12 minute read
Going Stateside
OPs across the pond
We are lucky that The Perse is a truly global community, and earlier this year we enjoyed catching up with some of more than 200 OPs and friends of the School who live in North America.
Here four OPs tell their story of how life after The Perse took them across the pond.
hugh Davies (1966)
my family left Oxford in January
of 1956 and emigrated to America. My dad was part of the so-called “brain drain” to the Department of Religion at Princeton University in New Jersey. Four years later almost to the day we travelled back to England for my father’s first six month sabbatical which he elected to spend in Cambridge. I was placed in the Perse Prep School and vividly remember being introduced to the Headmaster, Mr Lindeman, on the first day.
iStoCk.Com/BeyhAnyAzAr
I was enormously happy at the Perse Prep because I could play sports: back at Valley Road Middle School I never made it onto any team. At the Prep we played football in the winter and cricket coached by Mrs Billington in summer. She was pregnant at the time and the team chipped in to buy a fine teddy bear. I still treasure the team photo with its elegant calligraphy and the school crest. As the end of term approached I begged my parents to let me stay and entered The Perse as a boarder for the following year.
In the first form I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mr Brown whose classroom in the new school was a small but well-appointed “black box” theatre. We would present every aspect of play production and the results were so exhilarating for us young students who were granted such great latitude and responsibility to create.
Rather than desks I recall long tables arranged in rows facing the stage. Mr Brown would have us write extemporaneously on a regular basis in our notebooks on a great variety of unpredictable subjects that fired the imagination. I never dreamt that school work could be so effortless and exciting. For one of Mr Brown’s assignments I prepared an essay on Bath Abbey replete with my own Brownie photographs.
Though I returned to the US after first form, to this day I gratefully acknowledge Mr Brown and The Perse as the source of my lifelong interest in art and art history, which I studied at Princeton University through my doctorate and subsequently pursued as my career.
Early on, I focused on British art, writing my undergraduate senior thesis on the Shelter Drawings that Henry Moore made in the London Underground during WWII. In graduate school, I was granted permission to write my doctoral dissertation on a living artist, Francis Bacon, with the caveat that I must secure firsthand interviews with the subject as so little had been published on his work by the early 70s.
Bacon finally agreed to meet me in February of 1973. Over the next six months I interviewed him at his home studio every other Tuesday. He was enormously patient with my questions and most generous in leading me to paintings and literature that had informed his art. Following these sessions, we would take a taxi to the Colony Club in Soho and drink champagne with his friends before heading to dinner. After dinner, I’d race to catch the last tube train home to my bedsit in Ealing while he proceeded to gamble until all hours.
We remained friends until he died in 1992 and I have published several books and articles on his work as well as curated an exhibition on his Papal Portraits of 1953. When his 1975 oneman exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York I was thrilled to introduce Francis to Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol. I currently serve on the Bacon Authentication Committee for the Bacon Estate which recently published his catalogue raisonné – a complete, illustrated compendium of all his known works.
My first professional job was running the art gallery and teaching contemporary art history at the University of Massachusetts and as an adjunct professor at Amherst College. While I learned a great deal from teaching, my real passion was working with artists as a curator presenting their work at the University Gallery. The privilege of vicariously seeing the world from an artist’s perspective is an endless joy and fascination. My second and only other position has been as Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (California) from which I will retire next December after 35 years. Besides curating and writing, I am proud to have been a member, trustee and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors which represents the 250 largest art museums in North America. Through this organisation I have enjoyed the friendship of Tom Campbell (1980), who for eight years directed the Metropolitan Museum.
I’ve been granted a paid sabbatical for this my final year at MCASD and my wife and I have rented a house near Lyme Regis. I’ll spend more time on Bacon scholarship and in October our two standard poodles will join us on the Queen Mary II for the journey back to New York.
Jessica Wurzbacher (1997)
As one of the first group of girls
ever to attend The Perse it was certainly a unique experience. Looking back I’ve always enjoyed being a part of new adventures and perhaps that is why I thrive so much in my current role as Executive Director of a new organisation in Rhode Island, USA, that delivers innovative and empowering education-atsea programmes that promote personal and professional growth.
Growing up in Cambridge, far from the shore, my career path certainly seemed unimaginable. Heading to the University of Bristol to study biology I soon realised the opportunities for adventure that lay ahead of me. I began working on coastal management and teaching projects in the South Pacific (Indonesia and Fiji), the Seychelles and then the Bahamas. It was on Andros in 2003 that I met Dan, my husband, and he introduced me to sailing. For six years we sailed together, taking college students to sea on semester-long programmes.
Sailing and diving became my life and before long I had earned my 200-ton captain’s llicence, became a certified scuba instructor, with over 1,000 dives and several hundred students signed off. We logged more than 40,000 miles at sea, explored the most remote islands of the world, hiking, diving, mountain climbing, and studying rainforests, reefs and volcanoes. Along the way I learned that time at sea can be life-changing for young people.
After six years of sailing we decided to make a home ashore and found an old barn for sale in Jamestown, Rhode Island, a stone’s throw from shore. We picked Rhode Island off the map. We had no family here, didn’t know anyone, and had no job prospects. But the longer we stay, the more we love it.
Oliver Hazard Perry Rhode Island formed in 2008 with the purchase of a partly built hull that was towed down from Canada. Over the course of seven years it was transformed into the Sailing School Vessel Oliver Hazard Perry, a customised platform to deliver education-at-sea programmes. I joined in 2012 and have been so grateful for the opportunities the organisation has provided for me to develop my personal and professional goals. We began sailing in 2015 and have now embarked close to 1,000 students on our programmes including two voyages to Cuba. The part of my job I enjoy most is collaborating with teachers and administrators to create programmes that take advantage of the ship’s unique capabilities.
I now sail a few weeks a year but shore life has its attractions, including our eight-year-old chocolate Lab Cadbury and our four-year-old son Ben. I also run my own small business creating handmade nautical dog leashes and collars in my “spare time” and I’ve sold over 2,500 – so that’s 5,000 splices!
My path has certainly been a surprise for me; I was always firmly rooted at home in Cambridge and didn’t even like to spend nights away from home. But it was the
strong support and foundation of security that both the school and my family provided me that allowed me to feel comfortable testing out new and unique opportunities at my own pace, to discover where I wanted to be in life.
martha Bickerton (2014)
At the Perse, I really enjoyed my A-Levels. I did maths, economics, French and chemistry and when it came to applying to universities, I found it difficult to choose one subject. I applied to study law with French, thinking that it was way to combine disciplines. I left Perse with a deferred offer from Bristol.
On my gap year, I saw friends start university and noticed two things. First, their academic focuses seemed rigid and narrow. Second, the teaching style was impersonal and anonymous – a far cry from the attentive teaching at The Perse.
The idea of studying in America had lingered in my head but I didn’t know anyone who had been and it seemed far-fetched. Plus, I felt I could never compete with US students who had prepared for the SATs, CommonApp and Ivy interviews their whole lives. But my gap-year gave me the independence to think more about it and put in the work.
It was a very hectic process. I decided that I wanted to pursue the US option in December, which is when most American students submit their final essays for a January 1st deadline. I didn’t even have SAT scores (most American
students start taking these two years in advance and retake them 3–4 times). But the more research I did, the more I saw the US system as a great fit, giving me the freedom to study different disciplines for two years before settling on one. The immersive teaching style that emphasises discussion and debate also made me feel genuinely excited about being a university student.
Squeezing two years’ worth of application preparation into one month was ambitious. I was strategic and applied only to one university – NYU – because they didn’t require SAT scores. I think I was accepted because I could show them convincingly that this was right for me. I had a fantastic first year at NYU. I was far outside of my comfort zone and met fascinating people. But New York is overwhelming and it didn’t feel like a typical ‘college experience’, so I decided to transfer to a smaller college. I applied to most of the Ivies and was lucky to get to choose Brown, which is where I am now.
Brown is exactly what American colleges look like in the movies: preppy East Coast-ers, vast wood-panelled libraries, college sweatshirts and, of course, red cups at parties. But in many ways, Brown is much more than I had expected. I am surrounded by passionate people who love what they do. That is the beauty of the American system; that everyone is very engaged in their studies because they have had freedom to work out what they are passionate about. Of course, there are challenges; the hardest part is the culture shock. But overall, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
But overall, I can’t imagine being
michael Davies (1978)
i was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and spent my early years at school in Ponsonby. There was only a minimal uniform – I wore shorts and a polo shirt and, like many other Kiwi children, went to school barefoot. My father was an academic and we moved to Cambridge in the mid-1960s for his work. Starting at The Perse Prep was quite a culture shock. One term I was going to school shoeless, the next I was wearing a cap, tie and striped purple blazer.
I loved maths throughout my time at The Perse, and I spent my school career fighting with Gideon Yoffe (1978) and Adrian Cuthbert (1978) for the position as the best in the year – over the course of seven years we just about tied. After leaving school, I spent a year as a ‘jackaroo’ in Australia – a ‘jack of all trades’ fighting bushfires, shooting kangaroos, and fixing fence posts.
I had initially applied to study mathematics at university when I returned to the UK, but during an argument with my uncle about a diesel engine I realised that my true passion was engineering. I managed to change courses and studied engineering at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, followed by a Masters in Microelectronics, Cybernetics & Robotics at Durham and an MBA at London Business School. Nevertheless, I continued to have a varied career, working in steel mills and spending some time as the chief bouncer in Sheffield’s largest nightclub.
In the early 1990s, I moved back to New Zealand and helped to found the country’s first digital mobile ’phone network. My travels around the world continued when I was convinced by my American first wife to move to the USA, where I began lecturing at MIT, much to the amusement of my father, as I always said I would never follow his footsteps into academia.
Alongside lecturing at MIT and London Business School, I have also worked on a number of start-ups, with varying degrees of success. The first one failed (although I now have about 20 patents relating to horse lameness), the second couldn’t possibly match the vast resources of our tech titan competitors, resulting in us returning the initial investment, and it looks like third time lucky: the latest is scaling rapidly – making more than $1 million in its first week after the launch of its latest product.
In 2003, I founded Endeavour Partners, a strategy consulting firm. Although we’re only about twenty people, our clients have a combined market cap of $2.5tn – we are lucky to be working with some of the biggest names in technology. Nowadays, our work focuses primarily on how digital technologies are reshaping the world. There is likely to be more change in the next decade than in the last 50 years, as we face up to huge shifts in consumer behaviour, new competitive reality and the ethical implications of big data. Companies will need to adapt quickly and we help them to do this.
My career has been truly global, and my job still takes me all over the world – I’ve racked up over 1.5m miles in the last six years, mastering the art of avoiding jet lag with caffeine and red wine. It is wonderful to have reached the point where businesses and organisations who could go to anyone choose to ask me for advice. However, my greatest achievement is definitely my four daughters.
