Thebreakthrough onlycame whenhe listenedto ʿAlib.Hirzihim,a famous mystic,andhe feltasif ʿAli’sheartspokedirectlytohis. Fromthatpointonwards,Abu Madyanwasabletodevelopaspiritualpracticebasedontheknowledge oftheheartnotthebookandto gainhisplaceattheapexofthespiritual hierarchy of North Africa. He eventually settled outside Tlemcen in Algeria, which was located within the territories of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Almoravid and Almohad dynasties which also ruled Morocco. His tomb remains a popular shrine known as the Mosque of SidiBoumediene.
Thepresenceofblackindividualsintheranksofthesaintsappears primarilythroughonomasticevidence,thatis,throughthedescriptionof many individuals as ‘black’ (aswad) or ‘dark-skinned’ (asmar). Around thirty individuals or some 11% are described using these terms. Such somaticmarkerscontrastwiththeabsenceofreferencestoindividualsas
‘white’(abyaḍ),atermrarelyusedexceptforAlbinos. Alsorareareother terms denoting those of lighter complexions such as ruddy (ahmar) or sallow (asfar). Racism in its later form did not coalesce in Morocco until the early-modern period, notably with the Sultan Mawlay Ismaʿil’s recruitment of a large, enslaved black army, inspired by the Ottoman JanissaryarmyrecruitedfromenslavedBalkanChristianboys. Prejudice certainly existed but it tended to relate to whether populations were tribalornot,on thegroundsthattribesmenwerearmedandthusableto defend themselves from depredations by other tribes or rulers. Nontribal communities tendedto be morevulnerableand thus oppressedby tribesandrulers.
A further flourishing trans-Saharan trade in people included subSaharanAfricanconcubines,creatinganassociationbetweenslaveorigin and dark skin even when people were members of a tribe. Notably, this produced a black minority at all levels of society as rulers themselves owned concubines from the sub-Saharan south as well as the Iberian north. As a result, many black saints are also described as members of tribes, notably the Haskura and the Sanhaja, two Berber or Amazigh groups with a large presence in southern Morocco and Marrakesh, the capitalofboththeAlmoravidsandtheAlmohads. Arguably,theSaharan Almoraviddynasty,aSanhajalineage,werethemselvesblack. However, liketheshepherdboyAbuMadyan,manyoftheseindividualscamefrom humbleruraloriginsorlivedamongthepoorersectionsofurbansociety, working as artisans and servants. Their recognition as charismatics enabled them to acquire religious authority too. An interesting example of this appears in the biography of Abu Shuʿayb al-Sanhaji (Entry 62), a man described as dark-skinned. In the anecdote, the governor of Azzamur on the Atlantic coast of Morocco decided to execute several peopleforamisdemeanour. AbuShuʿaybintercededontheirbehalf,but the governor refused to receive him because of his apparently low-class origin. Afterwards, he was afflicted with severe pain and someone said to him, ‘The man you turned away was Abu Shuʿayb, one of the friends of God. How dreadful!’. The governor duly summoned the saint and acceptedhisintercession,causinghispaintodissipate. Thestoryreveals the prejudicial social context in which Abu Shuʿayb operated as well as his spiritual powers and recognition among the ranks of the ‘friends of God’,regardlessofhisbackground.
In order to understand the role of women in this new religious environment, we cannot rely solely on women’s biographies in the dictionary, which number only seven or 2.5% of the total. We must also look to what they, and the biographies of some men, imply about the widespreadparticipationofwomeninpopularpietisticpractices. Thisis also evidenced by the many shrines in Morocco dedicated to women, eventhoughmanymorearededicatedtomen. Unsurprisingly,thestudy of female religiosity and religious leadership is hampered by a lack of sources but there are hints that women were powerful cultic figures in LateAntiqueandEarlyMedievalNorth Africa. One ofthe mostfamous leaders of resistance to the Arab-Islamic conquest of the region was the queen or priestess of the Jarawa tribe known in Arabic as the ‘Kahina’, a word meaning a female soothsayer. Other women appear as prophetesses for their tribes, and it is likely that such figures were reinterpreted as Muslim holy women as their communities converted to Islam.
One female entry in the Kitāb al-Tashawwuf seems to speak very much to that dynamic. The entry is simply titled, ‘An anonymous girl’ (Entry112),andisrecountedbyaholymanwhosaysthatheandafellow male mystic, Abu Mahdi, visited this adolescent girl from the Haskura tribewhohadgoneintospiritualretreatinacaveintheHighAtlas. The pair were astonished by her knowledge despite her evident ill-health.
When they returned to the cave, they saw a sublime light which Abu Mahdiunderstoodtomeanshewasdying. Themenpromisedtoinform herparents.Subsequentlyshediedandthemensawherbodyriseinthe air. symbolising her reunion with the Divine. This seems to be an Islamised version of much older beliefs in female priestesses and soothsayers.
My favourite female saint is Munya bint Maymun al-Dukkali (Entry 160), a Berber or Amazigh woman from the tribe that gave its name to the Dukkala Plain north of Marrakesh. Munya came from Meknes in the north of Morocco but lived most of her life in Marrakesh asaholywomanofsomerenown,visitedbythewealthyaswellasmore humble devotees. This placed her in an awkward situation on one occasion. A rich merchant brought her some food. She seemed to hear the gift calling out to her, ‘Do not eat me, I am forbidden!’, but she did notwishtocauseoffencebyrefusingtoeat,soshetookabite. Asaresult, shewasunabletoprayforthreedayswithouthearingaraucousshouting like that used ‘to get dogs to slink off on their bellies’, a psychological disturbance indicatinghersuspicionthatthe merchant’sfood musthave beenpaidforby ill-gottengains.
Munya’s biography also sheds light on the wider involvement of women in popular piety and mysticism, as it says that she visited a religious retreat near Marrakesh called Ribat Shakir, where she played a leadingrole inthe activities of the many visitors to theretreat, including ‘1,000femalefriendsofGod’. Whilewecannottakethenumberliterally, it does suggest that women went to Ribat Shakir in large numbers and that many were considered spiritual adepts. This is corroborated by another anonymous female biography (Entry 207) of an elderly holy woman from Marrakesh who purportedly fell from her donkey while travelling back from Ribat Shakir with a night caravan. Although scantily clad in rags, her modesty was preserved by an illusory white cloth when some men when back to help her. The cloth was nowhere to be seen in the morning, at which point someone helpfully explained the miraclebysayingtheyrecognisedherasaholywomanfromMarrakesh.
Al-Tadili’s dictionary is hagiographical, so we cannot take these anecdotesatface-value,buttheydoshed anintriguing lightonreligious andsocialimaginariesintwelfth-century Morocco. Thiswas a periodof trenchant social change across the Islamic Western Mediterranean in which the spread of popular mysticism enabled previously excluded
groups to join the ranks of religious professionals. The lack of an education in Classical Arabic ceased to be a bar to public recognition as a religious authority and, in fact, humility and humble beginnings, gave manyholy menaddedlegitimacy,asAbu Madyan’sstoryshows. Other groups in society also benefitted from the shift in notions of religiosity, especially those of darker skin, who were often perceived as beingoflowersocialstatusandsub-Saharan,paganorigins. Colourwas not important in the presence of charismatic power and a failure to recognisethelattercouldledtothetemporaryreversalofpowerrelations as we saw with the governor of Azzamur brought low by his refusal to listen to Abu Shuʿayb. Finally, the dictionary also sheds light on the elusive role of women in the medieval religious sphere. Although the number of female biographies is frustratingly small, they do provide snapshots of a world in which the priestesses of the pre-Islamic past reappear as Muslim holy women in the company of crowds of female followers and as authorities respected and consulted by their male counterparts.
I hope to continue to explore al-Tadili’s dictionary and other medievalArabicsourcestofindoutmoreabouttheplaceswheremystics gathered,studiedandwereburied. Thisbottom-uplookaturbanismand landscape will complement my research on royal foundations and their significance, due to be published sometime next year as The Medieval Maghrib: Cities, Patronage and Power. It will add historical depth and background to Morocco’s contemporary abundance of shrines of all shapes and sizes, many dedicated to the holy men and women who began to secure their place in the hearts and minds of the population whenal-Tadiliwas writinghis Kitābal-Tashawwuf.
AKBennison
(Photos: A K Bennison)
This piece is based on my article, ‘Sainthood and social boundary-crossing in medieval Islamic North Africa’, al-Masāq 36: 2 (2024): 176-193 which gives a bibliography for the many other works I drew on to produce it. (https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2024.2325318)
The conception of Evolution as proceeding through the gradual transformation of masses of individuals by the accumulation of impalpable changes is one that the study of genetics shows immediately to be false. Once for all, that burden so gratuitously undertaken in ignorance of genetic physiology by the evolutionists of the last century may be cast into oblivion.
William Bateson, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity (1909), p 289
There is a widespread popular construction of scientific revolutions as singular events which unfold, bolt-like and final, in the blink of an eye. NameslikeGalileo, NewtonorEinsteinaretypicallyinvokedasthoseof mythical figures with a miraculous capacity single-handedly to transform the way we see the world. It appears, however, that the kind of sweeping, dramatic breaks of paradigm which we have come to associatewithscientificrevolutionsareratherhardtocomeacrosstoday. One may speculate and be forgiven for it that this is the result of certainchangesinthenatureofacademicwork,bywhichtheprogressof researchhasbeenthrottledtomakespaceforanever-swellingvolumeof
inescapable paperwork. But the truth is that, rather than stalling, scientific progress is now considerably faster than it has ever been. The actual reason why sharp and sudden scientific revolutions of the kind encountered in popular science books are nowhere to be found today, is that such events are not revolutions in the usual sense of the word. Instead of cataclysmic changes, these are painfully protracted processes which require decades of cumulative scientific work to mature and develop. Whilebothsciencepopularisersandscientiststhemselves not to mention the film industry are very often guilty of misrepresenting scientific discoveries by filtering them through an almost Wagnerian dramatic lens, the reality is that, in the academic world, every great conceptual shift must be slowly percolated, rather than poured, into the pool of accepted knowledge. The double-helix structure of the DNA molecule,forexample,nowhailedasthecentralbiologicalbreakthrough of the second half of the twentieth century, was regarded by many as little more than a theoretical possibility years after it was first proposed. EvenSirIsaacNewton,thatarchetypeofscientificgenius,hadtoendure a decades-long intellectual war of attrition with his Continental competitors before his law of universal gravitation became widely acceptedoutsideBritain.
Among the documented cases of gradual, unfolding scientific revolutions, one stands out for being both particularly interesting and surprisingly obscure; this is the story of how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection came to be the main unifying idea of biology. Contrary to popular belief, this was no swift revolution, but rather a drawn-out process of fierce scholarly debate which began with the publication of Darwin’s ideas in 1859, and which would not relent untilthelate1940s. Duringthisperiod,thedifferentiationofbiologyinto several new disciplines created the conditions for a chasm to develop between classically trained naturalists and a new breed of experimental biologists. As a result, evolutionary thought split into two mutually opposed currents which were only reconciled with the eventual developmentofa unifiedtheoryofevolution.3
During his lifetime, Darwin witnessed his theory of natural selection gain acceptance and esteem among a small circle of naturalists
3 E Mayr, ‘Some Thoughts on the History of the Evolutionary Synthesis’, in The Evolutionary Synthesis (Harvard University Press,1980).
and evolutionary biologists. This cadre of early Darwinians included AlfredNewton,aFellowofMagdaleneandthefirstProfessorofZoology at Cambridge, who wrote: ‘I never doubted for one moment, then nor since,thatwehadoneofthegrandestdiscoveriesoftheage adiscovery all the more grand because it was so simple’.4 Newton was one of the foremostornithologistsofhisday. HespenthiscareeratMagdaleneand, like former Master A C Benson, died of heart failure in his rooms at the Old Lodge (this was in 1907, only three years after Benson’s arrival at Magdalene). BothmenareburiedintheAscensionParishBurialGround, offHuntingdon Road.
Notwithstanding the appreciation of Newton and others, Darwin never experienced the ultimate development of his theory into the undisputed cornerstone of biology which it is today a status best encapsulated by Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous aphorism that ‘Nothinginbiologymakessenseexceptinthelightofevolution’. Infact, it might be difficult for present-day biologists even to conceive the extremes of opposition which so-called ‘Darwinism’ faced throughout thelatenineteenthcentury,and untilas lateasthe1930s.
Professor Alfred Newton by Lowes Dickinson (1891)
4 A Newton, ‘Early days of Darwinism’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 57 (1888): 241-49.
At the time, Darwinism was only one among several discordant theories attempting to explain the processes whereby biological species develop. Some of these, now referred to as ‘essentialist’ theories, were built on a notion of species as uniform ‘lines’ of virtually identical individuals, each made in the image of an unchanging ‘essence’ a concept plainly borrowed from Platonism. Essentialist thinking therefore rejected the existence of significant natural variation within a species. On the other hand, ‘populationist’ theories viewed species as populations composed of distinct, unique individuals, and thus inevitably carrying a substantial degree of natural biological variation; examplesofsuchvariationcouldbe differences inadultsize,coatcolour orleafshape. Furthermore,sometheoriespresumedtheexistenceof‘soft inheritance’, characterised by the notion that the hereditary material (what we now call ‘genes’) can be altered to some extent through the interaction of the organism with its environment. Lamarck’s theory of evolutionbyinheritanceofacquiredcharactersstandsoutasanotorious exampleofthiscurrent,positingthatanyphysiologicalchangesacquired byanindividualduringitslifewillbeinheritedbyitsdescendants. Other theories, in contrast, admitted only ‘hard inheritance’, by which the hereditary material cannot be modified through interaction with the environment, meaning that the characters acquired by an individual during itsownlifearenotpassedto itsoffspring.
Modern biology has supplied overwhelming evidence against the notionofsoftinheritance;weknowthat,atleastinanimals,thegermcells which transmit an individual’s genes to the next generation are sequestered away from other tissues, such that environmental modification of the genetic material in these cells is prevented. Nevertheless, this does not include systemic exposure to certain aggressive agents not normally found in nature, such as X-rays and chemicalcarcinogens,whicharecapableofinducingchangestothegerm cells’DNA. Furthermore,whilerecentdiscoveriesofheritableepigenetic changesinsomespecieshavebeenarguedtochallengethenotionofstrict hardinheritance,the validityofsuchargumentsremainsunder debate. It might therefore come as a surprise that nearly all the early theories of evolution, including Darwin’s, allowed some degree of soft inheritance. In particular, Darwinism originally assumed a certain plasticity of the genetic material, such that it could be modified to an extent through the use or disuse of certain organs during life; Darwin
believed that such a process would assist natural selection in allowing species to adapt effectively to their environment. Some of Darwin’s supporters, notably the biologists August Weismann and Alfred Russell Wallace, later developed an elaboration of Darwin’s theory known as ‘neo-Darwinism’, which rejected the possibility of any kind of soft inheritance. Remarkably, through his own extensive studies of natural populations in Southeast Asia, Wallace had independently arrived at a theory of evolution which was fundamentally similar, though less developed, than Darwin’s; it was knowledge of this which finally spurred Darwin to publish the theory on which he had been quietly working for two decades. In 1858, before the publication of Darwin’s book,heandWallacedecidedtopresentasummaryoftheirconclusions inajoint communicationtotheLinneanSociety.5
Basedonprinciplessuchassoftandhardinheritance,essentialism and populationism, a diverse array of evolutionary theories was put forward between the 1860s and the 1940s, of which Darwinism was seldom among the favourites. The chief factor compelling authors to support one theory over another was their particular field of expertise; andthenumberandvarietyofsuchfieldswithinbiologywasexpanding as never before, with emergent disciplines including embryology, cytologyandecology. Yet,fromthestandpointofevolutionarythought, one of these new sciences was undoubtedly more impactful than any other: the science of genetics, born out of the unexpected rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’slawsofbiological inheritance inthe year 1900.
The early geneticists several of them working in Cambridge built on the knowledge recovered from Mendel’s writings and began developing a detailed understanding of the principles of genetic mutation and inheritance. The spark of this new understanding, however, far from kindling any concerted progress in evolutionary biology, served to ignite a long and vicious conflict among the different biologicaldisciplines.
From the outset, the founding fathers of genetics stood in oppositiontoDarwin’sideaofnaturalselectionasthemaindrivingforce in evolution. Both the first geneticists and the earlier palaeontologists
5 C Darwin and A R Wallace, ‘On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology, 3: 9 (1858): 45-62.
interpreted their own observations as being plainly in accordance with the hypothesis that new biological forms emerge by means of discontinuous change, or ‘mutation’. A mutation was defined as a discretemodification ofthegenetic materialcausinga visibleandoften
Illustration of the inheritance of seed characters in pea (from Fig. 3 in Bateson 1909).
A plant from a variety with green round seeds, when fertilised with pollen from a variety with yellow wrinkled seeds, produces yellow round (YR) seeds (F1). In genetic terms, this indicates that the characters of ‘yellowness’ and ‘roundness’ are both dominant. When crossed among themselves, however, the seeds borne by these new plants (F2) present a distribution of characters which is closely predicted by Mendel’s laws of inheritance.
disruptive physiological change in the organism. Such events, the geneticists argued, would sometimes result in the instantaneous transformation of an existing species into a new one, without the productionofintermediateforms. Thistheory,whichdrewimplicitlyon essentialist principles, was known as ‘saltationism’ because of its belief in speciation by ‘saltation’ a large evolutionary leap leading from one form to another. It provided a counterpoint to Darwin’s theory, which
relied on a ‘gradualist’ conception of evolution derived from populationist thinking, whereby species give rise to new species in a gradualmanner,throughacontinuoussuccessionofintermediateforms. Outlandish as it may seem today, saltationism fitted the experimental observations of geneticists, as well as prior palaeontological evidence, remarkably well. The extreme sparsity of the fossil record meant that palaeontologists could not witness a continuous progression of forms linking two related species, whereas geneticists were accustomed to working with uniform stocks of nearly identical individuals typically plantsormice asameansofminimisingexperimentalinterference. The mutants produced in these genetic experiments presented dramatic physical modifications which were inherited by their offspring in accordance with Mendel’s laws. It seemed logical, then, to suppose that mutations such as these, infrequent but highly disruptive events, were the force behind the origin of new species. In the geneticists’ defence, however, we now know of cases where new species have indeed emergedthroughasingulargeneticalteration,suchastheduplicationof the entire genome in some plants. The idea of speciation by saltation is therefore not impossible, although saltationism as a theory lacks the generalityrequiredtoexplain theevolutionofmostknownspecies.
Furthermore, there was an additional problem plaguing Darwinism. Thephysiologicalbasisofinheritancewasentirelyunknown inthenineteenthcentury,andDarwinhadimplicitly maderecoursetoa theory known as ‘blending inheritance’, according to which an organism’s constitution is a smooth average of its parents’ constitutions. TherediscoveryandconfirmationofMendel’sworkquicklyprovedthat inheritance does not operate in this way, but rather through the segregation of discrete, individual genes from parent to offspring. Indeed, it could be shown mathematically that blending inheritance would lead to a situation where every individual in a species would displaytheexactsameformofeverytrait,renderingevolutionbynatural selection impossible.
GeneticiststhusarguedthatDarwin’sentiregradualistconception of evolution, based on continuous variation, blending inheritance and naturalselection,wassimplyuntenableinthelightoftheirexperimental results. Some of the most distinguished early geneticists, including T H Morgan and William Bateson a Fellow of St John’s who translated Mendel’s work into English and coined the very term ‘genetics’ went
sofarastodeclarethatgeneticshadfinallyputanendtoDarwinism(see Bateson’s words at the beginning of this article). It should be borne in mind, however, that genetics was itself a controversial discipline at the time,composedofmultiplecompetingstrands;andtheearlygeneticists, or‘Mendelians’,werejustasanxioustoestablishthevalidityoftheirown viewsonheredityasweretheDarwinianstoseetheirevolutionaryideas vindicated. Moreover, despite their opposition to Darwinism, the contributions of this first generation of geneticists most notably the elucidation of the laws of heredity, the discovery of genes and chromosomes, and the refutation of the notion of soft inheritance would ultimately prove essential to the refinement of evolutionary theory.
Incontrasttothegeneticists,thosebiologistswhohadbeentrained as naturalists, including zoologists and botanists, were used to deriving their conclusions from the direct study of natural populations, and they insisted that their observations of natural diversity were in perfect agreement with Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. The true root of the disagreement probably lay in the complete lack of communication between the two camps: naturalists and geneticists not onlyheldcompetingtheories,butalsofollowedverydistinctapproaches to scientific enquiry, pursued divergent biological questions, attended different meetings, read and published in different journals, and even employed distinct vocabulary, including incompatible definitions for such fundamental terms as ‘species’ and ‘mutation’. In addition, geneticists appeared to view naturalists as speculation-lovers who were incapable of subjecting their ideas to proper testing, while naturalists tended to dismiss geneticists as narrow-minded experimentalists who lackedexperience of realnaturalpopulations.
Misunderstanding and resentment compounded easily in such an atmosphere, gradually carving an ever-deeper chasm between both disciplines. An astonishing proof of this circumstance occurred when a younger generation of theoretical and experimental geneticists among them,SirRonaldFisher, JBS Haldane,SewallWrightandHJMuller begantoobtain,fromthelate1910s,freshresultsdemonstratinghowthe accumulation of effects from many discretely inherited genes can give rise to the continuous diversity described by naturalists (see figure below). ThisdemonstratedhowMendelismandneo-Darwinismwerein fact compatible yet did little to bridge the gaping divide between
geneticists and naturalists. Instead, because of the alienation brought about by constant hostility, scholarly communication was impaired to such an extent that the naturalists would spend decades persevering in theireffortstorefute thealready obsolete ideas oftheearlier geneticists.
Illustration of Ronald Fisher’s (1918) ‘infinitesimal model’, explaining the emergence of continuous biological variation from the combined contribution of a large number of discrete Mendelian genes, or loci. Each row in the diagram presents a simulated distribution of population values for a trait determined by an increasing number of individual genes. The bars on the left-hand side indicate the individual effect of each gene contributingtothetrait (rangingfrom onlytwo genesin thetopcaseto500in thebottom case). The right-hand side provides the corresponding distributions of trait values in the simulated population, showing how the values for a trait become more normally distributed as the number of genes increases. This explains why many physiological characters in humans and other species follow a normal (or Gaussian) distribution. (Credit: Chamaemelum/Wikimedia Commons)
Inthisway,naturalistsandgeneticistsfollowedseparatepathsfor thefirst three decadesof thetwentiethcentury,eachdraggingtheirown conceptualburdens:thenaturalistsheldobsoleteviewsaboutthenature of genetic mutation and inheritance; the geneticists were hampered by
saltationist ideas and by the belief that the evolution of species could be understood by extrapolation from the evolution of single mutations in experimental settings. Even as late as the 1930s, when crucial experiments in artificial selection, together with the work of the first mathematical geneticists, were demonstrating beyond any doubt the realityofevolutionbynaturalselection,specialisttextbooksstilllistedup tosixpotentiallycorrecttheoriesofevolution.
This stagnant atmosphere finally cleared in the 1940s, mainly through the insight of one palaeontologist, George Simpson, and two zoologists, Julian Huxley and Bernhard Rensch. Perhaps the only scientistsoftheirgenerationwhohadamassedaprofoundknowledgeof the latest advances in each of the relevant disciplines, they published three independent books describing how the findings of zoologists, botanists, geneticists, palaeontologists and others could be integrated into one self-consistent theoretical framework to explain the entire evolutionary process.6 In his book (published first because of circumstances arising from the Second World War), Huxley christened this new theory with the name by which it is known today: the ‘modern evolutionary synthesis’. The modern synthesis states that the gradual evolution of species can be explained in terms of the accumulation of myriad genetic mutations with generally small effects, in conjunction withrecombination(theshufflingofgeneticmaterialasitispassedfrom parent to offspring), and the action of both natural selection and stochastic processes on the genetic diversity produced by mutation and recombination. Onekeyfeatureofthetheoryisthatitexplainshowthese low-level genetic and selective mechanisms give rise to high-level evolutionaryprocesses,includingtheoriginofspecies,generaandhigher taxonomic levels.
Theforgingof themodernevolutionarysynthesis wasnot in itself ascientificrevolution,butrathertheconclusionofaprotractedparadigm shift initiated by Darwin and Wallace nearly a century earlier. Such a conclusion did not entail the victory of one scientific tradition over another, but the fusion of two radically different conceptual
6 J Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (Allen and Unwin, 1942); G G Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (Columbia University Press, 1944); B Rensch, Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre (Enke, 1947).
frameworks naturalism and experimentalism into one whole. For such a milestone to arrive, several obstacles, grown through the persistent isolation between the opposing camps, first had to be cleared up. In the end, this was achieved by those who, rather than focusing on theirownnarrowspecialism,weresufficientlycurioustolearnaboutthe advancesmadeinotherfields,andsufficientlyopen-mindedtonoticethe commonalities latent underneath the conflict. The legacy of the modern synthesis was the unification of evolutionary biology into a single field; after its arrival, the discord and hostility which had reigned for half a century gave way to widespread agreement. And the bridges erected then would remain solidly in place until the present day: although there is still debate about aspects of the theory such as the conceptual implications of epigenetic memory and horizontal exchange of genes between organisms the basic framework of the synthesis has remained essentially intactsincethe1940s.
The history of the modern evolutionary synthesis, our current framework for understanding evolution, is of value to scientists and historians alike. The long series of discoveries and conceptual advances linking Darwin’s original theory to our unified interpretation of the evolutionary process provides an illuminating example of the consequences of such phenomena as have manifested themselves time and again in the history of science: resistance to new ideas, deficient communication compounded by semantic differences, and excessive specialisation leading to tribalistic sentiments of superiority toward foreign disciplines. Hopefully, this story also offers a lesson in how exploring the history of scientific ideas allows much deeper understanding than the mere study of their definitions; for while definitions carry a pretension to simplicity and finality, the history of science conveys the truth that science is a living process, the progress of which is fundamentally arduous, incremental, and positively fraught withquarrel.
DAVID C CLARY, Walter Kohn: From Kindertransport and Internment to DFT and the Nobel Prize (London: WorldScientific,2025,300pp)
In a world where politicians wage war on defenceless international scholars and students, David Clary’s new book shows the resilience of individual scientists and their international community in ‘unwavering dedication to progress’ through the remarkable life of Walter Kohn. This splendid biography provides a timely accountofKohn’slifeandscientific contributions, both in research and in community building, during a periodinthehistoryofsciencethat is often neglected but remains crucially relevant to the present day.
For those who work in condensedmatterphysics,materialsscienceorchemistry,Kohn’stheory revolutionised the entire field. His theoretical work laid the foundation for computing the complex properties of atoms, molecules and solids, whicharenowreferredtoas‘firstprinciple’calculationsandwidelyused in an umbrella of applications from catalysis and drug discovery to quantum materials. For those unfamiliar with his work, this book represents a story of personal strength and intellect. Kohn survived devastating circumstances, often with the help and goodwill of many strangers and mentors and rose to shape modern science through both research breakthroughs and scientific leadership. Most notably, he created a supportive environment that continues to advance science and championsethical andsustainablepractices.
Following a chronological order, the first third of the book reveals a sense of helplessness in the face of external events and of the vulnerability of individuals – and scientists especially - to political
targeting. The artistic and liberal atmosphere of Vienna before the First World War sharply declined in the 1920s and 1930s, and the excellent education Kohn received was abruptly interrupted after the Anschluss (the union between Austria and Germany) in March 1938, just after his fifteenth birthday. He had ‘to learn as much and as quickly as possible’ in a Jewish school in days when he witnessed the highly traumatic Kristallnacht. HeescapedfromViennaononeofthelastKindertransport trains just one month before the German invasion of Poland. He was never reunited with his parents. Having arrived in Britain, Kohn was labelled an ‘enemy alien’ and transported to Canada to live in barracks in a remote internment camp for two years. Despite his superior education in physics and mathematics, as a German national he was denied entry to the Chemistry Building of the University of Toronto. Back in Europe, many of his family members and school friends ended upinAuschwitz. Helatertoldthemediathathiscontributionstoscience werehis‘wayoftryingtohelplivehis lostfamily’slives’.
The further three chapters of the book trace Kohn’s academic pathway at Harvard, Pittsburgh and San Diego, explaining how he established himself as a leading theoretical physicist in an ideal environment provided by a supportive and collaborative community. Here, David Clary offers extensive use of Kohn’s own scientific publications and his correspondence with colleagues. This is the most inspiringpartofthestory,especiallyforearlycareerresearchers. During his fixed-term tenure, Kohn developed his own procedure for doing research by collaborating intensively with another researcher to solve thoroughly a key problem. His close interactions with a far-ranging, mostlyinternational scientificcommunity,andinparticulartheInstitute forTheoreticalPhysicsinCopenhagen,BellLabs,andtheEcoleNormale Supérieurein Paris, provedvitalforhisscientificachievements.
The final part of the book highlights Kohn’s contributions to both his own field and beyond. The discussion includes his award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and how his scientific leadership, notably as inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, extended to the promotion of international exchange and supportforfuturegenerationsofyoungscientists. AsaNobellaureate, he felt greater responsibility for academic politics, especially on issues such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and systematic persecutions against vulnerable ethnic groups. His leading question remains as
pressing today as when he first asked it more than two decades ago, ‘whatare yougoing todonext time?’.
Despite this telling reminder of current challenges, this book provides a happy ending for David Clary’s trilogy on scientists during theSecondWorldWar. Withhisresilienceandintellectsupportedbythe internationalscientificcommunity,WalterKohnsurvivedasuccessionof tumultuous events in the twentieth century to become a pre-eminent theoretical physicist who left a scientific legacy that still influences researchinphysics,chemistryandmaterialssciencetoday. Andhemore than repaid the community that supported him by his promotion of ethicalscience andacademicfreedom.
SARA CAPUTO, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel (London:ProfileBooks,2024,352pp)
In 1795, Admiral Hugh Cloberry Christian failed in attempts to engage the French fleet in the Caribbean. Infact,withheavyloss of life, the convoys under his command failed twice to advance much beyond the English Channel. Afterforty-sevendaysof violent storms that kept blowing his ships back to Portsmouth, he halted his endeavour until a third attempt in 1796 finally succeeded (and included the seizure of St Lucia and other islands). Dr Caputo describes the chart that trackedhismovementsas‘a tangle ofdesperatezigzags’. Theepisode typifies a book brimming with histories of brave and sometimes madseafarersandtheiruse of maps and navigational charts. Inanother
chapter, we learn that the ship Blackbraes, a steel=built three-master sailing from Newcastle in 1899 took ten days shy of a year to reach San Francisco largely because of the legendary squalls around Cape Horn. The terrors of the journey are reconstructed from a day-by-day chart drawn by a boy on board, even though ‘the sea tangled these tracks almostbeyondlegibility’. Afootnoterevealsthecharttobepreservedat theNational MaritimeMuseum,anotetypically generousinadditions –inthiscase,tellingus whereanimageof the Blackbraes canbefound.
By themselves, these accounts offer an engaging history, but the author’s latest book is much more than that. It follows from her Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (reviewed, Coll Mag 67, 2023 24, pp 146-47) as an analysis of maritime exploration and the maps that attempted both to assist voyaging and to describe the accomplishment andoftentragedy. Suchtrackingatseadiffershugelyfromthemapping of terrestrial routes which are fixed, materially changing, and exactly replicable by travellers. Sara Caputo’s objective is to prioritise the personal cultures of adventure mission and to contrast these with the contingency of charts and maps. These drawings and publications are the power-driven agents of invasion and colonisation, and subject to exaggeration,erroranddeliberatefalsehood. Navalneedsdirectedlater scientificrecordingofseafaring,butasthisbookinsists,eventhesefailto revealmotivation,planning,execution andconsequence.
The book is accompanied by numerous helpful and fascinating illustrations, twenty-four in striking colour and lending weight to the arguments about the types of visual representation. A satellite image of shipping tracks on part of the Atlantic also adds to the consideration of post-eventreconstructionofseavoyages. Thereisacertainparallelhere with air travel, at least in the intangibility of the mapping if not in the moreassuredroute oftravel(atleastaswebelieve ittobe).
This sweeping history opens with T E Lawrence’s copy of the Odyssey with its striking printed round map of the Homeric Mediterranean. For its owner ‘empire was a blank map to be filled with personal stories’. In contrast to the nineteenth-century imaginings of Odysseus’s travels (one indeed created by Gladstone), ancient accounts emphasisetimeandactionintravelratherthanspace. Journey-linepaths originate from the perspective of the traveller, not from some imagined bird’s-eye view from above. The chapters which follow continue to
question our perception of the cartographical and its relationship to maritime travel and why and how it was undertaken from the early sixteenth century onwards. The achievement of the book is to make us reconsider how movement across seas and oceans has been represented inwaysthathideanddistortthedepictionsofseajourneysintheWestern world. Supporting characters and adventures abound, from Drake’s often untraceable expeditions to the use of navigational and modern surveillance techniques by the British navy. En route we encounter the missions,amongothers,ofCaptainCookwhoreturnsfrequentlytothese pages (including in exhausting acknowledgements that attest to the depth of research). Many mappings conform to a typology, to an instrumentalambitionfororderandownershipovertheunorderableand unpossessable. The vignettes make clear the violence and casualties hiddenbyhistoriesdrivenbymap-ledagendasofempowerment. When AdmiralChristianfinallymadeittoStLucia,GrenadaandStVincent,he not only swept away the French but brutally suppressed local insurrections, and as Sara Caputo stresses, launched a tsunami of executions, deportations and re-enslavements. To his successors in the Admiralty however, his name lived on as the originator of freakish ‘Christian Gales’
JRRaven
The northern lights over First Court in October 2024 (Photo: Andrea Joukal)