Martlet 2012

Martlet Newsletter of Pembroke College Cambridge Issue 16 Spring 2012

Back to the Future The Master, Sir Richard Dearlove

Contents 3 University Challenge Success 4 Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy 5 London’s Office Market Crisis 6 The First Dyson Lecture 7 The Cooks’ Lecture 8 Christians of Bethlehem 9 Saudi Shia and the Arab Spring 10 Pembroke and the Shahnama 11 Pembroke Development 12 Pembroke Admissions 13 Gossip 15 Poet’s corner

Published by Pembroke College Cambridge CB2 1RF Telephone 01223 339079 Email: martlet@pem.cam.ac.uk Editor Alex Houen Gossip Editor Colin Wilcockson Illustrations Martin Rowson © Pembroke College 2012 Photography and illustrations copyright of the owners Design Cambridge Design Studio Print Victoire Press

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s I reach the end of the term of my original election as Master it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on Pembroke’s progress over the last eight years and to assess where Pembroke is today and where we aspire to be in the challenging new funding environment for higher education which starts this October.

I was fortunate to begin my Mastership at a time when the College had laid strong foundations in three crucial areas. It had raised its academic reputation and ambitions and placed itself firmly in the top quintile of Colleges (judged by their Tripos results). It had become one of the benchmark Colleges for Oxbridge college fundraising. It had built up a world class Fellowship that shared a common view about Pembroke’s future and how to work towards it – and amongst the Fellows, debate about the future was the path towards agreement rather than division. The College has therefore been able to operate efficiently as a cohesive community, and I now understand enough about the detailed workings of colleges to realise that this describes a situation that should be cherished and protected. Though College governance works best when Fellowships act together as a community, it is not how things necessarily are, and therefore it is not to be taken for granted.

Eight years on, the College can claim, without hubris, to have built ambitiously and successfully on these foundations. With the occasional slippage in some subjects, it has maintained good Tripos results and become one of the most sought after colleges for undergraduate applicants: Pembroke is amongst those colleges with the highest number of applicants per offer made. This year a record number of applicants to whom we could not offer a place were advanced by the College to the admissions pool, and many of those applicants were picked up by other colleges.

Our fundraising has been consistently successful year on year and we have now comfortably passed the £25-million target for the endowment campaign ‘Excellence in Perpetuity’ that we set ourselves to reach by July 2012. Just as important, however, has been the College’s ability to generate income (mainly through its in-demand international programmes), at a level comparable to wealthier colleges with larger investment incomes, and to administer itself with great efficiency through a difficult financial period. In consequence the endowment has grown more or less consistently, and we have been able to reduce the rate at which we draw down income from the endowment. This is an important achievement and will help us to cope with the likely increase in the number of students requiring some financial assistance as a consequence of the increase in fees.

The fees increase presents a formidable challenge, both immediately and in the longer term. During the last year or so Pembroke has exercised significant influence amongst the colleges in helping to promote and model the concept of college-generated financial support for ‘the squeezed middle’ (the support about which I wrote in March, in an e-mail letter to members). However, having put together a response for one set of funding problems, as they relate to our undergraduates, we also have deep concern about the long-term impact of the fees increase on graduate studies.

We anticipate that new graduates, with accumulated debt from their three or four year undergraduate courses, may be discouraged by that debt burden from continuing with graduate studies (either one year MPhils or three year PhDs, or both). It would be a retrograde step if graduate

studies could only attract those who could afford them.

Pembroke is currently among the four most popular colleges among applicants for post-graduate study. So another challenge for Pembroke will be to build, in parallel with bursary funds for undergraduates, significant funds to support graduates.

So as I look towards the next three years of my Mastership (after the welcome sabbatical which I am about to enjoy) what will be Pembroke’s primary objectives?

First and foremost, of course, to maintain the highest of academic standards, at undergraduate and graduate levels, and to continue to attract and retain a world-class Fellowship. A condition of Fellowship must continue to be the willingness to make a contribution to the life of the community, mostly through teaching and pastoral support to students, but in other ways as well. Secondly, to drive the endowment towards £100 million, and beyond, to ensure that we can maintain these standards in all aspects of Pembroke life. Having just passed the £50 million mark, this may seem ambitious, but I am confident, given the phenomenal and sustained support of the wider Pembroke community, that such a target is realistic and achievable within a decade or so. Thirdly, to ensure that when the University eventually reaches a decision about the development of the Mill Lane site (on which matter there has been some positive movement) a significant part of it will be for Pembroke. This will ease the pressure on the College site and provide a unique opportunity to expand adjacent to the College, rather than out of town. In line with the University’s decision to expand graduate numbers, we would also be able to add significantly to our stock of graduate accommodation. It is difficult to put a timeframe on this, but I would be pleased if we at least have a green light for the project by 2015, with outline planning permission and the University having taken all the necessary decisions that would allow us to work out how the project might be best financed (at a likely cost of somewhere in the region of £20 million). This is one of those issues on which the College can afford to think and plan long-term, such is its importance viewed within a perspective of generations.

Finally, I should add one less tangible objective of overriding importance which is to ensure that ‘Pembroke remains Pembroke’. Members generally will not need me to spell out in detail what I mean by that. Suffice to say it is about our values, about inspiring and holding the loyalty of members, about cherishing and protecting our identity, but responding with flexibility and imagination to social change as well, and achieving that subtle blend of being at the very cutting edge of higher education globally, while drawing inspiration and confidence from the College’s rich and varied past. I also relish the prospect of returning in the autumn to lead Pembroke along the path that I have described until 2015.

University Challenge Edd Bankes reports on Pembroke’s success in this year’s competition

Pembroke’s 2012 University Challenge finalists with Jeremy Paxman: (left to right) Edd Bankes, Ben Pugh, Bibek Mukherjee (captain), and Imogen Gold.

Edd Bankes is a second-year English student from Kent who aspires to be Roald Dahl. His academic prowess was underlined by his Director of Studies whose official career advice was that he should go to Eastern Europe and get a job stacking shelves. After memorising every capital city at the age of 8 in an attempt to make his parents take more interesting holidays, this knowledge proved useful for advancing Pembroke’s first University Challenge team past Round 1.

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espite keeping the result secret for nearly a year, and inadvertently (and accidentally) convincing the vast majority of college we had in fact won, March 19th saw Pembroke finish as runner up in the 41st series, and 50th anniversary, of the best programme in the world, University Challenge. Very early on, I feel it is important to offer our hearty congratulations to Manchester, who managed to combine a formidable breadth of knowledge with that rare skill of being personable and rather likeable, a feat not managed by all the teams we happened to meet.

Given they had to endure a 400 question selection and regular training sessions, they certainly deserved it. Their opposition? A team of five chosen from a 20-minute pub quiz, who chose their captain by flipping a coin and for the lack of alternatives, named Eurovision as their specialist area of knowledge.

Luckily for us, the expectations were quite low. To be the best Pembroke team of the modern era, we simply had to progress past the first round, after which we could revel in our own greatness, at least within college. From the outset, unbeknownst to us, a lot more was expected, when in the selection quiz, Ben Pugh’s individual score was higher than most of the universities that made the programme.

And so the stage was set for the first showdown, against St Anne’s Oxford, where our initial nerves were offset by a clear flaw in our opponents’ preparation. Waiting in the dressing room – shared by The Jeremy Kyle Show, with the makeup artists happy to tell us the moral dilemmas discuss in the previous week – both teams were forced to make polite conversation while watching the episode that would be broadcast before ours being filmed. It soon emerged that St Anne’s could answer nearly every question posed, particularly when it came to dinosaurs. Unfortunately, it soon dawned on them that all of this demonstrated knowledge was bound not to come up, and Pembroke sneaked to a 65-point victory.

Through this combination of lulling opponents into a full sense of security and occasional moments of pure brilliance, we managed to progress steadily against Nottingham, Balliol College and Cambridge’s own Clare straight into the semi-finals without losing a match. With

each round, I was personally able to fall over most pieces of the set and get my own name wrong more than once, and it became a tradition that we would outright fail to answer any of the warm-up questions posed by Roger Tilling (the announcer whose voice is known to all, who made the most of the opportunity, moving out of the shadows to sit in Paxo’s chair). But this was no impediment to a team who could name internet codes, call on their knowledge of Greek derived nouns or recognise Girls Aloud in less than half a second, and in our third trip up to Manchester, we found ourselves in the final four, alongside Manchester, UCL and Worcester, Oxford. With what seemed to be half of Pembroke in the audience politely applauding, though thankfully blocked from view by a large floor camera, our last two games were an absolute pleasure to take part in, even when, about 7 seconds into the final, it became painfully clear we weren’t going to win.

A few thank-yous. Firstly to all the crew behind University Challenge, who looked after us throughout our time on the show, as well as writing all of the questions.

Secondly to everyone who came to watch the episodes being filmed, and were able to keep the results secret for nearly a year. And finally, there must be a shout out to the Duchess of Cornwall and Jeremy Paxman, as it provides a convenient way of talking about them. Despite his public demeanour and dubious choice of college, Paxman was an absolute delight, eventually revealing his disappointment that too many teams take the show too seriously and don’t treat it more like a pub quiz. He was kind in commending Pembroke for managing – from a team solely composed of undergraduates (take the hint) – to succeed where 125 or so teams had failed and finish runner up to fantastic champions. And of course the wonderful Camilla, who stepped in – how I don’t know – to change the producers’ plans from presenting the trophies at Manchester’s Student Union Bar to a champagne reception at a royal palace.

Unfortunately the presentation couldn’t be shown in its entirety, after she made it last more than 15 minutes by her insistence on talking to us. Because of University Challenge, I can now claim to have sustained conversation with the Duchess of Cornwall about her choice of wallpaper, and if that isn’t enough to demonstrate the wonder of UC, I don’t know what will.

The Pembroke team after the final at Clarence House, with the Duchess of Cornwall and Jeremy Paxman.

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Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy Jonathan Bronitsky reports on the 2012 Adam Smith Lecture by Charles Moore

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n 6 February in the Old Library, Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s authorized biographer, former editor of The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Daily Telegraph, delivered Pembroke’s second Adam Smith Lecture in Political Economy, entitled, ‘Has the “Iron Lady” rusted? Margaret Thatcher and the crisis of capitalism’.

Given Moore’s credentials, no one in the audience that packed the Old Library was surprised that he defended Baroness Thatcher. After all, the legacy of the former Prime Minister, arguably the greatest modern political advocate of capitalism, is seen to be teetering on a precipice due to the ‘credit crunch’. Offering a comprehensive and balanced assessment of that legacy, Moore sought to safeguard Thatcher’s reputation by positing that the mode of economics that has flourished since the collapse of the Berlin Wall has proven to be a far cry from the purportedly noble, gentle, and moral capitalism of Adam Smith to which she subscribed. ‘If this was Thatcherism’, Moore remarked of the recent trend in economics, ‘it was vulgar Thatcherism’.

Moore laid bare the stakes for Thatcher and, indeed, all proponents of capitalism. Most in the West, he maintained, believe that they have been living and working within an unambiguously free-market system since the end of Soviet Communism and, therefore, capitalism must be primarily responsible for the global financial meltdown. Moore conceded that Mikhail Gorbachev’s claim that ‘bourgeois democracy’ was a system ‘designed to fool people about who really controlled the levers of power’ appears more apposite today than it was when it was uttered in 1987. Further, he admitted that it is difficult to discount the Marxist contention that society’s ‘superstructure’, which is comprised of central banks, regulators, governments, courts, and even the media, either allowed or failed to prevent the creation of an unfair playing field on which citizens were fooled into thinking ‘that their activities were essential to the growth of prosperity and opportunity’.

The body of Moore’s lecture comprised an explication of two aspects of Adam Smith’s thought that have most informed Thatcher’s own attitudes and, specifically, her opposition to the self-styled wisdom of recent generations.

The first was Smith’s ‘faith in the capacity of human beings to make their own living honestly and well, if only governments will let them’. It was this ‘moral’ principle of ‘unlocking the natural desire for self-betterment’ that governed her approach to tax, regulation, privatisation, property and the relationship between trade union leaders, workers, and the public. Thatcher’s second ‘Smithian inspiration’, and the one that Moore emphasized, was ‘the powerful perception that commerce is too valuable a thing for it to be ultimately controlled by businessmen’. Thatcher, like Smith, believed that commerce was to be an activity transparently operated by the many, not an endeavour to be opaquely manipulated by the few.

This conviction is what caused her to challenge those with vested interests who alleged ‘without their monopoly, there would be dangers to health and safety, or national security’.

As such, Thatcher understood that bankers and financiers were just as prone as bureaucrats and trade union leaders to conspire against the public. Moore noted that it is ‘an irony of history more apparent than real’ that Thatcher was personally close to very few bankers. ‘Just as she was suspicious of the Foreign Office because she thought it was for foreigners, so she was suspicious of the Bank of England

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Charles Moore (middle) with The Master and Dr Madsen Pirie

because she thought it was for bankers, and therefore trying to frustrate her efforts to control the money supply’.

Moreover, while Thatcher was in favor of deregulation, she aimed to prevent nationalized industries becoming private sector monopolies. Moore acknowledged that she was not always successful in this area, notably in gas.

‘Contrary to her own myth, she was not invariably mistress in her own house’.

To that end, Moore proffered a series of concessions that appeared to preempt any claim that he was engaged in little more than ‘whitewashing’.

In particular, he affirmed that several of Thatcher’s initiatives were ‘certainly part of the context, if not the cause, of the credit crunch’. They included the abolition of exchange controls in 1979, the reduction of the top rate of income tax from 83% to 40%, and the ‘Big Bang’ of deregulation in 1986.

Moore also critiqued Thatcher for not having fully recognized ‘the tension between her belief in the importance of global free markets and her equally strong belief in the independence of the nation state’.

In her support for the European Single Market in the mid-1980s, she ‘ignored the problem that this was part of a political project which was intended to smooth down competition rather than promote it, and to take power away from elected governments and transfer it to fonctionnaires in Brussels’. Finally, she ‘gave in to her ministers’ and fastened Britain to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, causing it to be ‘chained to and then broken by the needs of a newly reunited Germany’.

Still, on the whole, Moore was overwhelmingly sympathetic to Thatcher. It is a testament to her foresight and perseverance, he professed, that ‘almost no one’ calls for a return to the economic system that prevailed in Britain before May 1979. What is fair is that the Iron Lady be judged like every other mortal, one who, by virtue of being human, was limited in her capacity to survey the manifold complexity of society. ‘In any event’, Moore himself stated, ‘no one who currently holds a position of power in the world has worked out how to establish a right relationship between the democratic answerability of independent nations and the free movement of people, money, goods and services in a world where the exchange of that money and those services is often transacted not in weeks or months or years but in seconds’.

The Adam Smith Lecture in Political Economy is kindly endowed by Dr Madsen Pirie (1996).

Jonathan Bronitsky (2009) is a PhD candidate in History at Pembroke, whose dissertation is an intellectual history of neoconservatism. He received his undergraduate degree from The Pennsylvania State University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and his MPhil is from Peterhouse. He spent several years in Washington, D.C., working in foreign affairs at a think-tank and a crisis management firm.

Jonathan is the Associate Director of The Henry Jackson Society in Cambridge and a member of the 1347 Committee.

All Fall Down?

Colin Lizieri on London’s Office Market in the Financial Crisis

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London’s financial district by night.

Colin Lizieri is a fellow of Pembroke College and the Grosvenor Professor of Real Estate Finance in the Department of Land Economy.

Before joining Cambridge in 2010, he was Professor of Real Estate Finance at Henley Business School, University of Reading. Colin’s research focuses on commercial real estate finance and investment and global office markets. He has an undergraduate degree from Oxford, a PhD from the London School of Economics and is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Among his publications are Towers of Capital (2009), and (with A. Baum and J. Reinert) Who Owns the City? (2011).

n discussions of the origins of the global financial crisis, popular attention has focussed on housing – before the sovereign debt crisis, we talked of the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage crisis. All around the world, house prices fell and borrowers defaulted on loans. But much of the ‘toxic debt’ in banks is actually loans on commercial property: offices, shopping centres, warehouses and hotels. For example, in 2008, RBS’s commercial real estate loan portfolio stood at £107 billion – and much of the bad debt is found there.

In the ‘bubble’ phase before the crash, the UK real estate industry borrowed heavily, that leverage inflating prices. Bank of England figures show total commercial property debt growing at 18% per annum between 2002 and 2007, growth that excludes mortgage-backed securities and other exotic debt vehicles created at that time. Newly created funds bought overpriced real estate using debt: funds that were highly vulnerable to a change in market sentiment and falls in values.

When the fall came, it was dramatic. UK property capital values fell 12% in the second half of 2007; they were 28% below their peak by the time of the Lehmans crisis and continued falling until August 2009. At their nadir, they were 44% below the peak, at levels last seen in 1993. While equity markets fell a similar amount, they regained much of their losses. Commercial property’s recovery has been, at best, anaemic and, as I write, prices are falling again. House prices, by contrast, fell by just 21% before stabilising.

For residential borrowers with long mortgages, a fall in prices may lead to negative equity for newer borrowers, but falling interest rates make mortgages more affordable.

Most can wait in the hope that prices recover: default levels in the UK are very low, by contrast to the USA. But most commercial real estate loans are far shorter and are usually interest only. An investor buying an office for £50 million in 2007 might have borrowed 70% of the value, a loan of £35 million. Forced to refinance in 2012, the property might now be valued at £33 million. They might be able to borrow 60% of the value: say £20 million. But they must repay the £35 million originally borrowed. The incentives to default at this point are high: many investment funds have little option.

The largest single commercial real estate market is the City of London office market, by far the largest office cluster in Europe. Given the huge concentration of global financial firms in the City, it is unsurprising that prices fell fast, halving in value between 2007 and 2009. This fall, though, is not unique: City office values fell by 55% between 1989 and 1992. Capital values, adjusted for inflation are barely a third of their 1986 values. Nor is there any evidence that rental income is more robust in the City than elsewhere. Buying City offices looks a terrible investment.

Nonetheless, the City still appears to be a target market for global investors. Data on capital flows consistently shows London as the leading target for international investors, alongside New York. Remarkably, this dominance increased after the financial crisis. International financial centres such as London captured a still greater share of investment despite the global crisis and the poor performance of their office markets.

Andrew Baum (St John’s) and I have tracked the changing ownership of City of London offices since the 1970s. Our research shows that over half of the office space in the City is owned by non-UK investors. As recently as 1980, UK owners controlled 90% of the space, but the ‘big bang’ era saw a rapid increase in foreign investment; by the end of the boombust cycle of the new century 52% of space was owned overseas. 60% of space built since 2000 is owned abroad.

Germany and Japan are the largest owners, but we have identified 35 different national owners, and many vehicles are owned by international funds that pool investment from many countries.

At the same time, the nature of ownership has changed.

In the 1980s, ownership was dominated by ‘traditional’ landlords: the Livery companies, UK pension funds, and longestablished property companies. Now ownership is fragmented and more financial: private equity funds, offshore investment vehicles, highly geared real estate firms and, more recently, sovereign wealth funds and even wealthy private individuals.

That international investment interest in City offices remains so strong is puzzling. If investors are rational, then they should be wary of committing capital to a market that has offered such poor returns. As I point out in my book Towers of Capital, office markets in global financial cities seem particularly vulnerable to shocks as the tenants paying the rents, the owners of the buildings and the lenders providing capital are typically international financial service firms, locking cities together to the tides of global capital markets. Why, then, does capital still flow to London? Are investors lemmings?

One plausible reason may be liquidity. Given the scale of market, investors can be confident that they can place large amounts of capital quickly and, more importantly, can sell and exit without major constraints. Another factor may be openness and transparency – information on the market is readily available and expertise exists to support investors. But much of the explanation must be more behavioural: investors seeking safe havens in troubled financial times and wanting to be in London for prestige and status reasons – echoed in the prime central London residential market, similarly dominated by non-UK buyers.

That the London is seen as a safe haven can be seen as a vote of confidence in the continuing role of the City as a global centre, despite the shift towards China and other emerging nations and despite Europe’s economic woes. Yet this global ownership brings risks, particularly where those owners’ motivations are driven more by short-term profits than long-term stewardship. The City survived the global financial crisis, but remains vulnerable to capital flight and the volatility of financial markets.

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‘Let us go then, you and I. . .’

Mark Wormald, the Senior Tutor, reflects on the legacy of A.E. Dyson (1949) and on the inaugural Dyson Lecture given by Paul Muldoon

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n my twenty years at Pembroke, I can’t remember a more exciting time for writing in College than the current academic year. Peter Clarke (1976) has generously agreed to fund a prize to promote clarity in science writing; Nicola Riley, in the memory of whose father Brian (1971) Pembroke has been hosting an annual Declamation Prize on a European theme since 1995, has herself funded three Masterclasses by the National Academy of Writing, led by its Director, the Pembroke novelist Richard Beard (1985). The two held this year, including talks by writers on their writing life and Richard’s public edits of student narrative prose, have been electrifying. But even more memorable was the inaugural Dyson Lecture, for which an audience that filled the Old Library was held rapt for much longer than the average lecture on the last Friday evening of the Michaelmas Term.

It was no more than either the man we were honouring or our inaugural lecturer deserved.

Anthony Edward Dyson (1949) was born in 1928, in Paddington, and his childhood was blighted by a stammer, and shyness. He was, his contemporary and great friend Brian Cox recalled on his death in 2002, gawky, and wasn’t supposed to run because of a heart murmur. Unfit for military service, Tony Dyson spent two years working as a clerk in the Ministry of Food, before coming up to Pembroke on an open Exhibition to read English in 1949.

Here he found his feet and his tongue. After the delights of the English Tripos and three years as a research student he accepted a University Lectureship at the University of Bangor, before moving in the early 1960s to the new University of East Anglia at Norwich, where he was eventually appointed Reader. It was a career that combined great range and great loyalty to the poets and friends he encountered at Cambridge. With Brian Cox he edited Modern Poetry: studies in practical criticism (1963), which was to become a bestselling textbook, and launched the journal Critical Quarterly in 1959. Other books included Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony (1966), and Yeats, Eliot and R. S. Thomas: Riding the Echo (1981). He edited selections of modern poets, among them Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and R. S. Thomas, and also wrote on Dickens and the modern novel.

But Tony Dyson was more than a literary critic. He was a campaigner on two fronts. One was as a teacher, against what he and Cox saw as teaching’s possible dilution: they published a series of Black Papers against the excesses of progressive education and comprehensive education.

He also did brave pioneering work to decriminalize homosexuality. In his late twenties, he wrote a high profile letter to The Times, signed by A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, J. B. Priestley and Clement Attlee, in support of the 1957 Wolfenden report. He went on to found the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and then with Priestley set up the Albany Trust to serve the needs of gay people. A furious and copious letter writer, he showed enormous courage in this work, at a time when the police could have investigated his private life. And at the heart of that private life was Cliff Tucker, senior executive at British Petroleum. They lived together for some 35 years.

Now, Tony Dyson clearly left his mark on generations of students and on the atmosphere and culture of

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contemporary Britain. This contribution has still to receive its due acknowledgement. But he also left a legacy to his old College, in the form of an endowment in 2002, ‘to fund an annual or bi-annual lecture called “The Dyson Lectures” to be given by a respected critic or poet, on the writings of William Blake, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare or R. S. Thomas, each poet to be chosen in each series of six lectures.’

Some ideas take too long to mature. But the first of our Dyson lecturers could hardly have done this one more justice. To describe Paul Muldoon as ‘a respected critic or poet’ would be to neglect complementary aspects of a formidable trajectory through the world of Irish, English, and American letters since his first collection New Weather (1973). The most significant English language poet born since the second world war, he was Oxford’s Professor of Poetry between 1999 and 2004, and since 1987 has been based at Princeton university. He’s also poetry editor for the New Yorker. The latest of his dozen or so linguistically dazzling, playful, and demanding collections is Maggot (2010). And he brought all those gifts to his lecture entitled ‘The Love Song of T. Stearns Eliot’. Beginning with a rich reading of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, delivered as he wandered up and down the aisle, the lecture itself took us on a beguilingly charming yet brilliantly erudite tour of the five centuries of literature, music, art and culture that Muldoon finds in that poem: from Eliot’s own youth in contemporary Parisian streets to the troubadours and back, via Nerval and Baudelaire, to the moment of our common reading. It was an extraordinary performance, before an equally unforgettable dinner in his company.

How to top that? Well, join us to find out: Bernard O’Donoghue, renowned poet and critic himself, will be giving the second Dyson Lecture on Yeats on 8th May. Visit the College website for more details.

Tony Dyson

Paul Muldoon

From Bread and Dripping to a Royal Wedding Stephen Halliday (1964) reports on the fourth annual Cooks’ Lecture

O From left to right: David MorganHewitt; Geoffrey Osborne, current Master of the Worshipful Company of Cooks; and Brian Turner.

Stephen Halliday graduated from Pembroke in 1964 and joined the food industry where he made his principal contribution to human welfare by introducing Hellmann's Mayonnaise to Great Britain. In 1998 he completed a PhD on Sir Joseph Bazalgette which became his first book, The Great Stink of London. He has recently seen the publication of his twelfth book Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: the Olympics (David & Charles, £9.99). He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Jane, and coaches Pembroke’s novice rowers.

n Friday 11th March 2012, Pembroke hosted the fourth lecture to be given in Cambridge by the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London, a London Livery Company. The audience in the Old Library was drawn from the University, the city and members of the Cooks’ Company who travelled from London. There were two speakers: Brian Turner, CBE, a Michelin-starred chef who has made many appearances on the BBC’s Food and Drink and Ready, Steady Cook programmes; and David Morgan-Hewitt, manager of London’s Goring Hotel which achieved international celebrity in April 2011 when it provided a temporary home for the Middleton family as they prepared for the wedding of Catherine Middleton to Prince William of Wales. Each speaker gave a roughly chronological account of his progress from the foothills of the hospitality business to its summit.

Brian Turner began by reminding the audience that in France, the traditional home of haute cuisine, it is customary for leading chefs to claim an ancestry in the profession stretching back for generations. He traced his own more modest roots to his father whose early career as a graphic designer for the Morley Co-op was inhibited by the fact that the goods he was encouraging shoppers to buy, such as oranges, were severely rationed. He was rescued from the limitations of this career when he was conscripted into the Catering Corps, which has an excellent reputation for training fine chefs. His success in developing a number of successful transport cafes – serving such delicacies as bread and dripping and bacon, sausage and tomato-dip sandwiches – was constrained only by the tendency of Her Majesty’s Government to impose compulsory purchase orders on the successive premises that he occupied. This had the effect of encouraging the young Brian to make an unusual choice of subjects at Morley Grammar School.

Eschewing the usual male subjects of carpentry and woodwork he chose instead to study Domestic Science, thus earning himself the envy of his fellow males for his proximity to the girls studying the subject, as well as the hatred of the girls for his superior skills. This experience led (via Butlin’s in Bognor Regis and a part-time job as a lavatory cleaner in the Charing Cross Road) to Simpson’s in the Strand, the Savoy Grill, and Claridges. His first Michelin star came in 1971.

David Morgan-Hewitt’s entry to the hospitality industry was very different. His father wanted him to study law at Cambridge with a view to becoming a distinguished and wealthy lawyer, a prospect which held no attractions for David at all. How many of us know just how he felt! Instead, he studied history at Durham university. There followed an interval in an eccentric establishment dealing with a chef whom he delicately described as “a bastard” and a restaurant manager whose obsequiousness when

dealing with customers was exceeded only by the insults he levelled at them when they were out of earshot. On one occasion he was informed as he waited to announce that dinner was served, that the chef, dissatisfied with the vegetables, had thrown them out of the window. Further drinks were duly served. This listener was reminded of gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.

The speakers concluded by reminding the audience of the way in which British cuisine and hospitality have developed over the past thirty years. As hotel chains have become formulaic, cuisine itself has become more imaginative and widely understood. One of the influences has been the development of the chef as a television personality. Some credit for this must be given to Anthony Worrall Thompson whose recent misadventures should not blind us to the fact that it was he who persuaded Peter Bazalgette to include chefs on his seminal Food and Drink programme. Incidentally, Peter Bazalgette, recently knighted for his services to television, though an undergraduate at Fitzwilliam College, was taught the mysteries of Roman Law by Pembroke’s James Campbell who will be remembered with affection by many Pembroke Alumni.

And not all hotels are formulaic or attached to chains.

The Goring Hotel which David manages was opened in March 1910 by Otto Richard Goring and is still owned by the Goring family. Its adoption by the Middletons had two unexpected consequences. David had taken a three-month sabbatical before the wedding, suggesting not so much that he has nerves of steel as that he has no nerves at all. Having returned two days before the event he handed over his much-loved hotel to the Metropolitan Police and watched, presumably in dismay, as the Boys in Blue dismantled it room by room, bed by bed and drawer by drawer in a vain search for nefarious materials. The second unexpected event was a happier one. David’s father is now reconciled to his choice of career. It’s wonderful what a royal wedding can do.

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Global Mobility and West Bank Internment Research Fellow Jake Norris writes about his research on Christians of Bethlehem

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can still clearly remember the first visit I made to Bethlehem in 1999. Stepping off the tour bus I was immediately accosted by half a dozen or so hawkers trying to sell me what looked like very tacky souvenirs – crosses, rosaries, even small models of the Church of the Nativity. Adamant I had come to discover the ‘real’ Palestine (Bethlehem lies just over the Green Line inside the West Bank), I refused their advances and made a beeline for the smaller streets that radiate out from Manger Square, only to find that they too were lined with souvenir shops.

This somewhat disappointing experience was initially reinforced when I returned to Bethlehem to carry out PhD fieldwork in 2007. I instinctively found the high concentration of tourist shops to be distasteful and deliberately avoided them during my early days and weeks there. In time, though, I became aware of Bethlehem’s long and distinguished history as a centre of artisanship, particularly in olive wood and mother-of-pearl carving, and the reliance of the town’s economy on the sale of these wares to tourists and pilgrims. While I had been quick to dismiss the many souvenir shops as the ‘inauthentic culture’ that results from the mass tourism of our contemporary era, I slowly came to realise that these stores had for centuries been the lifeblood of Bethlehem’s economy. Scan through the reports of travellers, both western and eastern, who visited the town from as early as the fifteenth century, and virtually every one of them will provide descriptions of the artisans who sold their products to pilgrims and tourists congregating in Manger Square.

These days, the artisans of Bethlehem have become the focal point of my wider research on the social history of the town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Gradually I have been uncovering a forgotten world of craftsmanship and commercial mobility in this most famous of Christian Arab towns. In the nineteenth century in particular, merchants from Bethlehem established successful businesses in all corners of the world, initially peddling products from their hometown and typically branching out at a later stage to a greater range of import-export enterprises. Given Bethlehem’s unusually high Latin Catholic population, merchants from the town were especially successful in the big trading entrepots of the Catholic world such as Manila (where much of the raw material for mother-of-pearl was purchased), Veracruz, Port-au-Prince and Marseille. An important part of this story revolves around the cultural exchange that took place between Bethlehem’s community of Franciscan friars from Europe and the local Arab population. From the fifteenth century onwards the Franciscans began to commission local artisans to produce replica models of the holy shrines of Palestine – based on exact scale drawings – in order to feed Europe’s growing thirst for knowledge of the biblical sites.

Examples of these beautifully intricate models can be found today in many of the world’s most prestigious historical collections, including the British Museum where I have been working as an advisor for a forthcoming exhibition.

The souvenir shops lining the streets of Bethlehem today represent the continuation of that tradition, selling as they do a range of ‘holy’ products from the smallest trinkets to enormous carvings that can cost as much as $20,000.

Rather than tacky expressions of our current ‘global age’, they should be viewed as expressions of Bethlehem’s longstanding position as a crossroads of trade and pilgrimage, as well as testaments to the remarkable

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Left: ‘Mother-of-Pearl Workers of Bethlehem making beads for rosaries’, wood engraved antique print, published in Picturesque Palestine (1875).

Below: author’s photograph of a Bethlehem-made replica model of the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem, probably from mid-17th century. Held in British Museum.

entrepreneurial skills of its population. Today Bethlehem’s diaspora communities are spread out around the globe and are especially concentrated in Chile, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador. Many of them have become highly successful and wealthy in a range of fields, from banking, to industrial production, to software design.

For those who remained in Bethlehem, however, life has become increasingly hard. The pronounced mobility of the nineteenth century has given way to the restrictions of life under Israeli military occupation in the twenty-first. So closely tied to Jerusalem in terms of their spiritual and commercial life, the Christians of Bethlehem can no longer access the big city that lies just six miles to the north without a special permit from the Israeli authorities. While women and children are usually able to obtain these permits at least once a year during the Easter festival, most men under the age of fifty have severe difficulties and are often unable to accompany their families. Economically, the Israeli occupation has strangled the tourist industry in Bethlehem over successive decades with regular checkpoint closures and curfews, while the recently constructed Separation Wall snakes ominously around the town, cutting it off from much of its agricultural hinterland. Just as I did in 1999, the majority of tourists come for only an hour or two with Israeli tour companies as part of a whistle stop tour of the Holy Land.

In this climate, Christians are emigrating in greater numbers than ever before, prompting some worried observers to warn that there may soon be no Christians left in the birthplace of the religion. The World Christian Database recently reported that Christians now make up under 2% of the total population in the West Bank and Gaza, compared to 5.3% in 1970. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Bethlehem where Christians accounted for over 90% of the town’s population and are now outnumbered by Muslims by around three to one. In general there remains a shared sense of Muslim-Christian solidarity in the face of a common struggle against Israel’s occupation, but tensions between the two communities have risen noticeably as Christians feel increasingly isolated and under threat. All this is a far cry from the global mobility enjoyed by the town’s merchants in the nineteenth century, and a stark reminder that for many people the process of globalisation and the freedom of movement it entails has significantly regressed over the last century. In the year of the Arab Spring, freedom in Bethlehem remains a distant memory.

Dr Jacob Norris is the Randall Dillard Research Fellow at Pembroke College for 20102013. He completed his PhD at Trinity Hall, in 2010 writing on the subject of ‘Palestine in the age of colonial development, 1908-1948’ – a project which he is currently adapting for publication as a monograph. He is also researching the social history of Bethlehem in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More generally, Jacob is interested in the modern history of the Eastern Mediterranean and its connections with the wider world.

Saudi Shia and the Arab Spring Research Fellow Toby Matthiesen reflects on his PhD fieldwork

Author’s photograph of protests at the ‘Pearl Roundabout’ in Bahrain, 24 February 2011.

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Dr Toby Matthiesen is the Abdullah al-Mubarak Research Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College. He received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2011, the year he also started his fellowship in Cambridge. His work is mainly concerned with the history of the Shia communities in the Gulf, as well as with leftist and Islamist movements in the Gulf.

He is working on a book based on his PhD.

hen I began my PhD, few people thought that I would find enough sources to be able to write a socio-political history of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Sources were scarce, public archives that could be of relevance were almost nil, and access to Saudi Arabia, let alone to study the Shia there, seemed impossible.

Yet, five years after the start of my research, I have more sources than I can use in a single monograph, and the topic has gained new relevance in the light of the Arab Spring.

Given that the Shia are a repressed minority and their history remains largely unknown, my fieldwork took me to libraries, bookshops, religious schools, literary salons and coffee shops across the Arab world and beyond. I started my fieldwork proper in the private archives of Saudi exiles, as well as in the archives of the few scholars that had worked on this topic before. Then I went to Damascus in the summer of 2008 and spent a few weeks with Saudi Shia on vacation there.

Damascus and particularly the shrine-city of Sayyida Zeinab on the outskirts of Damascus are a popular summer holiday destination for Gulf Shia and had previously been a base for various Gulf Shia opposition movements. Slowly making inroads into the different groups and gaining their trust, I gathered pamphlets, letters, petitions as well as books in Damascus and Sayyida Zeinab. At the weekends I often took one of the old American cars that serve as shuttle taxis between Damascus and Beirut, not only to enjoy summer in Beirut but also to interview academics, journalists and activists, and gather more sources. While the sectarian undertones of the uprising in Syria may lead to an uncertain future for the Shia suburb of Sayyida Zeinab, it was still a bustling suburb in 2008, and perhaps the most important transnational hub for Gulf Shia, as Iraq was still plagued by security risks and Iran often seemed to be out of bounds for pilgrims for political reasons.

In the autumn of 2008, I went to Saudi Arabia via Bahrain, at the invitation of an institute that hosts foreign researchers and academics. I was able to complete various trips to the Eastern Province, as well as to Jeddah on the Red Sea. Sadly, the official libraries and research centres in Riyadh contain almost no relevant material on the Shia of Saudi Arabia, as the mere existence of the Shia was largely purged from official historical narratives. Therefore, I had to rely on oral history, family, village and town histories, as well as

opposition publications, which have detailed Eastern Province politics since the 1950s. But even these publications are most often not publicly available, neither in the Arab World nor in the West. So, after my fieldwork in 2008, various trips led me to private and public archives in the UK, the US, Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon in order to uncover the political history of the Eastern Province and the Shia in Saudi Arabia.

While I had repeatedly argued in writing that the situation in the Eastern Province was extremely tense, the Arab Spring caught me, like almost everyone else, by surprise. I had long arranged a last research trip to Bahrain in February 2011 in order to visit some private archives on the history of the leftist and communist movements in the Gulf.

Little did I know when I stepped off the plane in Manama on February 15, fifty kilometres or so from the Eastern Province, that this trip would not be about history but about history in the making. The day before, tens of thousands of protesters, both Sunni and Shia, had responded to a call on Facebook for a ‘Day of Rage’ in Bahrain and later stormed the central ‘Pearl Roundabout’ to set up a tent city modelled on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Despite promises to family and friends that I would stay away from the protests, I was standing on ‘Pearl Roundabout’ on 16 February. Everybody that I wanted to interview seemed to be heading there and so a friend took me in his car, which we parked in the endless mass of empty cars that surrounded ‘Pearl Roundabout’ and added a whole new dimension to the human protests. Lenin's famous statement that ‘there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’ describes last year's uprisings in the Middle East surprisingly well, and particularly those in the Gulf.

For decades, public discourse has been cleansed of actual politics, deals were made in secret, crony ministers or royals – and there are many – could not be criticised. It seems as if Arabs, and indeed young people across the world were waiting for something to rally around, something that could galvanise protests. Even as violence, and perhaps civil war, seems to be the outcome in some states, the barrier of fear has been broken, forever. And this will define Middle Eastern politics in the 21st century. Nothing will remain the same, for the counter-revolutionary forces are sweeping through the streets, dividing the protesters along regional, sectarian or tribal lines. In essence, this was the Arab moment, realising the dream of the old Arab Nationalists: a supranational space bound together by the use of Arab language in poetry, politics and the media.

But the protests also inspired others around the world. A day after I had taken the train down from Cambridge to defend my thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I took a stroll around the Occupy London protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and references to the Middle East uprisings were everywhere; Tahrir/Liberation seemed to be the new catch-all phrase.

Naturally, these events have also had an influence on my work. I do not belong to an older generation of political scientists or scholars of the Middle East, who were convinced of the enduring and self-fulfilling nature of Arab authoritarianism or the inherently passive nature of ‘Orientals’ or Muslims in general. Recent events have overturned the basis for such arguments. In the years to come, it will be key for political scientists and scholars of the Middle East to explain the Arab Spring, and rewrite the more general literature on Middle Eastern politics, contentious politics and revolutions.

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Pembroke and the Millennium of the Persian Shahnama Firuza Abdullaeva

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ast year the world celebrated the millennium of the completion of the Shahnama, and Cambridge joined the wave of celebrations washing the globe from Tehran, Washington, Dublin and Berlin to Lahore, London and St Petersburg by hosting one of its most successful shows in the last decade Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (September 2010 – January 2011).

The opening of the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, curated by Dr Barbara Brend was made possible by the generous support of the Iran Heritage Foundation and other Iranian benefactors, and coincided not only with the anniversary of the beginning of American hysteria against the Muslim world but with the establishment of the Cambridge Shahnama Centre.

This Centre is a continuation of the Cambridge Shahnama Project set up in Cambridge by Prof. Charles Melville of Pembroke and Prof. Hillenbrand of Edinburgh University. The Project was originally set up Prof. Jerome Clinton of Princeton University; when Prof. Clinton contracted terminal cancer, Profs Melville and Hillenbrand brought the Project over to Cambridge. Since then, it has provided a spring-board for the careers of several academics who are now at the peak of their careers.

The Fitzwilliam exhibition showed one-thousandth of the paintings collected by the members of the Project from all over the world and preserved in its electronic database, the royal splendour hidden in the manuscripts that were created over a period of 800 years of illustrating the Epic of the Persian Kings in Iran and neighbouring countries. The Fitzwilliam Museum had on display paintings and artefacts related to the Shahnama world borrowed only from British collections. Coinciding with the show, due to the initiative of Dr Zahra Hassan-Agha from Sharjah University, there was a parallel international exhibition in the London Prince’s Gallery. This was dedicated to the modern perception and interpretation of the ancient myths and legends from the Shahnama, presenting the works of famous and young artists from Iran, India, Pakistan, Russia, the US and Australia.

What is the Shahnama? On 8 March one thousand and one years ago an old poet called Abu’l-Qasim Firdousi finished writing his magnum opus, having called it the Shahnama, which could be translated from Persian ‘The Book of Kings’, or ‘The King of Books’. It is in fact both, as it gives a semi-mythological, semi-historical account of the Iranian monarchy from the creation of world (the first man was the first king) until the Arab invasion in the seventh century. It is also still the longest poem written by a single author during the whole history of humankind. Written by a hereditary aristocrat it is a brilliant example of chivalric literature covering all aspects of mediaeval society, which is why it is sometimes called an encyclopaedia of Persian culture.

The poem and its author are surrounded by so many legends that even Firdousi himself could be a legend: we do not have any sources contemporary with him. The earliest surviving manuscript of his renowned poem was produced two centuries after his death. This means that we literally do not know what Shahnama Firdousi wrote, and which copy is closer to the original, as the difference between some of them is enormous. Even his real name is not known: Abu’lQasim Firdousi can be translated as ‘the father of Qasim from paradise’, which was quite a common way to describe yourself in the mediaeval Islamic world.

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He was probably writing his Shahnama as a manifesto for the Samanids, the only ethnically Iranian dynasty of the Islamic period, who ruled from Bukhara, enjoying their last glimpses of splendour, and power. They perished after being conquered by the Turks led by Sultan Mahmud – about whom Firdousi had tried to warn the Samanid kings.

Firdousi was trapped in his own mission: he had spent his life writing the Shanama as a very nationalistic and royalist book about the foreigners invading his country, and now he had to dedicate this book to Mahmud, the son of a Turkic slave and founder of the great empire who invaded his country! Why? Probably his main intention was to save his life’s work from disappearance by giving it to someone who could appreciate its artistic merits. Mahmud was a great literary connoisseur and a great politician: at his court he established a special department of propaganda where the best poets of his time were employed to praise him and his conquests.

Firdousi’s dedication of the Shahnama to Mahmud did not, however, change the tenor of the poem’s contents. Not surprisingly, it was rejected; the Sultan’s department of state propaganda declared the poem worthless, and ridiculed the ideals of Firdousi. Consequently, the Shahnama disappeared for two centuries. What happened next?

Since the thirteenth century until now the stories from the Shahnama have been among the most popular in the Persian speaking world: like Shakespeare’s characters, who have become part of English culture, the Shahnama’s characters are a part of the Persians’ everyday life. The idea of the poem helps individuals and the whole nation to survive the most difficult periods. During World War II British anti-Nazi propaganda used the iconography of illustrations from mediaeval Shahnama manuscripts (see Figure 2). During the latest events of the Green Revolution in Iran the monument of Firdousi in Tehran acquired a green scarf.

The Shahnama Project’s main achievement to date is the creation of an interactive online database of more than 18,000 images from the national museums, galleries, libraries and private collections in the Iran, U.K., France, Russia, Germany, U.S.A., India, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Tajikistan, Armenia, Spain, Malaysia and other countries.

The Project has had a great scholarly and public impact: the website is garnering widespread interest, with 9,000 different users around the world consulting it every day. Now the Project is ready to move to its next stage of expanding the research on Iran – a country which has been an axis of ancient cultures, not of evil.

Figure 1 (left). Firdousi, Shahnama, Shiraz, 1432, illustration of King Zahhak bound on mount Damavand, Bodleian Library, Ms. Ouseley. Add. 176, f. 30 recto.

Figure 2. Anti-Hitler posters by Kimon Evan Marengo (Kem) on the advice of Arthur Arberry of Pembroke, Cambridge, and Mojtaba Minovi of Tehran. The British Ministry of Information, London, March-October 1942.

Dr Firuza Abdullaeva has a PhD from St Petersburg University in Iranian Philology, Art and Islamic Studies. She was an Associate Professor there before moving to Oxford to become Lecturer in Persian Literature at the Oriental Institute, and Fellow and Keeper of the Firdousi Library of Wadham College (20052010). Since October 2010 she has been Head of the Cambridge Shahnama Centre, and an Academic Associate of Pembroke. Her research interests include Persian literature and art, and Russian Orientalism.

Blocking the Brain Drain Matthew Mellor, Development Director, discusses the Endowment Campaign and tuition fees

By the time you are reading this, Pembroke’s Excellence in Perpetuity Endowment Campaign will be reaching its deadline. The aim was to raise £25 million by the end of 2012, and with several months still to go that target has been exceeded by more than £1 million, and probably by £2 million by the end of June.

The first thing to say about this is, Thank you!

Pembroke’s Members and other friends have been broadly and deeply generous. Not only has the endowment grown considerably, even in some of the toughest financial times in living memory, but a huge number of other opportunities have been grasped since the launch in 2007. I would also like to thank, on behalf of the College, Paul Skinner (1963) and his colleagues on the Campaign Board for their extraordinary generosity and wise counsel over the course of the Campaign.

The 2011 Telephone Campaign student team. Thank you to all the Members who responded so generously during the campaign, which raised just over £255,000 for the Annual Fund and the Avenue Fund. Back row, left to right: Merryn Everitt, Peter Hatfield, Jonathan Wall, Olly Budd, Harry Baker, Emma Youngs, Adam Clark, George Ulmann. Front row, left to right: Phoebe Kemp, Christian Harrington, Lucy Fallen, Nikhol Hui, Rebecca Jacobs, Ian Johnson.

The second thing to say is that although the target has been reached, the job is not done! As the Master has written elsewhere in this magazine, there remain strategic priorities and challenges that cannot be met without sustained, and indeed increased, support. We work tremendously hard to develop different sources of support, such as our unique corporate partnership programme, but the support that Members give remains the main source, and it will be all the more important in the years and decades to come.

Even as we have continued to grow the endowment we have turned our attention, in an even more

focused way than before, on meeting the new challenge of supporting students adequately and equitably through their time at Pembroke. The egregious state of affairs that the introduction of tuition fees has brought about is that, with a small number of exceptions, those who arrive at Cambridge least well off will leave with the greatest debts.

For whatever reason, successive governments have seen universities as being the bastions of social engineering, but the truth is that aspirations to come to university are shaped long before UCAS forms are being completed. Universities cannot solve this, and starving them of money will only make it harder.

Just as it is unfair to expect universities, on smaller budgets than before, to solve the ‘input’ problems of low aspiration and inadequate training and apparently poor standards, while holding them to account on precisely these criteria, concern grows for the ‘throughput’.

With the exception of those whose parents can afford to pay tuition fees upfront, UK undergraduates will be leaving university with unprecedented levels of debt. This is just about okay if one’s chosen career is in finance, or commercial law, but it is a great discouragement for people wishing to be teachers, or research scientists, or academics.

The threat of a brain-drain, which has loomed for decades, may now be as real as it has ever been, as postgraduate study becomes possible only for those looking to pursue MPhils and PhDs in better funded environments, such as the USA, Brazil, or China. Scientific and social innovation, obvious and positive by-products of well-invested postgraduate and academic research, may well drift away from this country. The knock-on effect on the UK universities with global reputations to sustain and acclaimed academics and thought-leaders to retain could be catastrophic, especially in the sciences. This will in turn affect the way these institutions are viewed by home undergraduates and of course by overseas postgraduates, whom we must continue to attract.

So the job is certainly not done. The reason we seek to secure the long-term financial stability of the College is to sustain the cherished freedom to think and teach in the way that has earned Pembroke its reputation for nurturing academic excellence in Cambridge; and now it is clear that we must do far more to ensure that our undergraduates and postgraduates will be properly supported while here.

The College has identified the need to provide at least £200,000 per annum in undergraduate support in addition to that which it already provides over the next five years, and we are evaluating now what more must be done to meet the challenge of postgraduate funding.

The consequences of the introduction of significantly increased tuition fees clearly affects not only those who might wish to study here as undergraduates but also has a potentially damaging effect on the long-term prosperity of the nation.

Britain does not have huge natural resources to sell and exploit, but it has a disproportionate number of leading universities which do bring this country acclaim – this is why it matters that you support Pembroke and Cambridge, now more than ever.

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Admitting Aspirations Caroline Burt, Admissions Tutor

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have spent just over two years as Admissions Tutor at Pembroke and that, as well as the fact that 2011 saw the most extensive changes to Higher Education funding for some time, makes this a particularly good time to update you on recent trends and developments. As many of you will know, I inherited a very healthy situation from Susan Stobbs and Mark Wormald: by the time I started in post in October 2009, applications had for a number of years been both high in number (with one of the highest ratios of applications to places in Cambridge) and strong; and there is no doubt that the calibre of our students at entry has had a considerable, though of course not exclusive, bearing on academic performance within the College. This being so, we were concerned about the impact of the introduction of higher tuition fees on applicants, particularly from those with more limited family incomes. However, while it will take some time for the full effect of the recent changes to become clear, the news so far has been good: Cambridge has been one of the few English universities to see a rise in overall applications this year, and that was mirrored in Pembroke. Indeed, this year’s applications to the College from UK students were 3% higher than back in October 2009. It therefore looks as though the rise in fees has perhaps had the effect of emphasising the value of the unique student experience that Cambridge offers, which, if correct, would be very encouraging news.

That does not mean, of course, that we can forget about financial need, and the College is working hard to put in place new student support structures to complement what is offered by the University and the government. Doing this will, I am sure, contribute to the continued popularity of Pembroke with the widest constituency of students, which will in turn help safeguard our current tradition of academic success. Maintaining our appeal is not, however, only about making clear the financial

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support we can offer; it is also about emphasising the exceptional student experience that Pembroke can offer.

Conveying this remains central to our efforts, and both I and our Schools Liaison Officer, Laura McGarty, regularly go to schools and receive visits from potential applicants, and our Open Days are as heavily subscribed as ever. With valuable assistance from a very dedicated team of student helpers, Laura has also energetically driven forward a number of specific programmes since she started with us in 2010. They have been broad and successful in their appeal and impact: our summer school each July, for example, brings about 70 Year 12 students to Cambridge for three nights. Meanwhile, the Science Masterclass for Years 10 and 11, run by Pembroke alumnus Bill Merrick and his colleague Alan Jarvis, aims to inspire bright students to think hard about choosing to study science subjects in the sixth form and beyond. There is also our Southwark Ambitions Project, co-organised with St Catharine’s College and UCL, which we hope will help raise aspirations in a borough of London which faces many challenges.

I have so far emphasised our commitment to continuing to recruit the brightest students. In order to charge the £9,000 tuition fee, the University had to make commitments to the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) about targets in respect of diversity of intake, one of Cambridge’s proposals being to admit 61-3% of its students from UK maintained sector schools. Many of you will be concerned to know where this target came from and the extent to which its acceptance by OFFA will result in fair admissions.

The target has a very clear empirical basis: the percentage of British students achieving top grades at A Level who are educated in the UK maintained sector (the full details of this can be found at: www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/ undergraduate/research/docs/offa_pi_report.pdf). To aim to admit in line with that proportion seemed sensible and logical, enhancing rather than detracting from our drive for excellence. This metrics-driven approach was based on research in Cambridge in the last few years showing good links between strong school examination performance in the sixth form and likely success in Tripos. None of this makes the process of admitting students any more automatic or less personal – we take as much care as we always did in that respect, for there are, in the end, no perfect indicators of future potential – but it has contributed very constructively to our holistic judgments of candidates The world of admissions moves very quickly, and new challenges are always around the corner, but Pembroke remains in very good health, which is in no short measure directly attributable to the engagement of its fellows, staff, students and alumni, all of whose support I’ve greatly benefited from in the period since 2009. If you are interested in hearing more about, or supporting, any of our initiatives, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Dr Caroline Burt (Caroline.Burt@pem.cam.ac.uk) is Admissions Tutor and Fellow in History. Prior to joining Pembroke in October 2009, she was a Fellow at Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), where she was Director of Studies in History. She is also been Schools Liaison Officer for the Faculty of History. Dr Burt is originally from Manchester and was educated at Loreto Grammar School. She studied History at Churchill College at Cambridge, and an MPhil and PhD in medieval History at Murray Edwards College.