MCBC Report

background, he gained a BA at Birmingham University in English Literature followed by an MA on Coleridge, with a view to a teaching career. But Leslie Tizard, influential minister of Carrs Lane Congregational Church, Birmingham, encouraged a religious vocation and Stanley changed course. He trained for the ministry at New College, London and was awarded the London BD.

His primary calling was as a teacher of Theology and he saw a need to strengthen the teaching of apologetics in the church. So, as a Dr Williams’ scholar, he embarked on studies for the DPhil at Mansfield College and delighted to relate how, having read all the books on the subject in Oxford, he had to spend a final year at Edinburgh University. His thesis, ‘A Study in Augustine and Calvin of the Church Regarded as the Number of the Elect and the Body of the Baptized’ reflected on baptism and predestination to show how the tension between faith and doctrine might be reconciled. Lasting friendships were made during this time.

On obtaining the DPhil, Stanley left Mansfield in 1959. Ordination followed, and his first pastorate at Oundle and Weldon, but after three years he was encouraged by a fellow Mansfield man, Jack McKelvey, to join him as Tutor in Adams United College, South Africa. Jack introduced him to Pam, the college secretary, and later presided at their wedding. But under apartheid, the college was suspect because of its liberal ethos, and in 1967 Stanley decided to return to the UK with his growing family. For the next eight years he ministered at Zion, Wakefield, and briefly at Streethouse and Flanshaw, steering the congregations with determination through the often difficult debates that culminated in their joining the United Reformed Church. In 1976 Stanley was appointed to the newly created post of Tutor in Systematic Theology at Northern College Manchester, where he remained until he retired.

A member of the Society for the Study of Theology, Stanley was respected by the theological guild for his strong grasp of the Reformed tradition. He published a variety of articles on theological and ethical topics, chiefly in the Scottish Journal of Theology. He had a high view of preaching and continued to serve the local and national church faithfully.

Stanley didn’t waste words, and his style as a lecturer could be hard to follow. But students also recall with appreciation and affection his clarity of insight, the simplicity of his sermons at services of ordination, his dry sense of humour and his dislike of pomposity. Friends were left in no doubt that after theology, cricket was his passion.

In latter years, as Pam’s health deteriorated, Stanley devoted himself single-mindedly to her care, supported by their daughters, Jean and Catharine.

Revd Fleur Houston

Ian Hopwood English, 1964

27 November 1944 – 27 February 2020

During his time at Mansfield, Ian served on the JCR Committee and, being good at hitting small balls hard, played for the College at tennis and table tennis. Ever the individualist, Ian is the young man in the black sweater amid a sea of white, featured in a photo of the tennis team of that time displayed in the College Crypt café/bar. He occupied a room at the top of the Champneys Tower with a commanding view of the College grounds and played a role in an impressive, memorable stunt when a bicycle was strung high on a rope suspended between the Tower and the Chapel.

After graduation Ian worked for IBM until 1975 when he became President of a small software house in America. After his return to the UK the following year he was invited to rejoin IBM – something unheard of at the time as that firm had a reputation for never rehiring. He finally left IBM at the end of 1991 to join my parents in buying out my father’s partner, thus affording Ian the opportunity to fulfil a long-held wish and run a family business, joined by myself and in later years by our daughters, from which he took much pride and delight.

Sadly the latter years were very difficult as the unseen and unrecognised frontal temporal dementia wended its silent way through our lives, rendering him unable to function and robbing him of his speech. Oh the irony, that someone for whom words were so important and who was so eloquently articulate, should spend his last years virtually mute. It seems unspeakably cruel. Despite inevitable behaviour changes that caused him to be sectioned, the nurse’s words three years before his death held true: ‘Your husband is a gentleman, and however bad things get he always will be.’ A good, decent man much missed.

Lyn Hopwood

Thanks go to Ian’s best man, Roy Foster (Geography, 1964), who set this obituary in motion and who wrote most of the first paragraph. Roy adds: ‘I have much personal gratitude to Ian and Lyn because at their engagement party very soon after graduation, I met a friend of theirs, Lesley, who became my wife!’

Staff & Fellows’ news

Dr Mark Atherton Stipendiary Lecturer in English Language & Linguistics

Mark’s new book, The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth-Century England, is shortly to be published by Bloomsbury. The subject is one of the set texts for the BA in English at Oxford and at other universities that cover the history of English literature: a poem on loyalty, treachery and solidarity in a time of crisis.

Mark has also recently published a new, third edition of his textbook, Complete Old English, which he recommends for students studying English at Mansfield and Re-gent’s Park to use as a ‘teach yourself at home’ supplement to the module on early medieval literature (part of the Oxford English BA course in the first year).

In February, he spoke at the Polyglot Conference in Edinburgh on ‘What is Old English and how did it sound?’. The talk ended with Mark performing a musical interlude (without his band)! You can watch the video at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=06QNoa-rXfE&feature=youtu.be

Recent publications: Complete Old English, Teach Yourself Series (Hodder, 2019). ISBN 978-1-473-62792-5. New edition.

Professor Ros Ballaster Professorial Fellow in English

Ros has completed her third year in post as Faculty Board Chair in English. She ends her term in autumn 2021 when she will return to her Professorial Fellow duties at Mansfield. This year, she has also published a monograph, Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

In spring 2020 Ros received news that she had secured a grant as Principal Investigator with total funding of £34,000 as one of 12 projects for a UK-Ireland Collaboration in Digital Humanities Networking programme. The ‘Digital Edgeworth Network’ (DEN) is a collaboration between the Faculty of English, the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford), and the National Library of Ireland (Dublin). The project is jointly sponsored and funded by the Irish Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Fell Fund of Oxford University. Its aim is to explore and analyse the manuscript archives of the celebrated author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and the Edgeworth family, currently divided between the Bodleian Libraries and the National Library of Ireland.

The project runs from 1 August 2020 to 31 November 2021 and also supports a Research Assistantship. Dr Anna Senkiw, graduate of Mansfield, took up the post in August.

For more information about research into the Edge-worth papers at the Bodleian led by Ros, consult the Twitter feed https://twitter. com/EdgeworthPapers, blog posts http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ archivesandmanuscripts/2019/03/29/opening-the-edgeworthpapers/ and materials on the English Faculty Open Educational Re-source https://writersinspire.org/writers/maria-edgeworth.

Recent publications: Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Boydell & Brewer, 2020). ISBN 9781783275588. A 35% discount is available through Proofed (publisher’s blog): https:// boydellandbrewer.com/blog/.

Eovaai and the Fiction of Fantasy in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Eliza Haywood, ed T Potter (Modern Language Association, 2020), 155-161. ISBN 9781603294621 (hbk) ISBN 9781603294249 (pbk).

Dr Pam Berry Supernumerary Fellow in Geography

This year, Pam’s work in the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI) has continued to be focused on naturebased solutions. In conjunction with colleagues at the Naturebased Solutions Initiative in Oxford she has co-authored two papers and helped organise the international online conference, ‘Nature-based Solutions Digital Dialogues’.

Recent publications: Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges’, N Seddon, A Chausson, P Berry, C Girardin, AC Smith, and B Turner in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375 (1794), (2020).

Grounding nature-based climate solutions in sound biodiversity science’, N Seddon, B Turner, P Berry, A Chausson, and CAJ Girardin in Nature Climate Change, 82-87 (2019).