Cross Keys 2016

Summer 2016 | St Peter’s College

The Oxford Knee Professor John O’Connor

The Making of the High Table Interview with Robert Hadaway

Napoleonic Treasures The story behind St Peter’s Napoleonic links 1

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

CONTENTS

3

A Word from the Master

4

Development News: Victoria Fangen-Hall

6

Update from the Bursar

8

Feature: Interview with Robert Hadaway (1984)

10

Cover Story: The Oxford Knee

14

Exploring College Archives: Napoleonic Treasures

16

JCR Report: Anna Harris

17

MCR Report: Jacklyn Majnemer

18

Feature: Bringing Brazil to Oxford, Dr Claire Williams

20

Feature: Doing the Maths to Control Mosquitoes, Prof Michael Bonsall

22

Music at St Peter’s: Jeremy Summerly

24

Arts: The Rape of Lucretia, Laura Simpkins

26

Events Overview

30

Staying Connected

32

Events Calendar 2016/2017

Editor: Olga Batty, Alumni Relations Manager The Editor thanks all those who have contributed to and advised on this year’s issue.

With special thanks to Edmund Blok for the majority of portrait and event images. www.edmundblok.com 2

A WORD FROM THE MASTER From late autumn to early spring we watched the centre of the college being dismantled – with bulldozers, dumper trucks, cement mixers, stone cutters and high-vis jacketed builders assembling outside my window on the ground floor of Linton to perform the required alchemy and beautify the quad. Red plastic bollards, aesthetically challenging, have kept us all from sinking into manholes or tripping over mounds of rubble.

But, lo, the ground floor of Latner is now pristine, the outside of it has gone from grey to honey, the new chapel doors are splendid and the paving seems to have some literally illuminating qualities – and the trees have arrived. So for a few months we must enjoy the splendour of it all – with new disabled routes and lighting – until part two of the Perrodo Project begins in the autumn. It is a good time for you to come and have a look around and admire the changes thus far, and ponder the ones to come.

These projects can be exhilarating, draining and nerve-wracking as well as noisy and disruptive, but I find that virtually everyone here understands that improvement cannot happen on so constrained a physical site without some pain, and morale has been sustained.

Not everybody will like everything – but I am optimistic that the vast majority of students, fellows, staff and alumni will see it as a big and overdue improvement.

We are gearing up for a series of events (including an exhibition) to commemorate the contribution made by the college’s founding family – the Chavasses – to Britain’s war effort in World War One. The college was not around then (even if some of its buildings were) but the two VCs awarded to Noel Chavasse for his service in the Royal Army Medical Corps is so signal a reflection of duty and courage that we felt we should do something – details of which you will find in this edition. Please come to anything that takes your fancy.

Elsewhere, there is a piece by a St Peter’s figure of great standing – who also made a striking medical contribution – but a very different one. Our Emeritus Professor, John O’Connor, invented the Oxford Knee bringing together two subjects, Engineering (his own) and Medicine, and here he writes about it.

Many, many thousands of people have cause to be grateful for the creativity that

fused subjects and insights – a perfect example of how a great university should function.

Oxford is propelled by its teaching and research – and St Peter’s academics are involved in a dizzying array of enterprises.

Every morning the press cuttings about Oxford University are circulated, and there is inevitably a host of material focusing on various controversies admissions and the like - but every day too there is a large, often very large, section about academic work, research breakthroughs and Oxford contributions to public debate. It is a quotidian reminder of what really goes on here – and at St Peter’s on many days during term time there are people walking in and out of the college to attend seminars devoted to academic enlightenment and research. You will be able to read here about the research of Professor Mike Bonsall, aimed at controlling mosquito

populations, and, by way of contrast, work on Brazil, masterminded for the University by Dr Claire Williams.

Please do follow our work (and play) on the website or on social media. The college is an institution that works across generations and derives its meaning from a sense of both its past and its future (brilliantly expressed in the piece about the new High Table) and I hope that in the pages that follow you will find reasons to be sentimental and hopeful about St Peter’s.

Mark Damazer, CBE

3

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

DEVELOPMENT NEWS Victoria Fangen-Hall, Director of the Development and Alumni Relations

At the beginning of January I arrived at St Peter’s leaving behind the sunnier climes of Australia where I have been living for the past four years. Whilst meteorologically it probably wasn’t one of my better ideas – arriving back in the UK as winter took its hold whilst summer began in the southern hemisphere – I was excited to be joining the Development and Alumni Relations Office as its new Director. I have taken over the position from Andrew Thomas who has returned to the world of sport, fundraising on behalf of the International Paralympic Committee’s Agitos Foundation.

My career in development and alumni relations started by chance 13 years ago at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University.

Having lived and worked in London up until that point, I relocated to Cambridge with my husband’s work. Wondering what to do and with experience of helping a previous employer with their

Victoria Fangen-Hall 4

philanthropic giving, I made the switch to the other side of the fundraising table and I haven’t looked back. Working in a collegiate setting with dedicated people and engaging with a diverse community reinforced this was the profession in which I wanted to work. A number of relocations later which took me to Northern Ireland, France and Australia, I have always stayed in educational fundraising with the desire to return to the collegiate environment and so I moved to Oxford and St Peter’s after working in the Australian Independent Schools sector.

As I write this article four months into starting I am delighted to be part of St Peter’s at such an exciting time. There is much activity: from the ongoing physical transformation funded by the generosity of the Perrodo family, to the fire brigade rescuing 10 ducklings from the roof of Hannington Hall in early May. The interesting array of speakers continue

College 2016

to talk to packed-out audiences in the Chapel and the musical and sporting life of the college that help us provide a truly rounded education for our students continues with great enthusiasm. Of course this all happens alongside the core focus of the college that is the broad and far reaching academic excellence of the fellows and students. St Peter’s truly has an amazing energy with a transformational vision to match, encapsulated in the Keys to Success campaign.

Launched in June last year, the Keys to Success campaign is well under way. With a target of £35m with the simple yet ambitious aim of making St Peter’s financially secure, it is the college’s first multi-year comprehensive fundraising campaign. It has four key aims focusing on tutorial teaching, student support, upgrading of key public spaces, teaching facilities and bedrooms, and growing the endowment, which is currently one of the smallest of the Oxford colleges. This will provide a stronger financial platform, but importantly, this fundraising focus will help us close our annual funding gap and enable longer-term planning in a constantly changing Higher Education environment. Here are a few highlights:

Tutorial Teaching A key aim of the campaign is to increase philanthropic support for our tutorial system from 20% to 50%.

Whilst paramount to the Oxford way of learning, our world-class tutors are our single biggest expense, but our most substantial asset. Our ambitious goal has resonated with members of our community and donors are supporting the subject they or their family members studied, or areas of cutting-edge research that is important to them. A number of posts are now either fully endowed or supported on an annual basis. This includes Economics, Politics, Earth Sciences and History and we are very grateful to those that have chosen this area to support. Our focus now turns, amongst others, to Engineering, Law and Biology.

Supplementary teaching has been a new initiative this year. Run by St Peter’s tutors for our first year undergraduates in week 0, it provides assistance in core maths skills, essay writing and academic writing skills. This helps those in particular whose background did not equip them ideally for the demands of an Oxford undergraduate course.

Supported entirely by philanthropy from the St Peter’s College Foundation, it

is a great example of us being able to enhance the teaching support we can offer to our students.

Rooms for Improvement The refurbishment of the front of the college, through the Lodge and to Linton Quad has taken centre stage. There is new paving and the ground floor of the Latner Building has been renovated to create two meeting rooms, whilst the chapel has had two new doors added to the north side.

The summer sees the long overdue upgrade of the JCR, which will be completed in time for the start of the next academic year. Thanks to three key donations from Steve Wilcock, Clive Rutherford and Neil Warriner and alumni support from the recent telethon campaign, the project is funded entirely by philanthropy. As the building work continues the JCR becomes even more of an important space for undergraduates.

This refurbishment will certainly bring the JCR in line with the improvements made to other parts of the college.

Student Support St Peter’s aims to ensure a student can accept their place regardless of personal financial circumstances and through

the generosity of our community we continue to play our full part in ensuring Oxford has some of the most generous bursary provisions for undergraduate and graduate students. Alongside this, we have recently been able to enhance support for our choir, sporting clubs and reading parties that allow students to take full advantage of all there is on offer at St Peter’s.

At the time of writing the college has secured £16m from alumni, parents, friends, foundations and corporate supporters through one-off donations, pledges and legacies. Thank you to those who have made a commitment to support St Peter’s. Philanthropy plays a critical role in enabling the college to maintain and build on its status as a world-class centre of learning and we can boast of having one of the highest participation rates of all Oxford colleges with over 27% of the active community giving. Please help us if you can at www.spc.ox.ac.uk/giving Do let us know if you are in Oxford. We would be delighted to welcome you back to St Peter’s and show you around. Do keep up to date by visiting the website and following us on Facebook and twitter.

I look forward to meeting you.

5

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

UPDATE FROM THE BURSAR James Graham, Bursar

I’m writing this article in the jury assembly room at the Crown Court at Blackfriars.

Quite a contrast from last year (my office at St Peter’s) and the previous year (our cottage in Devon). An interesting context within which to reflect on my third year at St Peter’s. It’s reminded me of some of the important things we emphasise at St Peter’s: recognising our broader social responsibilities; understanding the context within which we live and work; taking your own and others’ experience seriously.

Two years ago I wrote about how conversation and dialogue dominates life at Oxford; tutorials, Governing Body meetings and the informal day to day ‘getting along’ in a residential, academic community. At the Crown Court I’m struck again about the importance of conversation and dialogue. Here, the formalised discourse in the courts, the informal chat in the jury retiring room, the formal discussion in the jury deliberation room, and the lively conversations and gossiping in the jury assembly room once the ice had broken after we’d arrived as randomly selected citizens at the beginning of the week. And the process is taken seriously; in my experience, both this time and 30 years ago when I first sat on a jury. My fellow jurors, from all walks of life and generations, concentrate, respect confidentiality and do not duck the issues. Participation in the judicial process that supports our democracy, along with voting in elections and 6

referenda, binds society and generations together, as does education.

Whether voting should be compulsory as is jury service is worth examining.

Certainly the College under the Master’s leadership encourages awareness and participation. Mark Carney gave a masterful speech at the Sheldonian Theatre in Michaelmas, explaining the pivotal role of the central banks in the national, regional and global economies, and the lessons learned from the last banking crisis. It was also a masterclass on how civil servants can speak publicly on highly political issues in a democracy. Most journalists do not have to worry about this, but BBC journalists do. Honorary Fellow Andrew Marr reflected diplomatically on the referendum on Scotland’s membership of the UK last year, and more recently on the general election. Our panel of leading alumni journalists (Martin Ivens, Sunday Times; Helen Lewis, New Statesman; Ben Wright, BBC) is returning in Trinity Term to discuss the June referendum on the UK membership of the EU. Andrew Marr is returning later this year to talk – we think – about migration.

We are also looking forward to a series of events to commemorate the role played by the Chavasse family, our founders, in World War One, under the heading ‘Duty, Courage, Faith.’ Our Archivist, Dr Richard Allen, is organising the display of the Chavasse family medals in the Chapel, with

New Chapel doors

thanks to the Chavasse family. Richard has been busy with other important projects in the Archives. The Chavasse WW1 correspondence is now on the website, and very moving it is too. Richard has brought into focus a benefactor of the College who had been rather in the background, Dorothea Sladen, whose story you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

Continuing the theme of important women in the College’s life and history, we commissioned an Oxford artist, Tom Croft, to paint portraits in oil of our Honorary Fellow Bishop Libby Lane and the first woman to be a Tutorial Fellow, Dr Christine Greenhalgh. These will be unveiled in June.

We are considering the restoration of a portrait of Miriam Chavasse, mother of Bishop Francis James Chavasse, borrowing the portrait of Mrs Rowcroft, an early and important St Peter’s benefactor, after whom Staircases I-III are named, from Torbay Hospital where she established the Rowcroft Hospice, and copying the portrait of Dorothea Sladen, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

We are looking forward to the installation of a collection of the works of Duncan Grant in Trinity Term. A good friend of the College who owns this collection has arranged for it to be moved from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, to us so that it can be hung in one place.

We plan to hang the pictures in the SCR Dining Room.

The Perrodo Project continues apace.

We started back in summer 2014 with the refurbishment and redecoration of the Porters’ Lodge and Fellows’ Writing Room, the transformation of the JCR Passageway, and the restoration and redecoration of the SCR and SCR Dining Room. Lodge envy started to grow across Oxford, which we now hope to supplement with Gate envy; we will install two sets of new gates to the Lodge by the start of Trinity Term. (The architects for Phase One are Allies & Morrison, and the main contractor is Edgar Taylor.

Waterman Project Management Ltd is the client project manager).

The full ‘Phase One’ of the Perrodo Project, which started in summer 2015, covered a new scheme for the College entrance, with new gates and paving, and much improved disabled access. The ground floor of the Latner Building has been remodelled and extended, giving us a much more flexible and useful modular teaching space, which can be configured as one larger or two smaller rooms.

Linton Quad has been redesigned, replanted and repaved, with secondary stone paving outside the new doors to the Chapel in the north wall giving us much improved access to the Chapel, and an area to enjoy after weddings and other events.

This better integration of the Chapel with the Quad was made possible by the dismantling of the walnut tree. The wood from this tree has been reserved and stored for seasoning, and will be given to our alumnus Robert Hadaway (who has made our wonderful new High Table) to make new chairs. Returning to the theme of conversation, the new table is narrower than the old one and has made conversation easier. Dialogue will be even easier when the work to improve the acoustic of the Hall is completed,

Proposed new building

towards the end of Phase Two of the Perrodo Project.

Phase Two of the Perrodo Project is well underway; we are in the planning, design and approval stages. Work will start again in October 2016, with a view to finishing in October 2017. The architects for this phase are ‘Design Engine’. This phase of the work covers the redesign and integration of the Hannington and Chavasse Quads. It includes the remodelling and refurbishment of the ground floor of the Chavasse Building, which will give us much better teaching spaces and could be configured as one larger or two or three smaller rooms.

We plan to erect a new building against the Baptist Church wall, at the south end of the Chavasse Quad. This building will give us six new student rooms, and a ground floor which could be used as an informal, quiet study area or a meeting/reception

room for College use and external events.

The putative top floor of the building will have another large room for College use and external events, opening on to a partially-covered terrace which will have outstanding new views over the quads towards and beyond the Chapel. There will be attractive terraced areas integrating the new building with the Chavasse Quad.

The current, non-compliant disabled ramp will be rebuilt along the New Building, thus allowing for the two quads to be integrated by steps from the higher Hannington Quad to the lower Chavasse Quad.

As I wrote last year, this is a challenging project, but will be worth it. I look forward to everyone’s involvement in it, and to seeing how St Peter’s benefits from it.

And again, profound thanks to the Perrodo Family for their wonderful generosity and support.

Proposed interiors of the new building 7

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

THE MAKING OF THE HIGH TABLE Zander Sharp (2012, English Language and Literature)

the time. But I make proper shavings, none of this nasty dusty stuff that machines make. It was quite a logistical exercise because the table was so big. I assembled the bases and cleared out a room in the basement where I could later work on the table.

How did the project come about in the first place?

I was at the college a couple of years ago and when talking to the Master, he told me about the walnut tree in the quad coming down, and I instinctively said: “Oh, I hope you’re going to make something nice with the wood.” And so it went on from there.

At that point they had no idea that you couldn’t just cut a tree down and make a table immediately. When I told the college that it would be two years or more before the wood was dried and seasoned, they couldn’t wait that long. I then went and sourced some timber, which was used for the table. The college walnut tree is drying now, and will be used to make a significant part of 24 chairs which will go with the table. The chairs will be based very closely on a Chippendale I have at home.

When you were at St Peter’s were you still making things?

I used to make instruments before I came up, but that came to a natural end. I was too cut off from the world of music in West Wales where I lived. It just gradually faded away. When I was at St Peter’s, I didn’t do very much woodwork, except that one summer vacation I bought the shell of a canal boat and fitted it inside and lived on it on the canal for a term, and then I found it was rather damp so I sold it. So I didn’t do much.

Zander Sharp (2012, English Language and Literature) interviews Robert Hadaway (1984, PPE) on the making of the new High Table.

Was this the biggest project you’ve undertaken?

Well, physically, yes. I have only got a workshop that’s ten feet long. The table is 21 feet.

So how did you make ends meet?

Three things. I can make the frame of the table and assemble it in the workshop 8

because it is smaller than the table. The most difficult job was to plane the edges of the boards at the top. Seven foot boards in a ten foot workshop meant there was not much room either side. It’s a long and arduous job and you have to keep trying one on the other with light behind to see if they’re tight. Once the boards were done I couldn’t assemble them in the workshop, because even one of those table tops was too big for the space.

So we put them on the kitchen table and the kitchen was full of shavings all

And how did you find being an undergraduate at a different phase in your life?

Well yes, age! I was 42. And at first all the students thought: “What’s this old fogie doing in our midst?” And after that they started carrying me around like a regimental goat. They used to take me off to these terrible reggae clubs and did terrible permanent damage to my hearing (laughs) but it was quite funny really. I used to sit at the bar and chat to people and then about half past eleven or so, I thought maybe it’s time to go to bed, but I wasn’t allowed. I was dragged along to one of those dives. They never won me over to reggae though! It was a very good experience.

What led you to study PPE? Well, it was broad. I just felt that I’d missed out on so much because I’d been buried in the countryside for so long. And all these very interesting world political events had taken place and I didn’t know why

and I just felt I needed to get more of a handle on it. I do keep an interest in it, next week there’s a conference on International security which I’m going to attend. I read the FT, and the Economist, and retain a very active interest in current and economic affairs.

If you were asked for advice to undergraduates who were about to leave St Peter’s, what would you say?

Follow your nose. You’ve just got to go where your heart takes you. Otherwise you’ll always regret it. You’ve only got one life. Go where something really interests you.

I love working with wood, sawing and planing. When I’m sawing, I spend days and days just sawing for hours on end. Whereas I could put it through a machine and – bzzzzt bzzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt – there it goes. But actually when you’re just sawing along a line, it only takes a very small part of your brain to keep your saw straight. 99% of your mind is on other things. It’s actually a very contemplative process.

Also you’re working with a fascinating material. Wood has an extraordinary structure, its grain is continually twisting and turning…

So each one has a different character?

Yes, exactly. The grain is changing direction constantly underneath your tool and it becomes a kind of ballet, you’re kind of dancing with a piece of wood.

And this is fascinating. I could have had that table made in a month or less if I borrowed somebody’s machines, I would have just stood there with things over my ears and something over my mouth watching machines gobble up a piece of wood. And that’s not a life. It’s extremely boring. This table bears the marks of my struggle, so it speaks to you of human fallibility, irrationality, of inconsistency.

All because it was made by a human. If it was made by a machine all it has is a kind of bland triumphalism, but no character.

What you can see in something made by hand is the aspiration to achieve perfection, and not quite getting there is far more beautiful and interesting than actual perfection.

And how did you find St Peter’s?

I thought it was a lovely college. It had such a very good spirit of generosity and friendliness to people who are not very well off or people who are not in the mainstream. There’s a great sense in St Peter’s of helping the underdog. It is very good, really, because in Oxford there is a huge amount of elitism, but you’ve got to have a place for the people who have had less advantages than others.

Well, it’s really kind of you to reflect that generous spirit back to us.

I’m just giving back something. I gained a huge amount from being here for three years. Huge amount. It’s the only way I can give back as I don’t have wealth. St Peter’s is a great college, and I am a huge fan of the Master, I think he’s done so much for St Peter’s.

Have you felt the same atmosphere when you’ve returned here?

I think so. I came back for the Neil McGregor talk and I came back recently for the lecture by Mark Carney. There’s a very special kind of fellowship attached to St Peter’s which I don’t think exists elsewhere in Oxford. I think it’s a very special place really.

Are you still in touch with any of the people you knew here?

Yes, from time to time I am. After coming here I found myself with a few new friends who were half my age. And that’s quite interesting. They tended not to be the people on my course, although I still send Christmas cards to some of them. But I’m actually in touch with those who were English students.

Sometimes I’m sorry I didn’t study English, but that’s fine.

9

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

THE OXFORD KNEE – AN ENGINEERING TUTOR’S SIDELINE Professor John O’Connor

Professor John O’Connor, Tutor in Engineering Science, St Peter’s, 1965-2001, Professor Emeritus of Engineering Science, Research Director of Oxford Orthopaedic Engineering Centre, 1992-2001.

John Goodfellow had recently been appointed Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre when I met him in 1966, shortly after I had come to Oxford as a University Lecturer in Engineering and a Fellow of St Peter’s. John was convinced that Engineering is the basic science of Orthopaedic Surgery and wanted to explore possible mechanical factors contributing to the disease of the joints known as osteoarthritis. This disease affects a significant proportion of the over-60 population, with many theories but no agreed known cause.

John had come to see Douglas Holder, who was head of the Engineering School at the time. He asked for help with a study of hip joints. Holder said: “Joints!

John O’Connor has just got a research grant for something to do with structural joints. Why don’t you ask him?” John said to me: “I see you are interested in joints. Could you possibly be interested in human hip joints?” I said: “Why not?” Our collaboration continued until we last met on the day before John died in 2011. We started work on a project “Load-bearing in the human hip”. We followed this with “Load-bearing in the human knee”.

The human knee has two rounded surfaces (the condyles) on the lower end of the femur which make contact with flattened surfaces on the top of the tibia, one in the medial compartment of the joint on the inside of the leg, one in the lateral compartment on the outside. The cruciate ligaments sit between the two compartments. These are short bundles of collagen fibres which, together with the medial and lateral collateral ligaments, hold the bones together.

The non-conforming surfaces of the knee can touch only over very limited contact areas. This is quite unlike the hip which has a near-spherical ball on the top of the femur in closely-conforming 10

contact with a near-spherical socket in the pelvis. However, the bone surfaces in the two joints are covered with very similar layers of articular cartilage. We deduced that the menisci of the knee must play a role in load-bearing. These are semi-lunar bands of collagen fibres arranged circumferentially on top of the tibia, one in each compartment, attached to the tibia at their ends and loosely to the surrounding tissues. The menisci fill the gaps between the dissimilar shapes of the ends of the bones and bring them into conformity.

Their function was not well understood at the time but we quickly established that the menisci are indeed load-bearing. They spread the load through the knee over a greatly increased area of contact and reduce the contact pressures to levels we had found in the human hip.

If nature needs menisci in its knees to assist with load-bearing, should not man, in designing knee replacements, use the same idea? We designed components to replace the bone surfaces in one compartment of the knee, medial or lateral, Figure 1. From the beginning, the load-bearing surface of the femoral component was spherical, the surface of the tibial component was flat. Both of these components were made of a cobalt chrome alloy, known to be well tolerated by the body. The novelty was that we interposed an analogue of the natural meniscus between the metal components, an unconstrained polyethylene bearing which we called a meniscal or mobile bearing.

The metal components are fixed to the suitably prepared bone ends with a methylmetacrylate cement. Over the past 10 years or so, cementless fixation of the metal components has also been used.

Figure 1. The implantable components of the Oxford Knee (Phase 2). The upper metal component is fitted to the femur. The lower metal component is fitted to the tibia. The mobile meniscal bearing interposed between them is made of ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene and is free to slide relative to both metal components. It has a spherical socket above to match that of the femoral component and a flat surface below to match that of the tibial component.

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 2. Mathematical model of the knee, seen from the side with the tibia fixed and with the components of the Oxford Knee. The femoral component is shown with a circular bearing surface, the tibial component with a flat bearing surface and the mobile bearing is in fully-conforming contact with the two metal components when the knee is straight (a), flexed to 60° (b) and flexed to 120° (c). The arrays of lines represent the two cruciate ligaments, the anterior cruciate in green with fibres almost parallel in extension (a), the posterior cruciate , two bundles in white, with the anterior bundle slack and the posterior bundle just tight in extension (a). The fibres in both ligaments slacken and tighten and the ligaments change their shapes as their attachment areas on the femur rotate relative to the fixed tibia. The implant is ligament-compatible. In each picture, the knee-cap is shown as a rectangle in contact with the front of the femur.

Since 1976, the shapes of the articular surfaces of our design have not changed.

Other features required development but by 1978 we had reached a stable design which we subsequently called Phase One. We argued that this design would have some advantages over current practice, Figure 2. It allows preservation of all the ligaments and restoration of their function. It is fully conforming at all positions over the range of flexion, the contact surfaces are as large as possible, the contact pressures are as small as possible and we hoped this would lead to low wear rates. Backwards and forwards movement of the components on each other is not constrained or limited by their shapes so, under load, they apply mainly compressive stress to the underlying bones. This should lead to low loosening rates. By being unconstrained, the bones would be free to move on each other in a physiological way in response to muscle and ligament forces and this would restore the function of the patient’s leg. These theoretical advantages have all been borne out clinically.

Figure 2 shows computer-drawn images of a mathematical model of the replaced knee with the femur rolling backwards on the tibia during flexing of the joint, a movement controlled by the ligaments and made possible because of simultaneous backwards sliding of the mobile bearing on the tibia.

It is appropriate here to say just a little about knee replacement in the 1970s. By then, earlier unsuccessful attempts at knee replacement had been overtaken by what was called total condylar replacement, later Total Knee Replacement (TKR).

The idea of TKR was to resurface the bone ends completely but with anatomical-like components. A rounded metal component covers the entire distal end of the femur for contact with the tibia and the knee-cap. A plastic-covered flattened component covers the top of the tibia and is fixed to it. There is usually no mobile bearing. Stems are necessary to gain attachment to the bones.

TKR is now used in the large majority of cases. Surgeons like it because the operation is relatively easy to perform and relatively easy to teach to trainees.

However, up to 20% of patients describe themselves unhappy with the outcome.

It is very invasive and its implantation requires substantial division of muscle fibres as well as some of the ligaments, often both cruciate ligaments. As a result, full restoration of function is difficult to achieve. Also, the non-conforming surfaces of the prosthesis touch only over very small areas, especially in the bent knee and in some cases there has been severe wear of the plastic tibial component. In the event of failure, revision is quite difficult and rarely achieves the quality of a primary replacement.

So, this was the arena that John Goodfellow and I entered in 1973. After our first experiments with prototype components in cadaver specimens, the National Research and Development Corporation (now the British Technology Group, BTG) agreed to patent the idea of a meniscal knee replacement. When the final patent application was filed in late 1975, the NRDC introduced us to a small implant manufacturer in Swindon and Bridgend, Zimmer GB Ltd, which agreed to take on the project. For the following six months, John and I met weekly,

after the day job, designing implantable components and surgical instruments and trying them out in the lab. After these sessions, I became a draughtsman and drew up the components and instruments and sent them for manufacturing. After some iteration, we were ready for the first operation, June 30, 1976. This was the only time I felt queasy in an operating theatre; the knee specimen into which we were about to implant our components now had a living person attached to it.

Zimmer GB was sold in 1984 to Biomet Inc which in turn was sold in 2015 to Zimmer Inc, a much bigger company than our first collaborators.

John Goodfellow began by doing bicompartmental replacement, using a set of our components in both compartments of the knee, Figure 3. He treated patients with rheumatoid arthritis (an inflammatory disease leading to destruction of the articular surfaces of the joints) and patients with osteoarthritis.

Figure 3. X-ray photo of a patient’s knee with components of the Oxford Knee implanted bicompartmentally in the lateral compartment on the right and in the medial compartment on the left.

11

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

Figure 4. Standing pictures of a patient with anteromedial osteoarthritis of both knees. The X-ray pictures show that the medial femoral condyle of each knee has deeply interpenetrated the opposing tibial plateau.

During this time, he encountered many osteoarthritic patients whose legs were greatly deformed, Figure 4. In such cases, the X-rays show evidence of bone to bone contact in the medial compartment but also evidence of complete cartilage layers surviving to protect the lateral compartment.

When the patient’s knee is opened, the articular cartilage on the surfaces of the femur and tibia in the lateral compartment is found to be fully intact

but there is severe wear in the medial compartment. Often, the bearing surface of knee-cap, the patella, is also severely eroded but the anterior cruciate ligament as well as the other three ligaments are still present and functional.

When the medial tibial plateau is removed at surgery, the arthritic lesion is found to be confined to the front of the plateau, the cartilage at the back is still full thickness. This is true also of the femur, the cartilage at the distal end of

Figure (5). X-Ray pictures of the two knees of a patient when standing with an Oxford Knee in (a) on the left and a total knee replacement in (b) on the right.

12

the femur on the medial side is worn away and the underlying bone exposed and eroded but the cartilage at the back is still full thickness. John coined the phrase antero-medial osteoarthritis to describe this disease, with uncovered bone in the medial compartment making contact with uncovered bone every time the knee is straightened. It is extremely painful. We believe that about 60% of patients presenting for knee replacement exhibit these focal lesions.

From 1982 onwards, John treated these patients with one set of our components, the Oxford Partial Knee, preserving the lateral compartment and the knee-cap. Figure 5 shows an X-ray of a patient who has had an Oxford Partial Knee on one side and a total knee replacement on the other.

The conservative nature of the Oxford treatment is obvious. Notice the space between the bones in the lateral compartment on the left of the X-ray picture in (a). This is filled with layers of articular cartilage which is translucent to X-ray. The lateral compartment on the right of the picture (b) and the anterior cruciate ligament (also X-ray transparent) have been removed and replaced by metal and plastic.

By 1984, John had stopped using our components bicompartmentally and concentrated instead on partial knee replacement, 90% for the treatment of anteromedial osteoarthritis. We therefore have over 30 years of clinical

evidence with which to assess the clinical (and biomechanical) outcome.

He had established a monthly clinic in 1977 to review his patients. We devised pro-formas on which to record his observations of the patient before and during the surgery and at the subsequent follow-up clinics. We were soon overwhelmed with data. Mr Lou Burnard of the University Computing Centre devised a clinical database for us. My son Oscar and god-daughter Una began the tedious business of inputting the data. I wrote the programs necessary to retrieve the data and, with one of my former undergraduates Steve Jack (SPC 1982), the programs necessary to analyse the retrieved data and arrange it for presentation.

My SPC colleague Dr John Bithell, the epidemiologist, provided help with the statistical analyses. The database made evidence-based assessment of the prosthesis possible.

The seventh patient was a certain Miss E, an otherwise sprightly and healthy 70-year old with one problem, a badly diseased knee. I met her in the clinic three months after her operation.

While John was still talking to the previous patient, I asked Miss E if her knee was still painful. “Certainly not,” she said witheringly, “Mr Goodfellow operated on it.” I ticked “No Pain at Rest” and “No Pain in Activity” on the proforma. I then asked her if she could walk. ‘Walk,” she said in much the same tone, “Of course I can walk, I can run.”

With no further ado, she hopped off the bed, ran the length of the ward and back, hopped back up on the bed and said nothing. We subsequently modified our proforma to include a box for “Can Run.” This was a very important memory for us when things started to go wrong, sometime later.

There was one striking result from the database. During surgery, we had recorded the state of the anterior cruciate ligament, intact and functional or absent. By six years, 35% of those with ACL Absent had been revised four per cent of knees with ACL Intact.

John Goodfellow, from 1984 onwards, therefore used the Oxford Partial Knee mainly for the treatment of anteromedial osteoarthritis, a disease in which the ACL was reliably intact.

Like Miss E, these patients had an excellent clinical result. Further efforts were made to improve the reliability of implantation.

It was necessary to implant the components so that the gap between them remained the same over the range of flexion. We had designed gap gauges to measure that gap and then implant a bearing of the correct

thickness. We had bearings available in eight separate thicknesses in steps of one millimeter and could choose the correct one just to fill the gap.

Matching the gaps proved difficult to achieve with the Phase One design.

In 1987, we introduced Phase 2, Figure 1, exploiting John’s observation of the focal lesions in anteromedial osteoarthritis.

John retired from his NHS surgical practice in 1990. He persuaded Biomet to fund Biomet Knee Fellowships to keep the surgical development going.

In 1994, we got David (now Professor) Murray who is still very much with us. After his first class honours in Part One of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos in Cambridge, David changed to medicine and became an orthopaedic surgeon. He took over John’s work as a surgeon but also much of my work as an engineer, the living embodiment of Orthopaedic Engineering. I was then able to concentrate on research into the many questions raised by our observations of the patients and their prostheses. I spent nine happy years before retirement as Research Director of the Oxford Orthopaedic Engineering Centre, graduating 17 DPhils.

Initially, Professor Murray was sceptical about the Oxford Knee because he was seeing many patients, ACL Absent, coming through the hospital for revision. He reviewed John Goodfellow’s patients treated for anteromedial disease. He found 145 cases and a survival rate at 10 years of 98%, perhaps the best series of knee replacements ever published. Later, Andrew Price helped review Ulf Svard’s patients treated for anteromedial disease. Ulf is a surgeon in practice in South West Sweden. They reported a survival rate of 94% at 15 years with Ulf’s Oxford Knees, 92% at 20 years.

Ulf has now treated more than one thousand knees. In part because of these results, the Oxford Knee was approved by the FDA for use in the US which now contributes almost half its usage worldwide.

But not everybody has been able to achieve such results. A report from the Swedish Knee Arthroplasty Register in 1994 showed highly variable results from that country. At the time of the first such report, Ulf Svard had the lowest failure rate of about four per cent but there was one hospital with a failure rate of nearly 30% of only 30 implants.

We concluded that this must reflect poor patient selection or poor surgical technique or both. We persuaded Biomet to organise instructional courses for surgeons. They have been attended by several thousand surgeons already.

The object of the instructional courses was to address the problem of variable results, to try to avoid mistakes in the early experience of the surgeons. They are taught how to recognise appropriate patients, how to do the operation and how to deal with complications. They are examined at the end by a quiz. Strangely, the surgeon with the highest marks gets a free copy of our book1, probably the one who least needs it. The surgeon Chris Dodd joined the instructional team in 1999 while Professor Price and Will Jackson now give some of the lectures on the basis of their own practices. A key element of the course is the workshop supervised by Hemant Pandit and organised by Keith Thomas, the Biomet Project Manager since 1984.

David Murray’s development of Phase 3 increased the number of component sizes and introduced a minimally invasive surgical technique. The operation is now performed through an incision made from the centre of the medial edge of the knee-cap to just below the joint line. It is like operating through a half-open drawer in a chest of drawers.

No muscle fibers are divided. The insult to the patient is minimised, resulting in very rapid recovery. Most patients are able to walk three hours after leaving the theatre. Many surgeons send their patients home the same day. The latest addition to the instrumentation is a system called Microplasty designed

by David Murray and Chris Dodd with Russell Lloyd and his team of engineers at Biomet. It makes accurate implantation yet more reliable.

Finally, an anecdote. About five years ago, David Murray and his team organised a review of John Goodfellow’s anteromedial osteoarthritis patients operated on at least 20 years previously.

John and I went along to the clinic. Bear in mind that the average age of these patients at surgery had been 70 years.

I asked one lady which of her knees had been replaced 25 years previously.

She looked blankly at me for a moment and then said: “I don’t know, I cannot remember.” She couldn’t tell which was her replaced knee, which was her intact knee. The best possible clinical result2.

1 Goodfellow J, O’Connor J, Dodd C, Murray D. Unicompartmental arthroplasty with the Oxford Knee. Oxford University Press 2006, 2nd edition (With H Pandit) 2015, reprint 2016, Goodfellow Publishers Ltd, Oxford.

2 A link to a video of a short lecture as part of the Bodleian Great Medical Discoveries 2015 exhibition and videos of the mathematical models, fig. 2, will be found online at: www. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whats-on/online/greatmedical-discoveries/the-oxford-knee 13

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

NAPOLEON ON NEW INN HALL STREET Dr Richard Allen, Archivist

College Archivist, Dr Richard Allen, explores the story behind St Peter’s and its Napoleonic links.

The St Peter’s Archives have thrown up all sorts of interesting things during my brief time here, from letters sent to our first Master, Christopher Maude Chavasse (1929-1939), by Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, to a wonderful caricature of an internment camp guard, drawn during World War I by Ervin Bossányi (1891-1975), the Hungarian artist responsible for one of the stained glass windows in the chapel.

But nothing quite prepared me for what I discovered in late summer of last year while sorting out one of the stacks containing unlisted material. Hidden away on the bottom shelf was a modern, grey archive box, which stood out somewhat from the larger, temporary storage containers with which it was surrounded.

Expecting to find administrative papers or other such material, I was instead confronted by a black leather document case on which was stamped, in gilded Roman letters, ‘Mr Brooke, Answer’d’.

Somewhat taken aback, I carefully opened the clasp to reveal a bundle of documents much older than anything I © National Portrait Gallery

Christian Dorothea Sladen 14

had yet come across in the Archives, along with a handful of notes scribbled on much more recent paper. These revealed that the case’s contents had been the subject of a previous attempt at sorting, which had seemingly been abandoned in the face of a collection that was written mostly in French and in hands typical of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the calligraphy of which is not always easy to decipher.

Fortunately, my training means I am able to read both French and handwriting of this period, so I promptly set about trying to work out what it was I had before me. The documents, it turned out, had been collected by a certain Henry William Brooke (1771/2-1842). Given to the College in 1950 (more on this later), they related to Brooke’s work as Chief of the Alien Office (then a branch of the Home Office), a role he occupied from c. 1798 to 1813, during which time Europe was in the throes of the Napoleonic Wars.

A secretive figure about whom little is known, it was Brooke who greeted the future Louis XVIII, king of France (18141824), upon his arrival in exile in England in 1807. The collection, it soon became clear, included not only a personal, handwritten account of this mission, but also a series of letters and notes sent to Brooke by the king, with whose wellbeing he was charged, and by various members of his court. Among the correspondence received by Brooke were notes and letters from Louis himself (written, according to Brooke, in the king’s own hand), as well as from figures such as the Duc de Gramont, the Comte d’Artois and the Countess de Rully, with subjects ranging from affairs of state and guarded requests to meet to discuss ‘matters of mutual interest’, to an appeal for Brooke to make the Viscount Sidmouth, then Home Secretary (18121822), aware of the theft of vegetables from the Prince de Condé’s garden!

Part of the collection, it also transpired, had been removed and deposited at the Bodleian in 1981. This included a copy of a letter from Lt General Hudson Lowe, governor of St Helena, announcing the death of Napoleon, and an account by Brooke of a conversation with the Duke of Wellington during a dinner at Walmer

The ‘Wellington’ snuff box

Castle on 6 June 1831, during which the Field Marshal offered his thoughts on the Battle of Waterloo.

Having reunited these papers with those at St Peter’s, and having identified, sorted and catalogued the entire collection, my thoughts naturally turned as to how the College, founded in 1929, had come to acquire such material.

Letter from Charles Philippe, count of Artois [later Charles X of France]

A bundle of modern letters kept in the document case soon revealed that they had been given to St Peter’s by Christian Dorothea Sladen, a friend of Christopher Chavasse and the widow of Douglas Brooke Sladen (1856-1947), the author and academic, who had himself inherited the material via his father’s godfather, Henry Brooke. These letters also revealed that the documents were part of a much larger gift of Napoleonic artefacts, which also included a snuff box carved from a French gun carriage captured at the Battle of Waterloo; the chair supposedly used by Napoleon at his dining table on the island of St Helena where he spent his final years in exile; and a series of portraits of the fallen Emperor, drawn from life by Denzil Ibbetson (1788-1857), a British officer who was with Napoleon until he died.

As for the Sladens, their association with St Peter’s stretches back to its very earliest years, and evidence of their generosity to the College can be found in almost every corner. It was Douglas Sladen who, along with his wife, persuaded Philip de László (1869-1937) to paint the portrait of Lord Nuffield (1877-1963), which now hangs in the Hall, with Mrs Sladen seemingly playing such an important role in the project that the artist, according to a letter in the College Archives, declared her to be ‘the godmother’ of the painting.

Another of Mrs Sladen’s great artistic friends was René le Brun, Comte de L’Hôpital (1877-1929), whose memory she chose to honour with a memorial in the chapel. Designed by the well-known Daily Mail cartoonist, Percy Hutton Fearon (1874-1948), otherwise known as ‘Poy’, the stone tablet, of which the original drawing still survives in the Archives, can today be found on the south wall at the western end of the nave.

Further investigation in the files revealed that this memorial was not the only lithic monument at St Peter’s associated with Mrs Sladen. Generations of recent Peterites will have walked past the block of Neo-Gothic masonry that currently sits on the lawn in Mulberry Quad, but few will have been aware that it was given to the College by Christian Dorothea Sladen. Even fewer would have guessed that, rather than something unearthed during one of the many building works to have taken place on site since the 1920s, it is in fact a piece of the Palace of Westminster.

Given to St Peter’s sometime in 193435, the gift was duly recorded in the Hall’s Seventh Annual Report as a ‘stone garden ornament from the Houses of Parliament’. Originally located outside the old Staircase V, the piece has been a constant feature of St Peter’s life for most of its history, but without any identifying plaque, and with the inevitable passing of those involved in its bequest, its original story had essentially all but faded from memory.

With its provenance now once again brought to light, plans are afoot to try and restore and then incorporate the block, which has been identified by Dr Mark Collins, Estates Archivist and Historian for the Palace of Westminster, as a segment of turret with a ventilation duct in the centre, within the building work due to take place in Chavasse Quad as part of Phase 2 of the Perrodo Project. As a result, future generations of students and visitors will be able to learn more about this unusual artefact and how it came to be at St Peter’s.

As for Mrs Salden, she lived to see St Peter’s complete the transition from

permanent private hall to full collegiate status, and towards the end of her life bequeathed to the College a sum equivalent to more than £300,000, which was eventually put towards the construction of the Matthews Building.

Her generosity therefore puts her among the other important women associated with early St Peter’s, such as Ella Rowcroft (d. 1941), after whom Staircases I-III are named. It is hoped that this piece, and a newly-commissioned reproduction of her portrait, currently at the National Portrait Gallery, might go some way to ensuring that when members past, present and future think of St Peter’s, they might also think once again of the name Sladen.

Block of masonry from the Palace of Westminster

SCRAPBOOK APPEAL The College Archives are home to a rich variety of material relating to the history of St Peter’s and its students.

Some of the most important artefacts relating to the College’s early history are its scrapbooks, compiled between 1928 and 1974. These contain not only matriculation and sports photos, but also programmes, term and menu cards, press clippings, posters and a wealth of other ephemera, much of it unique and some of it relating to our most notable alumni (Revd W Awdry, Carl Albert, Ken Loach, etc.)

The scrapbooks are, however, in growing need of conservation and restoration. Many of the items, which are attached to the pages with little more than ordinary sticking tape, are starting to come loose, while the binding and paper, both of poor quality, are beginning to deteriorate. The result is that many volumes are now too fragile to handle safely.

The College is therefore launching an appeal to help ensure the preservation of these important artefacts for generations to come.

The cost of such work is not cheap (£4,000-£5,000 per volume), but it is vital, and will result not only in the full physical restoration of each scrapbook, but also the complete digitisation of each volume, thus reducing the need for handling in the future.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please get in touch with the Development team on development. office@spc.ox.ac.uk or +44(0)1865 814985. All donors to the appeal will be listed in a dedicated section of the College Record (unless they wish to remain anonymous) and there is a possibility to have your name embossed on the flyleaf of a scrapbook if you would like to cover the cost of the full restoration of a scrapbook.

15

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

JCR REPORT Anna Harris, JCR President Another year at Peter’s has flown by, and what a time we’ve had. Phase 1 of the Perrodo Project has just entered its completion, and stories of planted trees and the magnificence of the brand-new quad are fizzing around college, if not the whole of Oxford, as we look ready to rival even the most beautiful of the collegiate system.

For the JCR in particular this has been a tremendous year, and being voted in as JCR president to oversee it all was an absolute delight. We started off with Freshers’ Week, which seems to be escalating in scale every year, and was led by the student-run freshers’ committee. This time it saw, amongst a few raucous nights at various clubs, a ‘Great British Bake Off’ style cupcakemaking event, a ‘schools’ sports day, a family dinner (where college parents cooked their college children food to varying degrees of success), an acapella singing group, lots of guided trips to Oxford sights, and much more.

Once the new students had been welcomed into the college the year was really able to get into full swing.

For college hockey, this was taken quite literally, as the talented swipe of the team’s sticks propelled them into Division 1, joining the brilliant rugby

16

boys, and missing coming top of the league by only one game. Our lacrosse team have been similarly fantastic, having won every single game they’ve played! The netball team remain in league 1, but as captain I think I can say we may be a little out of our depth (having won a grand total of one game this year) and so although a demotion may be in sight, at least we’ll win a game!

Boys’ football, meanwhile remain more successful with James Povey, a sports legend at St Peter’s, scoring goal after goal after goal, and girls football paired in a team with Hertford doing much the same. Outside of college sport, St Peter’s has had a number of stars in university teams, with Tom Stileman being named man of the match in this year’s Rugby League varsity at Cambridge, where the tabs where thoroughly ‘shoed’.

Moving to charity, after the creation of a St Peter’s Charities committee this year, we’ve been selling doughnuts at bops, had a student version of the TV show Take Me Out (rumour has it that one of the couples paired together even went on a date afterwards!), had a St Peter’s charity casino night, a team for Oxford’s Town and Gown 10k race and are once again selling the very fashionable St Peter’s jumpers.

Alongside, welfare has been a massive focus in the JCR this year as a means of ending the stigma surrounding mental health, and making Peter’s the most comfortable place it can possibly be. To do so, we’ve set up a ‘happy week’ in fifth week each term, which is packed full of activities from relaxing walks around Oxford to karaoke in the bar, and are currently producing a welfare handbook which signposts and gives advice for almost any difficult situation someone may find themselves in.

A number of wonderful speakers have also spread their wisdom to almost exclusively Peter’s people this year, which has made our university experience even richer. To name a few, we’ve heard from the likes of renowned news reporter Owen Jones, Ben Cooper, the controller of Radio 1, Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman.

All in all, it’s been a fantastic year, but one that ends on a slightly melancholy note as we say goodbye and good luck to another round of finalists whom will no doubt be transforming the world in no time. For those in the lower years this serves as a reminder to make the most of our time here at Oxford as it really is over in a flash, but attending St Peter’s makes this is a very enjoyable flash indeed.

MCR REPORT Jacklyn Majnemer, MCR President St Peter’s College experienced the largest graduate intake in its history this year, making the MCR community more lively, active, and diverse than ever before. The term began with a lot of excitement: a full week of Freshers events to welcome new and returning Peterites. These included tours of Oxford and the college, pizza nights, and the traditional champagne reception celebrating the beginning of term.

Our graduate community was keen to get involved with the MCR and many joined the MCR Committee. Social events in the MCR included exchange dinners with other colleges, wine and cheese nights, welfare walks (in rain and shine), afternoon teas, and even an indoor garden party complete with a snazzy and delicious chocolate fountain!

The MCR charities events were also very successful, raising money for PLAN and Crisis Skylight Oxford.

The MCR committee pulled out all the stops for Oxmas. They organised a secret santa gift exchange, served mulled wine and mince pies, and decorated the MCR’s very own Christmas tree with the rest of St Peter’s graduates. Term ended with the MCR Christmas party, a black tie event to celebrate the holidays!

Between all this excitement, the MCR is a place for students to relax and study. It is a place for many graduates to have a cup of tea or coffee, watch a movie, and socialise. Members of the MCR have taken to baking in the MCR kitchen, which is very much appreciated by the graduate community at large. The MCR also provides an important study space, and is one of the best places for feedback and interesting discussion.

St Peter’s graduates have also been given the opportunity to present their research more formally within the College. St Peter’s hosted two graduate poster events in Michaelmas and two graduate seminar events in Hilary. These occasions provide a great chance for graduates to practice their presentation skills, to get feedback, and to hear about interesting research that is being led by our peers.

Trinity term is on the horizon.

Although the MCR will likely be busy with graduates studying for exams or finishing up papers, there will be plenty of opportunities to relax and have fun. The final guest night of the term is always a popular social event, where members of the MCR and their guests can enjoy wonderful food and an

excuse to wear black tie. Elections will also be taking place early in the term to determine who will be on the MCR Executive Committee next year. The MCR will also put on events over the summer for the doctoral and masters students that will be staying on!

The MCR is more than just a common space at St Peter’s – it’s a community.

For many, the MCR is a daily meeting space. Members come for respite from a hard day’s work or for a change of scene when a faculty library is becoming too familiar. Almost any day of the year you’ll find at least a couple of us in here, relaxing over a cup of Yorkshire Tea, a crossword, or a couple of rounds of Mario Kart. It’s a place where graduates can discuss everything from coursework to college life, and it forms the social heart of a family drawn from a pantheon of academic subjects and from every continent in the world. The graduate community is one of the great assets of St Peter’s College, a closeknit and supportive group tucked into the common room at the far side of Chavasse quad. Now numbering nearly as many students as the JCR, the MCR can also rival the undergraduates in academic brilliance, friendliness, and fun.

17

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

BRINGING BRAZIL TO OXFORD Dr Claire Willams, Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture, SPC Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese

In 2008, I was lucky enough to be interviewed for my dream job: a lectureship in Brazilian Literature and Culture in one of (at that point) the only two independent departments of Portuguese in the UK. My love for Portuguese grew from my fascination with Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), about whom I wrote my doctoral thesis. After that, I worked at the University of Liverpool for eight years, teaching everything from Renaissance Portuguese drama to Brazilian cinema.

Now I am proud to be a member of the only independent department of Portuguese in the UK, and a Fellow of St Peter’s, having started teaching in Trinity Term 2009. It was already a ‘Portuguese’ college, thanks to the presence of Tom Earle (a Renaissance literature specialist) and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (an expert in Angolan politics), not to mention our talented chefs João Rodrigues and Hugo Marques. Since my arrival, Tom has retired, but new colleagues have joined St Peter’s: Elizabeth Ewart (an

Claire Williams 18

anthropologist specialising in the tribes of central Brazil) and Phillip Rothwell (who works on Lusophone African literature).

Shortly after I moved to Oxford, I attended a lunch held for the then Brazilian Ambassador, Carlos Augusto Santos Neves, where he set me the challenge of organising a week of cultural activities linked with Brazil. I saw this as a great opportunity to bring together academics, researchers, students, Brazilian and non-Brazilian, from across the University, and the wider public, to share ideas and counteract some of the stereotypes often associated with the country. And so Brazil Week was born, and has taken place every year since then, with St Peter’s featuring largely as a venue for talks, film screenings, concerts and a capoeira workshop. My students have always been heavily involved, whether carrying chairs, presenting guest speakers, or acting as impromptu sound engineers. A highlight for me is always the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Round Table, which showcases doctoral research

Lily Green, 2011, Modern Languages

projects from different departments and faculties of the University. Rather like the Graduate Seminars at St Peter’s, it is a chance to go outside one’s comfort zone and learn more about a new subject.

The first Brazil Week took place in November 2009 and went with quite a bang. The week of events included a celebration of the work of Clarice Lispector and the premiere of a film directed by her great-niece, as well as a free concert by internationally famous pop star Adriana Calcanhotto. Clips from the show can still be found on YouTube!

Adriana said she felt very moved to be performing at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (St Hilda’s), and played a song on the cello as a tribute. Brazil Week runs on a shoestring and we weren’t able to provide anything as fancy as a wardrobe assistant, so I took my own iron and ironing board and ironed the beautiful velvet shirt, with billowing cuffs, that Adriana wore that night.

And I’m very happy that lots of my undergraduate students have chosen to specialise in Brazilian options offered as part of the Portuguese course, as well as spending part of their Year Abroad in the country, volunteering, teaching, studying and working. Two had memorable experiences working for NGOs: James Robertson (now a solicitor working for a firm with a branch in Rio de Janeiro) for one called ‘Luta pela Paz / Fight for Peace,’ which trains youngsters from deprived backgrounds in boxing and martial arts, and Hannah Bowers (now on the British Council Future Leaders Scheme)

‘Orquestrando a Vida / Orchestrating Life,’ which educates children through classical music, along the lines of ‘El Sistema’. Aleks Klosok took advantage of being in Brazil to interview veteran footballer Socrates, his article contributing toward him later winning St Edmund Hall’s Clive Taylor Award for sports journalism. Another year, Clelia Goodchild was lucky enough to be invited to collaborate in the filming of a documentary about the wildlife of the Atlantic Forest near Recife in Northeastern Brazil. Travelling to and across Brazil is not cheap, and some of these projects and trips were partly funded by the St Peter’s College Foundation, whose support was very much appreciated by the students, and by me.

Many of my students form a metaphorical bridge between Brazil and Oxford. During her year abroad, Lily Green, who graduated in 2015, became a great success writing for BBC Brasil. With a little help from an influential contact who used to work for the Corporation, I set up a collaborative project between Oxford University’s Sub-Faculty of Portuguese and BBC Brasil, part of the World Service dealing with news from Brazil and presenting world news to a Brazilian audience. The students write blog posts, in Portuguese, about their impressions of the country and their experiences, ranging from a tour of the best graffiti in São Paulo to politicians’ use of Twitter, not to mention observations about behaviour on the beach, Americanisation and racism. I feel very proud to read their articles and see the number of responses and comments they have elicited1.

Not only are there Peterites passionate about Brazil, there are a number of Brazilian citizens studying here, as Visiting Students or postgraduates. Only this year, though, have I welcomed my very own Brazilian D.Phil student, Daniel Thomaz, since my supervisees tend to be at other colleges.

Daniel’s research is of special relevance to the college, again through St Peter’s link with the BBC. He is working on newly-discovered radio plays and scripts by the highly respected Brazilian novelist, Antônio Callado, who worked at the Latin American Section of the BBC during the Second World War. I’ve been proud to bring Brazilian and Brazilianist colleagues to St Peter’s for conferences and to give talks. In September 2013, the biennial conference of the Association of British and Irish Lusitanists (ABIL), the subject association for university teachers and researchers 1 The blog posts are in Portuguese and can still be accessed via: www.bbc.com/ portuguese/topicos/blog_para_ingles_ver

into the cultures of the Portuguesespeaking world, was hosted by the College, and it was a great pleasure for me to welcome colleagues from all over the world to my patch. And, in January 2015, I organised the second half (after two days at the Sorbonne) of a two-site conference of the Study of Contemporary Brazilian Literature Research Group (based at the University of Brasília but comprising members from all over Brazil, and beyond). Being a member of this group has enabled me to share my research on contemporary Brazilian novels with other specialists in the area, not to mention discovering new authors and topics of interest.

Despite terrible weather and a fire in the Channel Tunnel causing disruption to travellers, all the speakers made it to the 8am Introductory Session. After an intense day of fascinating papers, and discussion, the participants were invited to attend a reception in Canal House, thanks to the Master’s hospitality.

Since I started my lectureship and fellowship in Oxford, I’ve had the pleasure of sharing the college’s hospitality with the Brazilian

Ambassador, indigenous filmmaker Tukumã Kuikuro, Michel Yakini, a poet from the periphery of São Paulo, publisher and translator Stefan Tobler, whose translation of Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage is on the long-list for the Man Booker International Prize, investigative journalist Misha Glenny, and many graduate students as passionate about Brazil and its culture as I am.

Brazil is an amazing, eclectic country, full of promise and potential, but with more than its fair share of problems such as social inequality, controversy and corruption. I do my best to introduce its fascinating history and multicultural riches to my students, but there is nothing like visiting it yourself.

I try to go whenever I can, and when I can’t, bring as much of Brazil as I can to St. Peter’s.

Images of the first Brazil Week, including Adriana http://bit.do/BrazilWeek Lily Green on BBC Brasil http://bit.do/LilyGreen

Portuguese Party 19

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

DOING THE MATHS TO CONTROL MOSQUITOES Professor Michel Bonsall

Professor Michael Bonsall is a population biologist and has research interests across a range of disciplines including biodiversity, ecology, evolution, developmental biology, health and economics. He is a St Peter’s Fellow and Tutor in Biological Sciences and Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Zoology.

Science and policy of GM insects Research in my group sits at the interface between biology and mathematics, and although I am an ecologist by training (interested in the factors that affect the distribution and abundance of species on the planet), our research activity extends beyond the traditional boundaries of ecology. With colleagues here in Oxford and elsewhere, research questions on stem cell biology, through animal behaviour and evolution to ecology and beyond (even to understanding the

Mike Bonsall 20

dynamics of bipolar disorder – but that’s a whole another story) inspire and challenge our thinking.

One main research theme is on understanding how best to control agricultural insect pests (such as the diamondback moth which is a major economic pest of crucifer crops) and disease vectors (such as mosquitoes which spread malaria, dengue, Zika and other diseases). This has grown out of a collaboration with a spin-out company (from Zoology here in Oxford), Oxitec Ltd, who focus on developing novel geneticbased methods for controlling insect pests and vectors.

The idea behind the Oxitec approach is a novel twist on an old technique called the sterile insect technique. Developed in the late 1940s, the sterile insect technique uses doses of radiation to make massreared (male) insects sterile. These sterile insects are released and when

they mate, females produce no viable offspring. Over time the population of the insects gets smaller – this is known as population suppression. Proven to work against screwworm in the Caribbean, it is now used as a standard approach for the control of agricultural pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly: a devastating pest of citrus in the Americas.

Oxitec’s approach is to use genetic biotechnology to kill individual insects (usually in the larval stage) before they reach maturity. Rather than causing sterility, the genetic constructs cause lethality but the outcome at the population-level is the same, population suppression: the local elimination of the pest or disease vector.

Our biology is mathematics Will this approach work? Evaluating whether this sort of biotechnology has any benefits over conventional (radiation) sterile insect technique requires mathematical modelling to understand and predict the consequences of these different control interventions.

We have shown that timing of the lethality is really important. All populations experience mortalities at different parts of the life cycle and some of these have greater impact on the size of the population emerging into the next generation. Timing the lethality so these natural mortalities play out allows the genetic-based technologies to outperform the conventional radiationbased approaches. In fact for mosquito control, timing the genetic lethality so it operates later in the life cycle (say, in the late larval stage) achieves greater levels of population suppression, as the key mortality events tend to happen in the early larval stage.

Science policy All of this research has important practical implications in the control of insect agricultural pests and vectors of disease. Thinking how we translate this into policy is also critical and tightly integrated to our research.

Over the past few years we have been involved in GM science policy at both a national, European and international level.

Policy work in the group has developed statements on how the benefits (as

The future As is no doubt obvious, GM technologies are developing rapidly and this is no more apparent than using these

Photo by Roger Harris

well as the risks) should be taken into account in regulating GM and whether resistance evolution is an economic or an environmental problem. As this policy work is supported by our research, we aim to achieve wider impact from all the mathematics we do.

All of this policy work took a really interesting turn in the middle of 2015 as I was asked to act as a science advisor to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee. The committee was interesting in reviewing the science, policy and regulations about the use of the GM insects.

As a member of DEFRA’s Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment I have some understanding of GM issues, but this science advisory role with the House of Lords was a unique opportunity to be more directly involved in the processes of Parliament.

The enquiry began in late July by working with the Science and Technology Committee secretariat in drafting a call for written evidence which was open until mid-September. Written submissions were received from a range of stakeholders and from these lists of witnesses were drawn up who would provide oral evidence to the Science and Technology Committee.

The Lords committee was provided with an initial closed briefing about the science of the genetic modification of insects (which included a presentation from me and one of St Peter’s honorary fellows Professor Charles Godfray, the Hope Professor of Entomology in Zoology) and the committee received oral evidence from witnesses through October and early November.

Reports from select committees can only work from written and oral evidence provided in public so it was crucial to ensure that the questions directed to witnesses would draw out all the necessary aspects of the science and regulations pertinent to producing a useful and informed report. This worked very well.

The report was finalised and published in the week before the Christmas break with a set of key recommendations to which the Government was expected to respond. These recommendations focused on the science and the intellectual and regulatory environments for research and development on GM insects to prosper in the UK. Overall, this was a fantastic opportunity to see the profile of GM insect research raised to a new level!

Science Policy - House of Lords 2016

approaches for controlling insect vectors that spread disease. Over the past few years, field trials by Oxitec have proven that their population suppression approach can reduce the mosquito that spreads diseases like dengue, Zika, yellow fever and other related viruses by over 80%. With the recent Zika outbreak in Brazil, these technologies are now part of the integrated vector management plans proposed by the World Health Organisation.

It is well established that reducing insects spreading disease will have consequences for reducing the levels of disease burden. This is because insects (such as mosquitoes) have to bite twice: once to pick up the infection and then again to pass on the infection. Reducing this bite rate by reducing vector number is really effective at reducing disease levels.

Population suppression technologies will lead to the local elimination of mosquitoes with the predicted consequences on reducing the levels of disease: no mosquitoes: no disease.

However, eliminating mosquitoes (even if they are invasive species such as the species that spreads dengue or Zika in the Americas) will have ecological consequences. This is the question we always get asked: what is the role of the mosquito in the ecosystem? And what will happen if it is eliminated?

Disease theory tells us that we don’t need to eliminate all insect vectors of a disease in an area to have an impact to substantially reducing disease burden. If we can reduce the mosquito population below a threshold then we can still locally

reduce disease levels. How can this be achieved?

Alternative approaches to the sterile insect technique (which require the continual mass release of modified insects) are being developed and there is a growing movement thinking about using gene editing and gene drive approaches for the control and modification of mosquitoes. The idea here is to develop genetic constructs that might spread through the population from the release of a small number of individuals. These constructs might be lethal but they might also act to modify mosquitoes to make them less able to carry and transmit pathogens. Thinking more carefully about how to take forward these sorts of controls could mean that population suppression can be achieved without local elimination and hence (whatever) ecosystem services mosquitoes provide can be maintained. Is this an interesting idea?

Developing approaches for understanding the outcomes of these different ways of modifying insects for control requires our mathematical modelling approaches to integrate both the genetics and ecological effects. All the signs suggest that this area of genetic modification research will grow and so will its regulatory implications. As such, this is now a strong focus to our research on GM technologies.

There is more on all of this and our research on our website at: http://merg.zoo.ox.ac.uk 21

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

MUSIC AT ST PETER’S Jeremy Summerly

Jeremy Summerly, Director of Music at St Peter’s, reflects on his first year in office.

One of the many glories of St Peter’s is its musical hardware. A decent rehearsal space (the Music Room on the upper floor of the Pastry School) contains a knockabout Blüthner grand piano; within chapel the 1875 Father Willis organ, the 2012 Nicholson chamber organ, the 1906 vintage Blüthner grand piano, the 1985 Robert Goble singlemanual harpsichord, and a Welmar upright rehearsal piano make St Peter’s a well-endowed musical environment.

Within weeks of my appointment as Director of Music, I was seamlessly and inexorably absorbed into the college’s musical machinery. Having signed on the dotted line on 24 February, by 25 April I found myself jointly presiding over the Open Day for choral and organ

22

awards. That day I also conducted my first Evensong at St Peter’s, which was enormously rewarding. The current choir rallied round, and we all tried to make the prospective choral scholars who swelled our ranks feel as welcome as possible. The Choral & Organ Open Day is an extremely important recruitment tool. As ever, the main business is to lure a promising organ scholar – s/he will direct the choir on occasion, so the college is appointing a future musical leader as well as a competent organ practitioner. Half a dozen young organists showed particular interest in St Peter’s and by the end of that Saturday the field had narrowed down to two serious contenders. Come the Organ Trials in September 2015, our preferred candidate was signed to St Peter’s (with the added benefit that he had already passed his A-levels) and

our second choice was appointed to the Organ Scholarship at Hertford College.

Everyone was happy.

On 2 June I was spirited away by coach to Pembroke Lodge, a Georgian mansion in Richmond Park in West London, to be part of the fundraising campaign Keys to Success. It quickly became clear that there was a thirst for the enhancement of musical endeavour within college. My predecessor as Director of Chapel Music, Dr Roger Allen, is a much-loved figure and a fine ambassador for music-making within college; fortunately for me, he has not only paved the way for me to operate effectively within college, but he remains Fellow in Music for another two years, thereby making the handover as smooth as could be imagined. Roger is as patient as he is respected; he is also more generous than I can express.

Two days later, alumna Bishop Libby Lane visited college. Libby is the Church of England’s first female Bishop (of Stockport) and as an undergraduate at St Peter’s she was a member of Chapel Choir; indeed that is where she met her husband. The social benefits of choral singing cannot be exaggerated, and nor can the benefits of it shaping a young person’s future.

Choral singing fosters group discipline, goal-sharing, time management, and non-verbal communication. No wonder enlightened employers look favourably on somebody whose résumé boasts the label Choral Scholar.

So, by the time I joined the St Peter’s payroll on 1 September I was up and running. The Choral Awards at the end of September were extremely well managed by the Paul Geddes Senior Organ Scholar, Daniel Pugh-Bevan. Dan is a fine musician and an unusually careful and competent administrator. Not only did he ferry candidates around college with lighttouched efficiency, but he also assembled a handful of the current choir to join the candidates to form a makeshift choir so that the prospective choral scholars could get a feeling for what singing in chapel feels like.

A week before the start of Michaelmas Term 2015, St Peter’s received the news of the death of Christopher Tambling (Organ Scholar, 1983-6). Chris was a legend. As an undergraduate he ran the choir (in the days when there was no Director of Chapel Music). He was too young to die, but his passing provided a sharp reminder to me that music has been part of the fabric of St Peter’s since its foundation. I may be the college’s first Director of Music, but there have been many excellent musical directors before me, some of them half my age.

Twice-weekly Evensongs (planned in conjunction with the Chaplain, Rev Dr Elizabeth Pitkethly – how healthy to have a woman in the role) were augmented by a concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols for the female voices of the choir, a Christmas recital for alumnus benefactor Mr Harjeev Kandhari (PPE, 1993-6), and a carol service, which had to be repeated in order to accommodate safely all those who wished to attend.

Bleak midwinter was provided by an icy wind, which whistled through the tarpaulin that covered the construction hole in the north wall of Chapel. At both services I read the passage from St Luke’s gospel that relates the story of the birth of Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem. I then tore down to

Jeremy Summerly, Director of Music

London to witness my own daughter’s birth in the rather more sanitized surroundings of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. I was fortunate that my daughter arrived on the Monday morning of 8th Week – it was the only day in the last week of term when I didn’t have a commitment in college. I do hope my wife doesn’t read this.

January 2016 saw the choir contribute to the Burns Night festivities in Hall. While it is important to recognise the choir’s job as an enhancer of worship in chapel, the other contributions that the choir makes to the college’s profile should not be underplayed. A college with music at its heart is a college with a soul. The choir’s performance of Faure’s Requiem at the end of February spectacularly demonstrated how young and inexperienced voices can combine to give the impression of being a professional chamber choir if there is a will to do so. And that will certainly exists in St Peter’s. Now that I have my feet under the choir table, I need to expand my horizons to do more to encourage the role of instrumentalists within college, and also to give more obvious support to those whose bent is music theatre, rock, pop, jazz, or folk. For 26 years I was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There I witnessed the clamour of public outrage as the Jazz and Music Theatre departments opened in the early 1990s. Interestingly, the Music Theatre department is now the RAM’s leader in providing musical employment for students after graduation: the West End and Broadway are flooded with RAM-trained youngsters. The public outrage has abated. I am not one to say I told them so. But I did.

The biannual joint Evensongs with the Choir of Worcester College continue (Michaelmas is a home fixture; Trinity away). Choral gurus Ralph Allwood and Paul Spicer conducted our choir and coached our young conductors at Evensong on 29 October and 3 March respectively. The college also provides the venue and the lower voices for visits

by Frideswide Voices – a newly-formed girls’ choir, which fulfils a crying need in a city whose other young choristers are otherwise all boys.

It took me several years of lecturing in London to work out that I am a committed educationalist. There are no teachers on either side of my family and no musicians either, which is perhaps why I drifted into a life of teaching and conducting rather than deliberately aiming for it (I started my working life as a sound engineer at BBC Radio – I don’t know where my fascination for recording technology comes from either). But I have a fundamental belief that music education touches parts of the young mind that no other discipline can. The benefits of practical music-making to an undergraduate who is studying Music are self-evident, but there are huge benefits to, for instance, the medic and the linguist as well. As Plato wrote: ‘musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of one who is rightly educated graceful’. That’s also my story, and I’m sticking to it.

23

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

ARTS: THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA

By Laura Simpkins, SPC History of Art student and Artistic Director of The Rape of Lucretia

Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia was performed in St Peter’s College Chapel from the 3rd to the 5th of March 2016 to sell-out audiences. The production was staged by a small creative team of Oxford undergraduates, with music director (Rory Green, Music), producer (Alice Skinner, History) and artistic director (myself, Laura Simpkins, History of Art) from St Peter’s.

24

Ronald Duncan’s English libretto for the opera narrates the legend of Sextus Tarquinius’ (the contextual ‘Prince of Rome’) rape of ‘the chaste’ Lucretia, an act which led not only to the heroine’s suicide, but also to the fall of the Roman Empire.

A sinister and uncomfortable piece, both musically and thematically, Lucretia is not often performed.

An opera notorious for its difficult subject matter and a vocal and orchestral score difficult for professionals to stage, is more so for a team of second-years, lacking in experience but neither ambition nor imagination. In a sense, the well-known challenge of Lucretia is what increased its staging appeal, knowing that its title alone would attract the best singers and musicians to audition. Written in 1946, the opera is said to epitomise the modernity and forward-thinking of 20th-century music, an operatic genre which isn’t regularly staged at Oxford, instead more focused upon earlier composers such as Purcell and Mozart. Similarly, the team wanted to update the opera’s treatment of its more demanding themes, especially regarding the all too relevant issue of rape. Recently, institutionalised rape culture has been heavily criticised by national student bodies, particularly at Oxford. Furthermore, issues of consent, gender difference and binaries, as well as sexuality and identity were all taken into consideration by a conscientious and politically-minded crew.

All members of the team were passionate about staging the opera in the chapel at St Peter’s, as it is a venue several of us sing Evensong in twice a week, as part of the college choir. The historically significant chapel lends itself to the overt religious interpretation of Lucretia, acting to consolidate Britten’s framing device of the Male and Female Chorus who narrate the tale of the preChristian Fall of Rome. The setting of the chapel stressed the Christian elements of forgiveness, sin and resurrection, apparent in the ambiguous culmination of ‘is this it all/it is not all’. Hence, we were relieved when we finally secured the venue, knowing from the beginning how potentially problematic it could prove to be, (the same opera was rejected at Christ Church Cathedral in 2012 due to concerns of how the rape itself would be staged).

The process of how the most problematic areas of the opera were navigated was apparent not only in the performances of the opera, but was also to be addressed in a discursive academic panel talk. The

pre-performance seminar, held in Canal House (the Master’s lodgings) included two Fellows from SPC (Dr Roger Allen and Professor Abigail Williams), Professor Peter Franklin from St Catherine’s and myself. The event was well attended by students, alumni and fellows alike.

The panel itself was interesting and thought-provoking, contextualising many of my own artistic choices and hugely augmenting my understanding of the opera. I felt honoured to be included and very grateful for the experience.

The interdisciplinary panel consisting

of members at different stages within the academic system reflected just how much of a collegiate effort Lucretia proved to be.

The performances themselves were undoubtedly a success with overwhelmingly positive reviews. A highlight from an article by the Oxford Culture Review read: ‘It would be hard to find a more impressive group of singers within Oxford’, testament to the incredible talent of our cast and dedication of our crew. I’d like to end on the Cherwell previewer’s comments that ‘There is

something eerie and fitting about staging this opera in the chapel’ as it serves to reiterate the suitability of staging Britten’s Lucretia in the college chapel.

St Peter’s as a college is not known for its passion for music and drama simply due to its generous funding which makes student dreams a possibility – from which Lucretia greatly benefited - but because it is a college made up from a body of individuals that are not adverse to the sinister and uncomfortable topics which are confronted in the arts often before life itself.

25

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

EVENTS AT ST PETER’S Every year we run a busy programme of around 40 events for alumni and wider college community, including year reunions and anniversaries, subject dinners, social and networking drinks. Whether you would like to come back to St Peter’s for a concert, a lecture or a special anniversary, we hope you will find something of interest in our calendar. We are grateful to all alumni who help us organise regional and international events, and we are always looking for ways to bring St Peter’s community together. Please get in touch with Olga Batty in the Development Office if you can help run an alumni gathering in your area.

Talk by General Sir Nick Houghton, 1977, History

Law Society Dinner 2015 26

Cairncross Lecture delivered by Mark Carney, 1991, MPhil Economics

Howard Society Lunch 2015

Oxmas Drinks in London

Engineering Dinner 2015

Gaudy 1995-1999

Talk by Professor Sir Mark Walport 27

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

TALK BY ANDREW MARR

By Madeleine Herbert (2012, Modern Languages and Linguistics) It’s a nerve-wracking experience, preparing to interview a man who has himself interviewed a fair portion of the most important people in the world (Obama, Cameron, Chomsky, to name but a few). Luckily, Andrew Marr was as obliging and engaged as I could have hoped; he has been present at sufficient interviews to know what makes a nice interviewee!

So on 29th January 2016, after conducting my whirlwind interview for the Oxstu with Marr (about the changing face of journalism, Chomsky, and the BBC), I headed over to the Chapel to take my seat ready to see the main event: his talk on British politics following the general election last year (“after the deluge”). The event was open and welcoming and Marr attracted a large audience (who were invited also to admire the new chapel door to their left). My mum even popped over from Somerset to listen!

Marr characteristically presented the hour-long speech with his unusual combination of aplomb and gravity.

It was wonderful to witness the live delivery of a speech by a public speaker with such unparalleled skill. He was

captivating by means of both content and form and the time passed all too quickly. He covered all the important things and what was given less detail in his prepared speech was picked up by members of the doting audience in the questions afterwards: Cameron, attitudes towards the Brexit vote (particularly in Scotland), the Scottish referendum, the refugee crisis etc.

Marr has a privileged position as a regular interviewer of the most powerful and influential people in this country: he has been close enough to see the hairs on the back of their necks bristle; he is employed to know what they are thinking. Particularly interesting were his comments on David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The talk was before Johnson’s affiliation to the pro-Brexit side of the referendum debate and Marr strongly suggested that Johnson’s choice of side had the potential to reflect not his true opinion but the extent to which he wished to have the chance of being Prime Minister. Given the choice we now know Johnson has made, Marr’s comments paint Boris in a rather unfavourable political light: he seems to have prioritised personal success above his loyalty to political beliefs.

The afternoon was enjoyable and interesting and I hope such events will continue be a regular occurrence at St Peter’s. We are so lucky to have talks like these to enrich the cultural life in college and provide opportunities for wannabe journalists (like me): to be able to see a role model in action as well as test my own journalistic skills. What a treat!

Talk by Andrew Marr with Tuna Gonen, 2015, MEng Engineering Science 28

GAUDY 1985-89

By Peter Van den Berghe (1985, PPE) What’s three decades amongst friends?

Apparently not long at all, given the “House Full” signs at the 1985-89 Gaudy held on a balmy late summer evening on 19th September 2015.

While clearly apparent that we all still looked 21 (!), many old friendships were rekindled over what was an outstanding evening of conviviality; fine wine and dining; and an entertaining review of college highlights presented by the Master, all supported by the superlative SPC Development team.

St Peter’s has clearly gone from strength to strength since the late 1980s.

There used to be a pride at being from St Peter’s that bore a precise inverse correlation to the College’s standing on the Norrington Table. It was known as the friendliest College in Oxford for good reason; it had to be. That spirit still shines bright as the packed guest list attested, but the Norrington Table is also now a source of legitimate pride, with the concept of St Peter’s sitting above Merton in the 1985 Norrington rankings being about as likely as Donald Trump running for President in 2016… Possibly a bad analogy at time of writing, but you will take my point.

We started with champagne in the college chapel before the Master regaled us with an insightful commentary on recent college news, the Keys to Success campaign and the Perrodo Project, which – given the very large digger parked in Linton Quad – is clearly going to radically transform not only the aesthetic look of St Peter’s, but the depth and breadth

A few quips overheard during the Gaudy “You know you are getting old when the Master talks about renovating buildings which didn’t exist when we were here.”

“Did we really get more Blues than Firsts? I am not sure we got any Blues did we?”

“That 1987 Matriculates Photo was dark and out of focus for a reason.”

of possibilities in future college life.

Other improvements were also readily apparent. The Porters’ Lodge now bears no resemblance to the cramped wooden box we all remember, while the student accommodation that many enjoyed in the New Block was far superior to anything we experienced in our own student days.

From the Chapel, we moved to the Dining Hall and, once again, three decades felt much more like the blink of an eye. We were back in the same surrounds, on the same benches, with the same people, and the decibel level bore witness to what was a very memorable occasion. Some things had changed here too. The High Table had been recently replaced with a beautiful piece of new craftsmanship, and the dinner itself was outstandingly good – a far cry from our days of often Oliver Twist fayre.

The Master conducted proceedings with aplomb, but was forced to use his gavel with ever increasing authority as the Gaudy proceeded. He noted that we had all come together from many disparate places, but Helen Ivory, who had travelled all the way from Australia, surely deserved her special mention. We all enjoyed a recap of the college’s unprecedented run to the semi-finals of University Challenge before the Master unleashed a quiz of his own that had many of us feeling once again like ill-prepared freshers.

The evening officially concluded with nightcaps in the SCR, but a “who’s who” of usual suspects were reported still going strong at 3am.

Taking a liberty on behalf of all those present, I would like to record our thanks to the whole team at St. Peter’s – Academic, Development, Catering and Lodge – for organising such a spectacular occasion at what clearly still is “the friendliest college in Oxford”.

DR ROGER ALLEN RETIREMENT CELEBRATION

By Aileen Thompson (2007, Music) My track record of keeping secrets from Roger is chequered to say the least.

So when an event to celebrate Roger’s retirement from his duties as Director of Music was mooted, and the word ‘surprise’ was mentioned, my heart sank.

Luckily, I knew I had a few things up my sleeve. For instance, I knew it would not be difficult to ask my peers to give up their time to attend a celebration of Roger’s role in the musical life of the college, since all of us who have worked with him feel a very deep affection for him. Secondly, as we all know, Roger has a complete aversion to social media, so I could conduct my business in fairly plain sight without fear of discovery.

Lastly, and most importantly, I knew that Pamela (Roger’s wife) had agreed to be in on the act. After over 30 years of marriage, I was sure that she would know exactly how to deal with the subterfuge and subtleties required.

So, details were finalised, invitations sent and – most importantly – the music was chosen. It had been decided that the only way to ensure Roger’s attendance at an event entirely to do with celebrating his achievements was to have him be there already. His last official engagement with the choir was due to be the Commemoration of the

Founder and Benefactors Evensong in June, and so a short concert and afternoon tea would happen directly afterwards, thus allowing us to indulge in Roger’s twin passions of good music and excellent cake. The music was chosen by alumni organ scholars Jonathan Lo (2006) and David Quinn (2010) and current senior organ scholar Dan Pugh-Bevan (2013) to appeal as much as possible to Roger’s love of and enthusiasm for choral singing. The choir, made up of current students and alumni from the last 15 years, numbered over 60.

Pamela had decided that it would only be fair to tell Roger that something was organised for after the service and, when Roger noticed his former students in the congregation for the Evensong, he assumed that they were there to see his last service. I am absolutely convinced that until the Master rose to speak before the start of the concert, Roger still had no idea that all those people could be there to celebrate him.

It was a deeply moving experience for all of us there, and the standing ovation given at the end of the concert was lengthy. It was an absolute pleasure to have been able to play a small part in celebrating the work of a man who took musical life at St Peter’s from relative obscurity to its current position as something envied by colleges across the University. My thanks go to the other players who made the event possible: Pamela, for all her advice; Mark Damazer, the Development Office, and all the College staff for their support both before and during the event; and to everyone who filled the Chapel and made it such a terrific and memorable occasion.

Dr Roger Allen Retirement Celebration 29

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

50TH ANNIVERSARY REUNION: CLASS OF 1965

By Andrew Flockhart (1965, PPE) As I now live, as a returned “Settler”, on the edge of the Highlands it is normally a three-day trip to Oxford for any event. However, an invite to a 50 years reunion was not be ignored, particularly as my wife was invited rather than left on her own in a hotel room, as usually happens when I attend a Gaudy. This was particularly important to me, as Margaret my wife and two sons were with me during the time I was at St Peter’s and shared many events with me including MCR dinners and watching me training on the river from the towpath.

The reception in the chapel was long enough to meet up with contemporaries and their partners. Also the opportunity to talk to Billy Watson and Francis

1965 Reunion 30

Warner and, of course, the Master and to listen his address on the state of the college. All very encouraging, showing that the college is now a big player in the University.

The following dinner was excellent with good speeches from the Master and Richard Heffer during which he talked about excellent fundraising ideas for the college. He pointed out that while we hopefully all contribute something it would be better if we individually contributed £1 a day to St Peter’s. I think this a great idea and I have increased my monthly direct debit to meet this suggestion. I hope many others follow Richard’s suggestion.

It was also a great pleasure to meet

1966 first eight contemporaries Derek Bevan and John Pope. It is also an interesting fact that of the same eight, six of us make regular financial donations to the College. It was equally good to meet up with former MCR members, Richard Tudway, who I speak with at least monthly, Bob Moncur and his wife who had travelled all the way from Vancouver to be with us, and Afsal Mufti, who I had not seen since 1967.

At the conclusion of the dinner I won a bottle of wine in the now regular Master’s Quiz. Overall I regarded the event as a great success and better than all the Gaudies I have attended, as it was smaller and more intimate with more time to mingle with old friends in the SCR.

KEEPING IN TOUCH

STAYING CONNECTED Hear our NEWS Keep us up-to-date with all your contact details and receive: • Regular e-newsletters • Cross Keys • The College Record • Invitations to events CONNECT through social networks The social media sites are not only used to share news, events and photographs, they are also a great way for alumni to link up. As the audiences grow we hope we can develop a place where members can connect with others from their cohort, in their region or field of employment, and so on. You will find us on: • Facebook (St Peter’s College Alumni page) • Twitter (@spc_alumni)

Regional and International Networks

Year Group Representatives

St Peter’s has networks all over the world through which alumni meet and share stories about their time in Oxford. Alumni gatherings have fostered business networking, new friendships and general help and support. They are a valuable way to continue to benefit from your membership of St Peter’s.

Our committed and engaged body of alumni volunteers help us to keep alumni in their area connected. This year we are especially grateful to Patrick Turner (1978) and Gautam Prakash (1989) for their help in running the college dinners in New York and Washington, DC, during the North America Alumni Weekend 2016. Next year, the university’s alumni outreach will focus on Asia with Asia Alumni Weekend taking place in Singapore in March 2017.

We are looking for volunteers to help us organise events in Hong Kong and Singapore so please get in touch if you would like to get involved.

If you would like to put your part of the world on the St Peter’s map and become a Regional Representative for your area, please contact Olga Batty for further details.

To promote strong ties within cohorts we are currently recruiting Year Group Representatives. This will enable us to organise special year group activities in addition to the regular Gaudies. If you are interested in joining this body of volunteers please contact Olga Batty on olga.batty@spc.ox.ac.uk or 01865 614985.

• LinkedIn • YouTube • Flickr • Instagram (@spc_oxford)

SPC 10 SPC 10 is a programme for those who matriculated within the last 10 years.

We aim to hold one event per calendar year and invitations are sent by email, so please keep us up-to-date with your contact details. If you would like to help us organise networking events for young alumni, we would love to hear from you!

SHARE YOUR STORIES If you have any news, from changing jobs to having children, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

31

Cross Keys / Summer 2016

EVENT LISTING 2016 Friday 16 – Sunday 18 September Oxford Alumni Weekend Saturday 17 September Gaudy 1975-1979 Sunday 18 September Howard Society Lunch Wednesday 12 October 2016 The Chavasse Family in WW1 Series: Lecture

by Jeremy Paxman in the Sheldonian Theatre Sunday 23 October Chavasse Evengsong: Joint performance of the Walford Davies Requiem by the Choirs of St Peter’s and Trinity College Friday 4 November Talk by Mary Beard, SPC Chapel Wednesday 30 November: The Chavasse Family in WW1 Series: Talk by the Rt Revd James Jones, SPC Chapel Thursday 1 December Oxmas Drinks in London Thursday 8 December The Varsity Rugby Match, Twickenham 2017 Saturday 18 March Gaudy 1960–1964 Friday 24 – Sunday 26 March Alumni Weekend in Singapore Friday 15 – Sunday 17 September Oxford Alumni Weekend Our events calendar is always subject to additions, which we keep you informed about vie e-newsletters and on our website.

For further information about any of these events or to book a place please contact the Development and Alumni Relations Office: development.office@spc.ox.ac.uk +44 (0) 1865 614985 We look forward to seeing you!

32