An Eightieth Birthday Speech Professor Robin Carrell responded to the College’s toast to his health on 24 April 2016
FELLOWS, STAFF, AN D ST U DEN TS
Master: thank you for your kind words of introduction and for proposing this toast. The question that I keep being asked in College, is ‘how did the shift from New Zealand to Cambridge come about?’ And indeed I think my greatest challenge in life was in this transplantation of a teen-aged family over a distance of 12,000 miles. So I am especially grateful for your hospitality in inviting tonight, with their spouses, my three brothers who stayed in New Zealand, my four children who made the shift, and most of all, my wife Sue, to whom the success of the resettlement of the family is wholly due. The Land that I grew up in is summarised in two lines in my father’s diary, written when I was three years old. Sept 2nd 1939: Germany has invaded Poland. War is terrible. Why can’t we have peace forever? Southland beat Canterbury 10–8 The New Zealand of my early childhood, was a land distant to everywhere. A post-pioneering community of quiet contentment. A community ruefully described by the philosopher Karl Popper, a University lecturer in Christchurch, as ‘abgeschnitten, cut away from the world”. The generations of my grandparents and great grandparents had arrived with the surge of settlers from Britain in the 1850s to 60s. Their grow-it-yourself, almost cash-free life was epitomised by the household into which I was born, that of my grandfather, a blacksmith. It was in this self-sufficient household that my mother and father lived for the first seven years after their marriage in 1931 and where the first three of their four children, all boys, were born. These were the years of the Great Depression during which my father was periodically out of work, from farming to railwayman. It must have been a stressful time, with a crowded house and all the more so with the presence in the back room of my 97 year old great-grandfather, a Cornishman and one-time seaman in the Crimean war.
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