oxford today trinity_2015-digital

Trinity Term 2015 ~ Volume 27 No 2 ~ www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk 

OXFORD 

IN 2065 

Prof Steve Rayner 

on Governance 

Christopher Benton 

on Logistics 

Barbara Hammond 

on Energy 

Sir Christopher 

and Lady Ball 

on Waterways 

Tom Curtis 

on Food 

Lord Drayson 

on Transport 

Peter Madden 

on Technology

GAME PLAYER 

GAME CHANGER 

Oxford Executive MBA 

Go from a game player to a successful game changer. The Oxford Executive MBA is your opportunity to 

transform yourself and your ambitions whilst providing immediate impact to your organisation. 

Scholarships available for Executive Degrees programmes 

There are scholarships available for University of Oxford staff in 2016: 

• Executive MBA 

• Diploma in Financial Strategy 

• Diploma in Global Business 

• Diploma in Organisational Leadership 

• Diploma in Strategy and Innovation 

• MSc in Major Programme Management 

For more information visit: www.sbs.oxford.edu/emba

Oxford Today Welcome 

Welcome 

EDITOR: Dr Richard Lofthouse 

DIGITAL EDITOR: John Garth 

ART EDITOR: Christian Gauthier 

HEAD OF DESIGN AND PUBLICATIONS OFFICE: 

Anne Brunner-Ellis 

SUB EDITOR: Linda Loder 

PICTURE EDITOR: Joanna Kay 

ART DIRECTOR: Paul Chinn 

TRINITY TERM 2015 

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: 

Alun Anderson, Author and journalist 

Anne Brunner-Ellis, Head of Design and Publications Office, 

University of Oxford 

Jo Dunkley, Associate Professor in Astrophysics, 

Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford 

Tom Dyson, Director, Torchbox 

Liesl Elder, Director of Development, University of Oxford 

Christine Fairchild, Director of Alumni Relations, 

University of Oxford 

Jeremy Harris, Director of Public Affairs, University of Oxford 

Alan Judd, Author and journalist 

Martin Leeburn, Former journalist and PR consultant 

Dr Richard Lofthouse, Editor, Oxford Today 

Ken Macdonald QC, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford 

Dr William Whyte, Lecturer in History, 

Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford 

Dr Helen Wright, Member, Oxford University 

Alumni Board 

EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES: 

Janet Avison, Public Affairs Directorate 

Tel: +44 (0)1865 280545 

oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk 

www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk 

ALUMNI ENQUIRIES, 

INCLUDING CHANGE OF ADDRESS: 

Claire Larkin, Alumni Office 

Tel: +44 (0)1865 611610 

enquiries@alumni.ox.ac.uk 

www.alumni.ox.ac.uk 

University of Oxford, University Offices, 

Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JD 

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES: 

Tel: +44 (0)20 3004 7201 

Anne Mead-Green 

anne_meadgreen@themediasaleshouse.co.uk 

Aleksandra Iwanik 

aleksandra_iwanik@themediasaleshouse.co.uk 

The Media Sales House 

133 Creek Road, Greenwich, London SE8 3BU 

www.themediasaleshouse.co.uk 

Oxford Today is published in October and April. It is free to Oxford 

graduates. It is also available on subscription. For further information and 

to subscribe, contact Janet Avison (see details above). © The Chancellor, 

Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford. The opinions expressed in 

Oxford Today are those of the contributors, and are not necessarily shared 

by the University of Oxford. Advertisements are carefully vetted, but the 

University can take no responsibility for them. 

All information contained in this magazine is for informational purposes only and 

is, to the best of our knowledge, correct at the time of going to press. The 

University of Oxford accepts no responsibility for errors or inaccuracies that 

occur in such information. If you submit material to this magazine, you 

automatically grant the University of Oxford a licence to publish your 

submissions in whole or in part in any edition of this magazine and you grant the 

University of Oxford a licence to publish your submissions in whole or in part in 

any format or media throughout the world. Any material you submit is sent at your 

risk and neither the University of Oxford nor its employees, agents or 

subcontractors shall be liable for any loss or damage. No part of this magazine 

may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the University of 

Oxford. Printed by Headley Brothers, Ashford, Kent. 

The text paper in this magazine is chlorine free. The paper manufacturer 

has been independently certified in accordance with the rules of the 

Forest Stewardship Council. 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/NEW COLLEGE 

Magnolia outside New College chapel 

This month’s cover is chock full of references that may not be 

immediately obvious. The traffic arrows represent the huge 

constraints Oxford faces as it grows. In short, it cannot build up, it 

may not be able to build out, but it can build down. Skyscrapers 

have been off the agenda since the 1960s, after the rejection of the 

planned zoology tower, depicted bottom left. Expanding outwards is 

a question mark, because it would require greenbelt exception, 

currently the subject of fierce debate. That leaves digging and 

tunnelling down into the earth. While County Council leader Ian 

Hudspeth’s recent idea of a mile-long tunnel conveying buses from 

The Plain to the railway station was met with scepticism, it is not 

unthinkable. We forget that the Bodleian Library first dug a great 

tunnel under Broad Street, to say nothing of the Norrington Room 

underneath Blackwells, perhaps the largest basement dig-out in 

England, before they became fashionable. Next, the cover 

reproduces a map of Oxford in 1918, showing how the city 

developed between two rivers and their flood plains. Electric cars 

and a drone carrying a library book complete the illustration. 

Elsewhere in this issue we consider how technology is failing society, 

and how librarians may have the solutions. We remind everyone 

that Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist, went to Oxford, and only 

later Cambridge. And we recount how Napoleon Bonaparte ended 

up in Oxford, or at least a likeness of him. We visit the Oxford 

karting team, meet two artists and a potter who are building a 

Japanese kiln at Wytham Woods, and note Oxford’s involvement in 

recovering the drowned Egyptian city of Heracleion. 

EDITOR: Richard Lofthouse 

Email: oxford.today 

@admin.ox.ac.uk @oxtoday /oxfordtoday 

Front cover: Oxford Past, Present, Future. 

Design by Scott Rhodes for the University of Oxford, 2015. 

www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk | 

@oxtoday 

3

SPECIAL 

ALUMNI OFFER 

...ish 

Get the Times Literary Supplement on your iPad, 

iPhone, Kindle Fire or Android device every week. 

12 ISSUES FOR JUST £10 

Read compelling coverage of the latest and most important publications in subjects ranging from literature 

and the fine arts to history, religion, philosophy and science. As well as the digital edition you’ll get the printed 

magazine and exclusive access to the TLS archive – dating back to 1994. 

. 

“If I were only allowed one weekly, it would be the TLS ” Tom Stoppard. 

01858 438 781 quoting OXAL 

visit subscription.co.uk/tls/oxal 

After your first 12 weeks, you’ll pay just £29 per quarter, saving 57% on the cover price. This is a UK offer and prices will vary depending on where you are in the world. For US and Canadian 

subscriptions, please visit oxford.tls-subscription.com. You can also opt to receive just the print edition or just the digital edition.

In this issue… 

Oxford’s project to 

build a Japanese 

ceramics kiln, p60 

OXFORD IN 2065 

TRINITY HIGHLIGHTS 

24 

Oxonians 

This issue’s Oxonians 

include elephant protector 

Ian Douglas Hamilton 

47 

10 

36 

28 32 

Napoleon 

How Napoleon’s death 

mask was created – and 

ended up in Oxford 

Nimble ninjas 

Oxford beats Stanford and 

Cambridge as Isis Innovation 

wins tech transfer award 

Your voice 

6 Letters 

OT digital 

8 Web, email & apps 

Inside Oxford 

10 News 

Shaping the world 

14 The big picture 

17 Viewpoint 

19 Research 

24 Oxonians 

Alumni diary 

26 Resources and events 

Features 

28 The uncrowned 

tech monarchs 

The vital role of librarians in 

preserving our digital heritage 

32 Hawking at Oxford 

The famous scientist’s Oxford beginnings 

36 Oxford in 2065 

The changes Oxford faces if it is to be a 

successful city 50 years from now 

47 Napoleon’s last 

resting place 

How a final relic of the emperor 

came to rest in Oxford 

Common room 

53 Books 

57 The good sport 

59 Food and drink 

Oxonian lives 

60 Portrait 

63 Obituary 

66 My Oxford 



5

Your voice Letters 

Your voice 

Letters 

We welcome letters for publication, but may edit 

them to fit. Unless you request otherwise, letters 

may also appear on our website. Write to us at: 

Oxford Today, University Offices, 

Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JD 

In response to... 

OT 27.1: 

Fracking 

The Shell protagonist, Dr Joe 

Cartwright, seems to have 

overlooked the one obvious 

drawback to this technology. 

It is merely a short-term 

expedient until the eagerly 

sought gas and oil are 

exhausted. Had the vast 

funds devoted to the 

physicists’ job creation 

scheme been used instead to 

develop wind, wave and solar 

energy sources there would 

be no need for fracking, 

extracting oil from tar sands, 

etc, all at great expense and 

all resulting in contamination 

and pollution. 

Allan R Mears 

Wadham, 1954 

Dr Joe Cartwright says that 

‘Europe’s largest onshore oil 

field, in Dorset, Wytch Farm’ 

is ‘nestled in the beautiful 

New Forest.’ As other readers 

have no doubt already pointed 

out, Wytch Farm is in the Isle 

of Purbeck, not particularly 

near the New Forest – which 

is in Hampshire, beyond Poole 

Harbour, Poole, Bournemouth 

and Christchurch. 

Rob English 

Balliol, 1954 

The fracking debate can be 

put on a more rational basis. 

The main driving force behind 

shale fracking in the UK is the 

economic argument, that 

since it has transformed the 

economy in the USA (with 

lower energy prices and 

increased industrial 

competitiveness), therefore it 

can do so here. This is unlikely 

to be the case, because 

conditions are very different 

between the US and UK. 

First, the US has 40 times the 

Our last issue explored 

both sides of the 

fracking debate 

land area of the UK, so they 

can afford to lose a few million 

acres. The UK does not have 

vast open spaces. 

Furthermore, our population 

density is eight times theirs, 

so every square mile fracked 

affects eight times as many 

people. There is however an 

alternative: tidal power, which 

has not received the attention 

it deserves, and which we as a 

maritime nation could excel 

in. Tidal power will continue to 

be available as long as the 

moon goes round the earth, 

and so will produce clean 

energy for centuries to come. 

Richard J Ellis 

Corpus Christi, 1962 

The relevant question is 

whether or not fracking is a 

necessary condition of a 

highly developed society. And 

of course it is not. Moreover, 

such a democratic deficit 

throws doubt on whether our 

society is highly developed or 

not. So what point was the 

professor trying to make? 

Peter Lanyon 

New, 1953 

RANDI SOKOLOFF/SHUTTERSTOCK 

Rochester’s Oxford 

Alexander Larman (OT 27.1) 

blithely cites Wadham as 

‘later...notorious for 

homesexual activity, revelling 

in its nickname of “Sodom”.’ 

That refers to a notorious 

sex-scandal of 1739, which saw 

the hurried flight of the then 

Warden to Boulogne. There is 

no indication that the college 

was proud of the event; rather 

otherwise. What possible 

relevance can this event have 

to a discussion of possible 

homoerotic relations in 

Oxford in 1660, some eighty 

years earlier? 

Incidentally, Pembroke, not 

Wadham, was (just) Oxford’s 

newest college in 1660. 

Cliff Davies 

Wadham, 1956; 

Emeritus Fellow 

Carpentry 

Being a carpenter’s son is no 

guarantee of success. Like the 

eminent 18th-century 

Oxonians William Crotch and 

William Crowe (OT letters 27.1), 

I am the son of a carpenter 

and was a ‘poor scholar’ 

(albeit with few claims to 

scholarship!). There, sadly, 

all resemblance ends. 

David Stanbury 

Wadham, 1960 

Football 

Your current Michaelmas Term 

edition refers to Cuthbert 

Ottaway (BNC), England’s first 

football captain, but let us not 

forget R E ‘Tip’ Foster (Univ), 

the only man to have 

captained England at both 

cricket and football. Like 

Ottaway, he was a multi-Blue. 

In cricket, his innings of 287 

against Australia in 1903 is 

still the highest on debut and 

the highest for England in 

Australia and was the highest 

in any Test at Sydney until 

Michael Clarke’s 329 against 

India in 2012. In football, when 

England beat Germany 12–0 in 

1901 (those were the days!), he 

scored six of the goals. 

Nevill Swanson 

St Edmund Hall, 1958 

Bicycles 

In 1946, though accepted, 

it was touch and go whether 

I could afford to go up to 

Oxford. My family were 

extremely poor. But somehow, 

I made it. Ah. But another 

snag: I’d never owned a bicycle. 

However, my mother located a 

second-hand specimen for me. 

For £5. It was a beauty! 1926 

lady’s model, sit-up-and-beg, 

with a basket in front and a 

back carrier. I christened it 

Amalia. Amalia had several 

adventures. One day I bicycled 

with my cello on board to a 

rehearsal in the Music Room. 

It was a bitterly cold night and 

snow lay in frozen ridges along 

the roads. Just outside Keble 

College Amalia tipped over. 

My cello tobogganed ahead 

into the darkness.Miraculously, 

it was unhurt. 

My most worrying time was 

when Amalia was stolen. But 

about a week later, lo! Amalia 

reappeared outside my college. 

In the basket was a note saying 

‘This is the worst bicycle I have 

ever stolen. You can have it 

back.’ Amalia travelled many 

miles – even around the 

Dordogne on a family holiday. 

In 1987 a house move 

necessitated an end to a happy 

relationship. That gallant old 

lady was for the dump. 

However, she was rescued by 

an antiques dealer who paid 

£5 to charity. 

Alison Mallett 

Lady Margaret Hall, 1946 

6 


@oxtoday

Letters Your voice 

Email your letter to: 



/oxfordtoday 

For full 

versions of these 

letters and to read 

further alumni 

correspondence, visit 

www.oxfordtoday. 

ox.ac.uk 

Entrepreneurial Oxford 

I was delighted to read in OT 

27.1 that there is an increasing 

focus on entrepreneurial 

activities at Oxford. In a world 

in which, civil service aside, 

there are no ‘jobs for life’, it’s 

increasingly valuable for us all 

to think entrepreneurially even 

if we won’t all create new 

companies as a result. It’s a bit 

worrying, however, to note that 

the emphasis with regard to 

faculty is still abstract and 

academic. Where are the 

real-world entrepreneurs 

who have gone through the 

gruelling and brutal 

experience of moving from 

idea through execution 

to market? 

Allan Lees 

Hertford, 1984 

The name Isis 

Regarding Helen Massey- 

Beresford’s (online) article on 

whether we should continue to 

use the name of the river Isis, 

in light of recent politics, my 

thoughts are that its name 

through Oxfordshire and 

Berkshire probably predates 

that of the Thames. The Isis 

meets the Thame just south of 

Dorchester, the confluence 

thereby logically being named 

Thame-Isis (Celtic Tamesis). 

Camden’s Britannia (1586) also 

notes that the stretch above 

Dorchester to the source was 

named the Isis. We should be 

proud that the river’s name 

has such antiquity and priority 

over the name of a probably 

soon-to-be-disbanded 

political faction. 

Matthew Kaser 

Linacre, 1984 

The Germans in Oxford 

Professor Lawrence Goldman’s 

description (OT 27.1) of the 

outbreak of World War I 

stirred memories of a similar 

scene at Christ Church during 

Michaelmas term, 1945. At 

that time I was serving in the 

US Army. The war in Europe 

ended in May 1945, and I then 

went on to serve in the army of 

occupation in Berlin. Soldiers 

awaiting discharge could apply 

for transfer to a programme at 

Oxford. My application for 

PPE, while matriculating and 

residing at Christ Church, was 

accepted. The highlight was a 

tutorial with Roy Harrod, the 

distinguished economist, who 

had just returned from 

Bretton Woods where he 

participated with Lord Keynes 

in the development of the 

International Monetary Fund. 

My rooms at Christ Church 

were in Tom Tower, just under 

the large bell that struck each 

evening at a designated time. 

On one occasion I was offered 

access to the top floor of the 

tower where the ropes were 

placed to ring the bell. On 

that occasion I saw several 

large wardrobe cases which I 

was told had been placed 

there by German students who 

were then living at Oxford and 

who had to leave Oxford 

suddenly when World War II 

broke out to report back to 

Germany for service in the 

German army. 

What happened to these cases 

(or to the students) I don’t 

know, but once again it was 

apparent that the more things 

change, etc. 

Maurice S Spanbock 

Christ Church, 1945 

Tolkien’s pine tree 

I refer to the assertion in 

the above article (OT 27.1) 

that the ‘University’s Botanic 

Garden has had to fell the 

famous black pine…’ 

No, not ‘HAD’ to fell: 

CHOSE to fell. A wise and 

laudable choice, no doubt, but 

a choice, nevertheless. 

N J E Harrison 

St Peter’s, 1975 

I understand the power of 

trees, and how much their 

super/natural presence can 

bring comfort, solace, and a 

great sense of tradition and 

ancestral spirit. This is why 

I understand the loss of 

Tolkien’s black pine tree in the 

University’s Botanic Garden. 

This tree is like the autograph 

tree – signed by the likes of 

William Butler Yeats and Lady 

Gregory – near Gort, County 

Galway, Eire; full of literary 

allusion and priceless heritage. 

In homage to such trees, 

I recall Oxonian Gerard 

Manley Hopkins, S J, and 

his poem Binsey Poplars. 

Read it at bit.do/otpoplars 

Reynaldo Nera Obed 

University College, 1966 

Siberian vase 

The picture of the Siberian 

vase at Merton (OT 26.2) 

awakened memories from 40 

years ago, when I was a visiting 

fellow at Wolfson. 

On our first night in Oxford, 

my family and I trekked down 

from our house on Victoria 

Road to hear a concert at 

Merton. We were jet-lagged, 

cold and wet, but seeing that 

vase as we walked in 

imprinted a memory that 

is with us yet. The concert 

was itself lovely, and our 

time at Oxford was rewarding 

in many ways. 

Marshall Shapo 

Wolfson, 1975 

OT 27.1: 

Molecular 

marmalade 

In the article ‘Molecular 

marmalade’, you refer to 

Bon Maman (marmalade). 

Quel horreur! 

Ian Fyfe 

Trinity, 1966 

At last, something really 

interesting and useful in your 

magazine! I now know why my 

London marmalade is clear, 

and my Nice marmalade is 

‘slurry’-like; a perfect 

description. Pity about ‘Bon’ 

Maman though. 

Dr Grace Kenny 

St Anne’s, 1961 

After a glass of wine and a 

brief browse of the internet, 

I’m leaning towards David 

Potter’s theory of a 

mis-transcription of Rebecca 

Price’s 1681 manuscript of 

‘How to jarr plums’. I have no 

expectation of winning the 

competition but would like to 

say I tried the lemon and basil 

jelly recipe and it is lovely! 

Ann Hinds 

As both a jam maker and 

retired molecular biologist, 

I was particularly interested 

in Joy Boyce’s piece about 

marmalade. However, it 

occurred to me that maybe 

Oxford Today was not aware 

of another alumna who is big 

in the artisan marmalade 

world. Jane Maggs (St. Hugh’s, 

1973) won double gold medal 

at the Dalemain Marmalade 

Festival last year. 

See bit.do/marmalade 

Caroline Lynas 

St Hugh’s, 1973 

ONLINE 

New letters are regularly uploaded to the ‘opinion’ 

section of the OT website www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk 



7

OT digital Web, email & apps 

OT digital 

Web, email & apps 

Read Oxford Today on the go with our 

Oxford Today app, now available 

free for iOS and Android! 

5MOST 

POPULAR 

WEB 

FEATURES 

Subscribe 

THE TOP 

1. Sleepless in Oxford 

Our runaway winner links to 

an evidently popular sleep 

survey – we are ignoring our 

natural sleeping patterns with 

dangerous results, according 

to Oxford’s Professor of 

Circadian Neuroscience. 

bit.do/otsleep 

2. Duckface, lolcat 

and permadeath 

See Oxford Dictionaries’ 2014 

mahoosive update to check 

out some xlnt new words – 

whether you’re on your 

fone or al desko. 

bit.do/otdictionary 

Join in the 

conversation 

to email newsletters OT Weekly and OT Extra, 

and join Oxford’s online alumni community 

Simply visit www.alumni.ox.ac.uk today 

Select the 

login 

dropdown 

Here you can 

also update 

your details and 

select your 

communication 

preferences 

3. Oxonian honours 

Seven senior academics and 

a philanthropist recognised 

in the New Year Honours. 

bit.do/othonours 

4. Isis: a name with 

a problem? 

An old Oxford name – but 

given its new associations, 

should we continue to use it? 

bit.do/otname 

Enter login 

details or 

register 

To register you 

will need to 

enter your 

name, college 

and alumni 

card number 

5. Gallery: night and the city 

Jonathan Kirkpatrick uncovers 

a magical Oxford of shadows, 

moonlight and stars. 

bit.do/otnight 


You will then have some subscription 

options to choose from: 

Choose 

OT Weekly 

and get the top 

three stories 

every Friday 

Or choose 

OT Extra 

for a monthly 

email packed 

with content 

8 



Higher 

Learning. 

That’s what you’ll get from an investment in the Oxford Saïd MBA 

Class of 2016. The investment is a listed bond earning c. 5.16% annually. 

Prodigy Finance works with leading universities to connect alumni 

investors with student borrowers. Earn a financial return while 

investing in the next class of talented Oxford Saïd MBA students. 

An investment in Oxford’s interest, that will pay you interest. 

Contact us for smart returns. 

+44 20 7193 2832 | investor@prodigyfinance.com | prodigyfinance.com 

Prodigy Finance Ltd 2013. All Rights Reserved. Prodigy Finance Ltd is incorporated in the United Kingdom 

Company Number 05912562. Prodigy Finance is licensed under the Consumer Credit Act 1974 (Licence no 

612713/1) and is an ICO registered data controller (Reg. No. Z9851854). Prodigy Finance Ltd is an appointed 

representative of BriceAmery Capital Ltd which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. 

Note that Prodigy Finance Limited carries out both regulated and unregulated business, and that its 

FCA-regulated activities extend only to promoting and arranging investment in the Notes. 

PFL_20150223_OXFORDTODAY

Inside Oxford News 

Inside Oxford 

News 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/ROB JUDGES 

#1 for research 

The official, government-led assessment of 

research across all UK universities, the Research 

Excellence Framework (REF), announced in 

December that Oxford University is leading in 

world-class research. 

The research of more 

than 52,000 academic 

staff from 154 UK 

universities was 

peer-reviewed by a 

series of panels comprising UK and 

international experts. Oxford 

submitted 2,409 staff and 31 

departments for review. 48% of the 

University’s research was judged to 

be 4* (‘world leading’) and 39% to 

be 3* (‘internationally excellent’). 

The University also performed 

strongly in the new impact 

category, reflecting the wideranging 

benefits of Oxford’s 

research. Examples included a new 

malaria treatment which has saved 

more than a million lives globally, 

and miniature chemical reactors 

created by Oxford chemists which 

can convert low-value and waste gas 

into high-grade liquid fuels. Most 

recently, although it fell outside the 

timing of the REF, an Oxford team 

led by Professor Adrian Hill at the 

Jenner Institute has contributed to 

the rapid development of a vaccine 

against ebola (above). 

‘It is pleasing to be ranked in 

first place, but even more 

pleasing to see recognition of the 

fantastic contribution Oxford 

researchers make to knowledge 

across a huge range of subjects 

– and of the real impact they have 

on health, prosperity, policy 

formation and culture around 

the world,’ said Professor Andrew 

Hamilton, Vice-Chancellor. He 

warned that reaping the full fruits 

of the University’s impact would 

depend on ‘strong and sustained 

public investment.’ 

Back on the Tideway 

For the first time, April 

witnessed the women’s 

boat race fought on 

the same stretch of the 

Thames, on the same day, 

as the men’s. Sponsored 

respectively by BNY 

Mellon and its UK-based 

subsidiary Newton, the 

men’s and women’s 

boat races are now back 

together, contested from 

Putney to Mortlake on 

the historic course that 

characterised the men’s 

race from its founding 

in 1829. The women’s 

race began in 1929 and 

finally has equality with 

the men’s event for the 

first time – and not before 

time. Cambridge remains 

ahead in the overall tally of 

victories in both men’s and 

women’s races. 

The results of the 2015 

contest can be found at 

www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk 

Topping out the Blavatnik School 

The Blavatnik School of Government in the Radcliffe 

Observatory Quarter has reached its highest point at 

22.5m, 50cm shorter than Carfax Tower. A topping out 

ceremony was held in January, and the building will be 

finished later this year. Benefactor Leonard Blavatnik, 

who donated £75m towards the school, said, ‘I feel I am 

standing in a building of the 21st century.’ Established at 

Oxford in 2010, the Blavatnik School first opened in 2012 

to students studying for its flagship one-year Master of 

Public Policy degree. It is now also possible to study for 

a doctoral degree in public policy. The first Dean of the 

Blavatnik School is Professor Ngaire Woods. 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE 

10 



News Inside Oxford 

Beating Stanford 

at tech transfer 

Global University Venturing awarded Isis Innovation 

‘Technology Transfer Unit of the Year’ 

Global University Venturing, 

which reports on universities 

holding stakes in spinout 

companies of staff and students, 

named Oxford’s Isis Innovation 

‘Technology Transfer Unit of the Year’, 

beating rivals including Stanford and 

Cambridge. Oxford-based Isis was also 

ranked the largest university tech transfer 

company in Europe. The awards capped a 

successful year, the standout deal being the 

acquisition last year by US games company 

Zynga of Oxford spinout NaturalMotion 

for US$527million. 

A second highlight is the recent creation 

of two funds open to alumni investors: 

the University of Oxford Isis Funds I and II. 

The first, of £1.6 million, was launched last 

January, and the second in December. Both 

funds were oversubscribed within weeks, 

principally by word of mouth and without the 

University having to spend any money 

advertising them, unlike commercial rivals. 

London-based Parkwalk, who manage both 

Isis Funds, announced in January that they 

had invested, as part of a larger, £1 million 

investment round, in TheySay. TheySay was 

founded by Stephen Pulman, Professor of 

Computational Linguistics at the University’s 

Department of Computer Science. With 

colleagues, he has developed software that 

can apply linguistic algorithms to decipher 

public opinion across large volumes of data, 

including social media. The patented 

software has potentially very wide application 

in both public and commercial sectors, both 

reducing time spent processing large volumes 

of unstructured data, and gauging public 

opinion. Likely customers for this kind of 

technology include political strategists, 

consultants and developers, marketing 

service providers, hedge funds and traders. 

Medical technology is another major sector 

The game Clumsy Ninja, produced by Oxford 

spinout animation company NaturalMotion 

for Isis Innovation, which has built the Isis 

Angels Network into a powerful body of over 

200 investors, including many alumni. Not 

only did angels – a trade term for wealthy, 

private investors in early-stage companies – 

back NaturalMotion with £2 million, but 

more recently they have supported OxSonics 

and Oxtex. OxSonics is commercialising 

ultrasound-based devices for drug delivery 

and surgical application, while Oxtex is 

developing novel tissue expanders with 

applications in burns, scar revision, breast 

reconstruction and cleft palate surgery. 

Seed Fund Manager Andrea Alunni, who 

runs the Isis Angels Network, reports that 

angels are becoming an increasingly 

important source of equity finance for 

Oxford. ‘Over the last four years,’ he says, 

‘investments from angels have outnumbered 

those from seed and venture capital funds.’ 

NATURALMOTION 

BULLETIN 

Tolkien’s pine tree 

Since our last story on 

‘Tolkien’s pine tree’, the 

iconic black pine tree taken 

down last summer, Acting 

Director of the Oxford Botanic 

Garden Dr Stephen Harris 

confirms that the plan is to 

carve the remaining tree 

trunk in situ, while the pine’s 

branches will be made into 

a wide range of wooden 

objects by local craftsmen 

and sold to raise funds. 

Castle Mill 

A motion tabled by Diarmaid 

MacCulloch, Professor of the 

History of the Church, to 

modify student 

accommodation erected two 

years ago in Jericho, by Port 

Meadow, has been rejected by 

the University’s ‘parliament’, 

Congregation. A postal ballot 

rejected the motion, with 1698 

votes against and 460 votes in 

favour. This endorses the 

decision of the Congregation 

meeting of February 10, which 

rejected the motion by 536 to 

210 votes. The University plans 

to mitigate the appearance of 

the buildings with additional 

landscaping and tree planting, 

with exact details to be 

unveiled later this year. 

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD BOTANIC GARDEN 

OUI/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE 



11

Inside Oxford News 

New Year Honours 

Seven senior members of the University 

of Oxford were recognised in the New Year 

Honours announced on 31 December. 

Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, Provost of Worcester 

College and Professor of Literature, was knighted for 

services to literary scholarship and higher education. 

Sir John Bell, FRS, Regius Professor of Medicine 

and Student (Fellow) of Christ Church, was appointed 

GBE for services to medicine, medical research and 

the UK life science industry. 

Professor Marina Warner, CBE, FBA, Fellow of All 

Souls College, was appointed DBE for services to 

higher education and literary scholarship. 

Russell Foster, FRS, Professor of Circadian 

Neurosciences, Head of the Nuffield Laboratory of 

Ophthalmology, Director of the Sleep and Circadian 

Neuroscience Institute and Fellow of Brasenose 

College, was appointed CBE for services to science. 

Tim Palmer, FRS, Professor of Climate Physics, 

Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on 

Modelling and Predicting Climate, and Fellow of Jesus 

College, was appointed CBE for services to science. 

Cyrus Cooper, Professor of Epidemiology and 

Director of Research Strategy at the Nuffield 

Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology 

and Musculoskeletal Sciences, and Fellow of 

St Peter’s College, was appointed OBE for services 

to medical research. 

Hugh Williamson, FBA, Emeritus Regius Professor 

of Hebrew and Emeritus Student (Fellow) of Christ 

Church, was appointed OBE for services to theology. 

In addition Dickson Poon, CBE, the Hong Kongbased 

philanthropist, was knighted for services to 

business and to charity, particularly higher education. 

Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors 

In Michaelmas Term, the following 

new members were admitted to 

the Court in recognition of their 

generosity to the collegiate 

University and Americans for 

Oxford, Inc: John W Adams, 

Chairman and co-founder, 

Foundation for Law, Justice and 

Society; Jon Aisbitt, Chairman, 

Man Group plc, as Man Group’s 

representative; S Andrew Banks, 

Founder, ABRY Partners; 

Dr Robert Conway, Senior 

Director, Goldman Sachs 

International; Peter Davies, 

Senior Partner and Co-Head of 

Developed Markets Strategy, 

Lansdowne Partners; 

Dr Genevieve Davies, barrister; 

Geoffrey de Jager, co-founder, 

Anglo Suisse Investment; 

Caroline de Jager, philanthropist; 

Marina Warner 

John Bell 

Jonathan Bate 

Jonathan Hall, Advisory Director, 

Goldman Sachs; Professor 

Roderick Hay, consultant 

dermatologist and Trustee of the 

Dunhill Medical Trust, as the 

Trust’s representative; 

Michael Lewis, Chairman, Oceana 

Investment Corporation Ltd; 

Francois Perrodo, Chairman, 

Perenco, as the Perrodo family’s 

representative; Professor 

Dr Andreas Schlüter, Secretary- 

General, Stifterverband für die 

Deutsche Wissenschaft, as the 

Brost family’s representative; 

Michael Sumpter, CEO, Servier 

Laboratories Ltd UK, as Servier’s 

representative; Brad Youmans, 

Vice-President Strategic 

Marketing and Communications, 

Schlumberger Ltd, as 

Schlumberger’s representative. 

DAN WELLDON 

THOMAS BERNHARDT 

OUI/JOBY SESSIONS 

New Heads of House 

Brasenose College 

John Bowers QC, a leading human rights lawyer, 

has been appointed Principal-Elect of Brasenose. 

He will succeed Professor Alan Bowman in October. 

Jesus College 

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence 

at the University of Southampton, an advisor to the UK 

government across a range of data-related topics, and 

founder, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, of the the Open 

Data Institute, has been elected Principal of Jesus 

College with effect from August. 

Lady Margaret Hall 

Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, 

has been appointed Principal of Lady Margaret Hall 

with effect from October. 

Guy Weston 

receiving the 

Sheldon Medal 

from the Chancellor 

Sheldon Medal 

At the end of Michaelmas Term the Sheldon Medal, 

the highest distinction the University can bestow on 

benefactors, was presented to the Garfield Weston 

Foundation in recognition of its gift towards the new 

Weston Library. In 2008, the foundation awarded 

£25 million in support of the redevelopment of the 

New Bodleian Library into the Weston Library. The 

new building allows the Bodleian to safeguard and 

care for its collections of national and international 

importance. Besides offering scholars the newest 

technologies available in modern research libraries, 

the Weston Library will enable the Bodleian to 

engage with the wider public through its new 

galleries and exhibition space. The building is now 

open to both readers and the public. The Garfield 

Weston Foundation has previously supported other 

areas of the University, including the Ashmolean 

Museum, medical research, academic posts and 

sports facilities. The Sheldon Medal – named after 

Gilbert Sheldon, whose benefaction supported the 

construction of the Sheldonian Theatre in the 

seventeenth century – has been presented to 

benefactors whose contribution to Oxford has made 

a significant strategic difference. Benefactors 

previously honoured with the medal include the late 

Lord Wolfson, chairman of the Wolfson Foundation; 

Leonard Blavatnik; and Mica Ertegun. 

JOHN CAIRNS 

12 



Beautiful books for history buffs 

FROM THE FOLIO SOCIETY 

THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN 

• HOWARD CARTER 

Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of the tomb of 

Egypt's famous boy-king is one of the greatest 

archaeological finds of all time. The Folio Society is 

proud to present this exclusive collector's edition in 

two beautiful cloth-bound volumes. Volume One is 

Carter's eyewitness account, accompanied by a 

fantastic selection of contemporary photographs of 

the excavation. Volume Two features 140 exquisite 

colour images of Tutankhamun’s treasures taken by the 

celebrated photographer Sandro Vannini, who was 

granted exclusive access to them in the Cairo Museum. 

20% OFF 

SELECTED 

TITLES 

PLUS TWO FREE GIFTS WORTH £19.90 

Visit www.foliosociety.com or call 0800 977 4004 

Use code F20PH to claim your 20% saving

Shaping the world The big picture 

The big picture 

14 



Heracleion recovered 

For centuries, Heracleion has been a city 

of legend. Aside from the occasional 

mention in ancient texts that tell of Helen 

of Troy’s visits there, there was simply no 

evidence for its existence. 

Then in 2001 French marine archaeologist 

Franck Goddio discovered relics in 

Aboukir Bay, Egypt, 20 miles north-east of 

Alexandria. While their exact origin was 

unknown, he suspected that they hailed 

from the legendary city. Soon after, 

Dr Damian Robinson and his team from 

the Oxford Centre for Maritime 

Archaeology joined the search. 

Now Heracleion is giving up its treasures. 

In this image, the team watches the rise to 

the surface of a colossal statue of the god 

Hapi; of red granite, it is 5.4 metres in 

height. Hapi was the symbol of abundance 

and fertility, and god of the Nile flood – 

which ultimately submerged the city. 

His statue stood in front of the 

temple of Heracleion. 

Never before has such a large statue of a 

god been discovered in Egypt. It indicates 

Hapi’s importance for the Canopic branch, 

the largest and most important of the 

Nile branches at that time. 

©FRANCK GODDIO/HILTI FOUNDATION, PHOTO: CHRISTOPH GERIGK 



15

Handcrafted By

Viewpoint Shaping the world 

Shaping the world 

Viewpoint 

Charlie Hebdo, 

free speech 

and Oxford 

Timothy Garton Ash sifts through the issues 

arising from the Paris attacks in January 

The assassination of the journalists of the 

satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 

7 January 2015 shook the whole of Europe. 

It faced us once again with what I call the 

assassin’s veto. People take such violent 

offence at something that is written, drawn or 

performed that they say: ‘If you publish that, we will 

kill you.’ This is one of the greatest threats to free 

speech in our time. 

It is very important to distinguish between three 

things: violence, law and custom. The illegitimate use 

of violence, or the threat of violence, to chill or silence 

free expression is unacceptable in all circumstances. 

Whether it is wielded in the name of Islam, the mafia, 

Christianity, atheism or Mr Bean, the assassin’s veto 

can never be allowed to prevail. It is quite clear from 

the reactions across Europe that most European 

Muslims entirely accept this and were horrified by 

these brutal murders – both in themselves and 

because they were done in the name of Allah. 

Unfortunately, the discussion then became 

confused with two other issues: whether certain 

images, which are considered grossly offensive by 

some groups, should be forbidden by law, and whether, 

even if they are not prohibited by law, we should 

refrain from publishing them for reasons of taste, 

civility and mutual respect. In a free country, enjoying 

the rule of law, any individual or group can work 

through politics to try to change the law. This is what 

British Muslims did a few years ago, in partnership 

with some other groups, in lobbying for what became 

a new law on incitement to religious hatred. 

The British Muslim theologian Abdal Hakim 

Murad has urged that ‘the many Muslims now at the 

Inns of Court’ should press for more legal restrictions. 

I happen to disagree, and do not believe that in the 

Timothy 

Garton Ash 

‘It is very important 

to emphasise that 

no one has to read 

Charlie Hebdo’ 

end this will be good for Muslims either, but there is 

no possible objection to any group or individual 

proceeding in that way. Quite a few European 

countries do in fact have restrictions, ranging from 

old-fashioned blasphemy laws through to legislation 

against ‘offending religious feelings’, and against 

hate-speech. 

Most desirable, in my view, is a country in which 

offensive things are not forbidden by law, but a large 

degree of customary self-restraint is generally 

exercised in society. The classic example of such a 

society is the United States, which has the strong 

protections of the First Amendment but at the same 

time shows considerable restraint in practice. 

Exceptions are however made in a number of 

important areas, including art and satire (to which 

genre Charlie Hebdo clearly belongs) and it is also very 

important to emphasise that no one has to read 

Charlie Hebdo. Even more is this true on the internet: 

no one has to go there and look. 

In the Free Speech Debate project which I direct at 

Oxford, under the auspices of the Dahrendorf 

Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony’s 

College, we have been exploring these difficult issues 

on an interactive website. With the help of a great 

team of Oxford graduate students, content is 

presented in 13 languages, including Farsi, Arabic, 

Hindi, Russian and Chinese. The site is built around 

ten draft principles, and the principle that we propose 

for discussion in relation to free speech and religion 

is: ‘We respect the believer but not necessarily the 

content of the belief.’ I shall be presenting my own 

conclusions in a book to be published next year. 

The website will become a carefully adapted online 

educational resource, which we hope will be widely 

used in all its languages. This is, we feel, an example 

of Oxford University using the 

potential of the internet to make 

its research more widely accessible. 

All readers of Oxford Today are 

warmly encouraged to visit 

freespeechdebate.com. 

One thing is certain: in an 

increasingly interconnected world 

– in which there are already more phones than there 

are people – these issues will not go away. 

We must hope that Europe will not face such another 

barbaric assault on freedom of expression for a long 

time to come. But the challenge of debating the terms 

of free speech in an increasingly mixed up, 

interconnected world is now more urgent than ever. 

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah 

Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College 



17

J & G GRANT, GLENFARCLAS DISTILLERY, BALLINDALLOCH, BANFFSHIRE, SCOTLAND AB37 9BD 

TEL +44 (0)1807 500257 INFO@GLENFARCLAS.CO.UK WWW.GLENFARCLAS.CO.UK 

Glenfarclas encourages responsible drinking.

Research Shaping the world 

Research 

Enhancing 

cyber protection 

A new online resource has been launched to 

help protect cyberspace 

ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES 

BULLETIN 

Going nuts 

There’s been a puzzling 

increase in peanut allergy in 

the West. A study by Professor 

Quentin Sattentau and Dr Amin 

Moghaddam of the Sir William 

Dunn School of Pathology may 

have cracked it. Mice given 

dry-roasted peanuts and then 

fed peanuts of any kind had a 

stronger allergic reaction than 

mice only exposed to raw ones. 

Dry roasting has become more 

common in the West; in the 

East, where they are normally 

eaten raw, there is around half 

the incidence of peanut allergy. 

It’s thought that the browning 

which occurs during roasting 

produces compounds that 

trigger the allergy. 

Read the paper: 

bit.do/Peanuts 

MARIE C FIELDS/SHUTTERSTOCK 

Sony Pictures’ computer 

network was compromised 

last year, with wave upon 

wave of internal 

documents leaked into the public 

domain until the company halted 

release of North Korea-ridiculing 

film The Interview. After the FBI 

and President Obama blamed 

Kim Jong-un’s administration for 

the attacks, North Korea itself 

‘went dark’, losing internet 

connections across the country. 

Many blamed the US, though at 

the time of writing it’s not clear 

exactly who was responsible. 

Such tit-for-tat battles often 

used to result in armed conflict, 

but are now increasingly played 

out on the internet. Occupations 

or invasions are now accompanied 

by the seizure of sensitive data; 

terror can be invoked by the 

threat of a leak. In 2014, 81% of 

large corporations and 60% of 

small businesses suffered from 

cybercrime of one sort or another. 

Workers 

remove a poster 

for The Interview 

after Sony 

announced it 

was cancelling 

the film’s 

release 

ONLINE 

Explore the 

portal: bit.do/ 

CyberSecurity 

Oxford researchers have now 

created the Cyber Security 

Capacity Portal, a new online 

resource designed to help 

technologists and policy makers 

safeguard cyber space. It provides 

a platform for the University’s 

research to shape national 

policies and regulations. 

‘Cyber security is essential to 

keeping our online environments, 

societies and economies safe and 

prosperous,’ explains Professor 

Sadie Creese, Director of Oxford’s 

Cyber Security Centre. ‘This new 

portal will be a one-stop shop for 

essential information on what is 

already being done around the 

world and how we can better 

increase the scale, pace and 

quality of cyber security.’ 

In January, Creese attended the 

World Economic Forum in Davos 

to advise world leaders about the 

very real threats of cyber crime. 

It’s hoped the new portal will help 

spread the message further still. 

Walk the line 

A new molecule, too small to 

see with a microscope, can 

‘walk’. Called ‘small molecule 

walkers’ by their creators in the 

Department of Chemistry, they 

take nanometre-sized steps 

and could be used to create 

molecular building sites. ‘Tiny 

machines could move cargo 

the size of individual molecules, 

to build more complicated 

molecular machines,’ explains 

Dr Gökçe Su Pulcu. ‘The goal is 

to use molecular walkers to 

form nanotransport networks,’ 

which could one day help to 

reverse the growth of 

cancerous tumours in the 

human body. 


bit.do/MoleculeWalker 

KARL HARRISON 



19

New 

Over 10,000 books available 

from Oxford University Press 

Ideal for academic research, professional 

education, or simply reading for pleasure 

Archaeology 

Biology 

Business 

Classical Studies 

Economics 

History 

Law 

Religion 

Very Short Introductions 

Linguistics 

Literature 

Oxford World’s Classics 

Mathematics 

Medicine 

Music 

Neuroscience 

Philosophy 

Physics 

Politics 

Psychology 

www.oup.com/promo/alumni


Sustainability 

is the real 

bottom line 

SHUTTERSTOCK 

Doing good actually does your business good, 

new research has found 

There’s long been a 

tension between socially 

responsible investment 

and financial reward. 

Investment professionals have 

typically assumed that these 

don’t mix at all, while a small 

number of investors have 

deliberately constructed their 

portfolios to include 

environmental, social and 

governance factors. The latter 

remain a minority, but that 

might be about to change. 

A new report by researchers 

from the University’s Smith 

School of Enterprise and the 

Environment reveals that there 

is, in fact, a remarkable 

correlation between thoughtful, 

sustainable business practices 

and economic performance. 

The finding demonstrates that 

responsibility and profitability 

are compatible after all. 

The report, by Professor 

Gordon Clark and Dr Michael 

Viehs, respectively Director 

and a research fellow of the 

Smith School, is a meta-study 

which analyses more than 

190 existing pieces of research. 

It disentangles some of the 

myths which surround socially 

responsible investment. 

Of the studies considered, 

88% found that ‘solid 

environmental, social and 

governance practices’ had a 

positive impact on operational 

performance of companies, 

and 80% showed a positive 

correlation between 

sustainability practice and 

stock price performance. 

‘Based on the economic 

impact, it is in the best interest 

of investors and corporate 

managers to incorporate 

sustainability considerations 

into their decision-making 

processes,’ claim the authors 

in their report. 

‘It is also the responsibility of 

institutional investors to engage 

with those firms which do not 

score particularly well in these 

areas,’ says Viehs. ‘Active 

ownership will be the future of 

responsible investing.’ 

ONLINE 


bit.do/Sustainability 

HIV slowdown 

HIV appears to be getting 

less aggressive in parts of 

Africa. A new study carried 

out by Professor Philip 

Goulder and colleagues 

from the Department of 

Paediatrics shows that over 

time the virus has begun to 

reproduce more slowly, 

which should mean it takes 

longer to damage the 

immune system of victims. 

This finding was established 

by comparing HIV samples 

from 842 pregnant women 

in Botswana, where the 

epidemic took hold in the 

mid-1980s, and South 

Africa, where it became 

established a decade later. 

In Botswana, the virus was 

developing more slowly – 

equivalent to people 

developing AIDS about 

2.5 years later than they did 

at the start of the epidemic. 

ONLINE 


bit.do/HIV 

SALAWIN/ISTOCK 

MCLEK/SHUTTERSTOCK 

Hot odds 

It may come as no surprise that 2014 was the hottest year 

in Earth’s recorded history. But climate change sceptics 

who choose to explain the fact away as an anomaly or 

symptom of cyclic heating may now have an even tougher 

case to argue. A team of researchers led by Professor 

Myles Allen, from the Environmental Change Institute at 

the University, found that the odds of such a warm year in 

this country had increased by a factor of ten because of 

climate change. Across Europe, the likelihood of such warm 

temperatures was 35 to 80 times greater. ‘We are seeing a 

substantial impact of human influence on climate on the 

odds of such a warm year,’ explains Allen. 



21

THE UNIVERSITY OF 

OXFORD SHOP 

The University’s Official Store 

106 High Street, Oxford, OX1 4BW 

www.oushop.com


Down the 

greasy pole 

There’s an ongoing 

debate in the UK about 

upward social mobility, 

or rather a lack of it 

A 

new study led by 

Erzsébet Bukodi, 

Associate Professor of 

Quantitative Social 

Policy, suggests that social 

mobility is alive and well; it just 

happens that more of us are 

moving down the social ladder 

rather than up it. 

The study, published in the 

British Journal of Sociology, looked at 

over 20,000 British men and 

women from four birth cohorts, 

in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1980–4. 

Using the 7-class version of the 

official National Statistics 

Socio-Economic Classification, 

where individuals are assigned 

a social class based on their 

employment status and 

occupation, the researchers 

compared the class of each 

individual in their late 20s or 30s 

with the class of their fathers. 

They found that around three 

quarters of men and women 

ended up in a different class from 

the one they were born into, and 

that the proportion was consistent 

across the four cohorts, from 

those born in 1946 to 1984. 

Evidently social mobility is very 

real, and certainly not in decline. 

But the direction of movement 

has changed. ‘Over the past four 

decades, the experience of 

upward mobility has become less 

common, and going down the 

social ladder has become more 

common,’ explains Bukodi. 

While there was a major growth 

in professional and managerial 

employment between the 1950s 

and the 1980s, the expansion of 

room at the top has now slowed. 

BBC 

The famous 

‘class sketch’ 

from the BBC’s 

The Frost Report, 

1966, satirised 

the British 

class system 

ONLINE 


bit.do/ 

SocialMobility 

The offspring of former 

generations have rather more 

dismal prospects than their 

parents had. The latter were 

promoted into good jobs, but the 

number of those positions has 

now levelled off and competition 

is fierce when they become vacant. 

Bukodi speaks of ‘an increase 

in the numbers “at risk” of 

downward mobility.’ 

The study found that the 

inequality of opportunity to move 

between different social strata 

seems to have remained 

consistent over time – but is 

actually much larger than we 

thought. For example, the 

research suggests that the chances 

of a child with a managerial father 

finding themselves with a similar 

professional role, rather than in a 

working-class position, are up to 

20 times greater than those same 

chances for a child who grew up 

with a working-class father. 

BULLETIN 

Robo wars 

The skies of war zones are 

increasingly filled with 

unmanned aircraft, or drones. 

Whether autonomous or 

remote-controlled, these 

aircraft are changing modern 

warfare, and researchers at the 

Oxford Martin School are 

calling for new regulations for 

their use. ‘There is an urgent 

need for states, the military 

and manufacturers to work 

together to respond to legal 

and moral concerns,’ says Dr 

Alex Leveringhaus, lead author 

of a new briefing paper. He 

urges them to prioritise human 

oversight and control, and to 

ensure human operators can 

always be held accountable for 

the deployment of weapons. 


bit.do/RoboWars 

Bird-brained 

followers 

Just as trends sweep the 

human race, it seems cultural 

transmission applies to birds, 

too. A new study by 

researchers from the 

Department of Zoology reveals 

that birds learn new foraging 

techniques from one another in 

their group – a form of copycat 

behaviour that can sustain 

foraging traditions over years. 

The results come from the 

ongoing study of great tits at 

Wytham Woods, just outside 

Oxford. ‘From just a couple of 

birds, the new technique 

spread like wildfire through the 

social network, persisting for 

over two generations,’ explains 

Dr Lucy Aplin. ‘Such stability 

seemed to be partly due to a 

process of social conformity, a 

form of cultural learning.’ 


bit.do/otbirds 

OXFORD MARTIN SCHOOL 

ANDREW HOWE/ISTOCK 



23

Shaping the world Oxonians 

Oxonians 

Elephant protector 

Iain Douglas Hamilton 

Oriel, 1961 

Somewhere between the glossy tourist brochures and reality, says Iain 

Douglas Hamilton OBE, ‘there is a terrible massacre of elephants going on 

right in our midst, now, and since 2009.’ In 2011 alone, approximately 40,000 

African elephants were illegally poached to fuel an enormous and illicit ivory 

trade to China. Leading the conservation fight has been the Nairobi, Kenyabased 

charity Save the Elephants, founded by Iain in 1993. The unprecedented 

levels of poaching result from the exploitation by Chinese authorities of a 

small loophole in a global ivory trade ban dating back to 1989. Iain says that 

rapidly raising awareness among Chinese consumers is an overriding priority. 

A comparable change in public sentiment was experienced in Japan in the 

1980s. He remains sanguine that it can be repeated. savetheelephants.org 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS

Oxonians Shaping the world 

Inspirational science educator 

Dr Sarah Bearchell 

St Catherine’s, 1991 

‘An eight-year-old boy wanted to 

know why we have two intestines 

instead of one,’ laughs Sarah 

Bearchell, who read biological 

sciences at Catz. ‘I hung a 

backpack on his front with a pair of 

lips and we pulled a piece of string 

out until it reached the length of 

his digestive tract, then using a 

mixture of cold porridge, sweetcorn 

and coffee we squeezed out a very 

authentic-looking fake poo through 

thick black tights to show how the 

intestines work. The children loved 

it.’ Instead of going from a PhD to 

academia, she is today a freelance 

organiser of science workshops, 

called Adventures in Science, for 

a wide range of children, including 

some with special needs. Last year 

she won the prestigious Joshua 

Phillips Award for Innovation 

in Science Engagement, and is 

currently Manchester Science 

Festival Science Communicator 

in Residence. ‘I want children to 

see science as part and parcel 

Vera Brittain biographer 

Mark Bostridge 

St Anne’s, 1979 

According to Mark Bostridge, 

authorised biographer of Great War 

writer Vera Brittain, her Testament 

of Youth (1933) is ‘the greatest 

story of love, loss and 

remembrance to emerge from the 

First World War.’ Earlier this year, he 

of normal life,’ she says. ‘It’s very 

different to the “proper” job I 

expected to go into,’ she adds, 

‘but this is definitely my career now. 

It’s far too much fun to give it up for 

academic life.’ 

bit.do/SarahsAdventures 

published a new biography of 

Brittain, timed to coincide with the 

release of the film Testament of 

Youth, a 2014 British drama film 

directed by James Kent and written 

by Juliette Towhidi, based on the 

memoir. The film stars Alicia 

Vikander as Vera Brittain and Kit 

Harington as her fiancé Roland 

Leighton. Bostridge approves of the 

film, not for being slavishly detailed, 

but for its emotional connection. ‘It 

genuinely moves people.’ He adds, 

‘I’m very relieved the film has been 

made as it’s always been one of my 

wishes as one of her literary 

executors that her story should be 

told to a wider audience. There was 

little indication back when I was 

an undergraduate that Testament 

of Youth would become part of 

the canon of war literature as it is 

now. Vera Brittain’s reputation as 

a writer, feminist and pacifist is 

well established.’ 

Charity founder 

George Monck 

Christ Church, 

1976 

George Monck, 

founder and 

Chief Executive of charity 

CleanupUK, jokes that he has 

graduated from Literae 

Humaniores to litter. When he 

was six, he participated in a 

litter pick organised by his 

parents on Woolacombe 

beach in Devon. This made a 

lasting impression. Later, he 

focused on the correlation 

between littering and crime in 

the UK. ‘CleanupUK’s first 

major project was connected 

with the London 2012 

Olympics, with the idea of 

helping people in less affluent 

areas to get together and help 

make their community clean.’ 

Since then, he has helped 

launch the Beautiful Boroughs 

Project in London and 

litteraction.org.uk, now a 

thriving hub for 700 regional 

litter picking organisations. 

cleanupuk.org.uk 

Heritage boss 

Kate Pugh 

(née Maxwell) 

St Hilda’s, 1969 

Today she is Chief 

Executive of The 

Heritage Alliance, but Kate 

Pugh traces an earlier 

inspiration to an architecture 

paper she was taught by 

Howard Colvin, reading for her 

joint honours degree in 

History and Economics. ‘I’m 

always interested in what I’m 

looking at, why it was built, 

who by, and why it was built at 

that particular time, and 

Oxford, of course, is an open 

history book. There is much 

more to heritage than bricks 

and stones, it’s also about the 

bond between people and 

buildings and what it gives us 

in terms of our sense of 

identity and wellbeing; it has 

wide ranging social, economic 

and environmental benefits.’ 

Her current campaign is to 

support better maintenance of 

heritage properties. 

theheritagealliance.org.uk 



25

Alumni diary Resources and events 

Alumni diary 

Resources and events 

Forging links with 

Oxonians 

There is a new professional network for Oxford alumni. 

Guy Collender explains how it works 

The University has just launched an online 

networking platform explicitly designed for 

Oxford alumni to search for jobs, mentors 

and fellow alumni. It’s called the Oxford 

Alumni Community. 

The platform is notably different from other 

networking tools, including Facebook and LinkedIn, 

because all of its members are verified alumni of the 

University. The platform is an exclusive and secure 

space to connect with other alumni, and it is geared 

towards improving employability. 

The first part of the University to introduce such a 

platform was the Saïd Business School late last year 

with the Oxford Business Alumni (OBA) Community. 

Open to all Oxonians with an interest in business, it is 

proving a real success. 

The new and separate Oxford Alumni Community is 

designed for all alumni, irrespective of subject studied 

and career interests, and it is proving equally successful. 

Members can find and post jobs exclusively within the 

alumni community. They can also offer to share 

professional advice, insights and experience with fellow 

Oxonians, who can find relevant mentors via the online 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/PS UNLIMITED 

ONLINE 

Join the 

Oxford Alumni 

Community at 

bit.do/otOAC 

and the OBA 

Community at 

bit.do/otOBAC 

directory by searching for industry, subject studied, 

matriculation year, location or employer. 

Registering is quick and easy as you can use your 

LinkedIn or Facebook sign-on and can import 

information from either account, thereby avoiding the 

need to create a new profile. 

Christine Fairchild, Director of Alumni Relations at 

the University, says: ‘Our alumni trust the Oxford 

Alumni Community because they know it is a protected 

website only for Oxonians. More and more members 

are finding mentors, posting events and exchanging 

messages thanks to the platform. We are harnessing 

the power of technology to benefit our alumni.’ 

Gayathri Sudhakaran (St Anne’s, 2006, MBA) was 

one of the first to sign up to the Oxford Business 

Alumni Community. She says: ‘Professional networking 

is extremely important to all of us and the OBA 

community is not just a great tool for staying connected 

to alumni from all over the world, but also a great 

resource for information.’ 

Jane Szele, Head of Alumni Relations at the Saïd 

Business School, adds: ‘The tone of interactions on the 

OBA community has been really positive, professional 

and friendly.’ 

The vast majority of alumni are already familiar with 

the power of social media and the incredible popularity 

of networking websites. LinkedIn – the world’s largest 

professional networking website – boasts more than 

330 million members. But the latest developments in 

networking are moving beyond mass networks to more 

exclusive platforms. Trust is at the heart of any 

successful and influential network, and this is also at 

the core of these new initiatives. 

Both alumni communities are hosted by Graduway, 

which currently produces platforms for 100 universities 

worldwide, including 20 in the UK. A leading provider 

of alumni networking platforms, the company – based 

in the UK and US – combines the loyalty of alumni to 

their alma mater with the connectivity of social 

networks to transform how alumni stay in touch with 

their universities and each other. 

26 



Resources and events Alumni diary 

DIARY 

Professional 

networking events 

Industry insights will be shared 

at a series of evening events in 

London. Join fellow alumni to 

network and hear about the 

latest developments in these 

particular areas: 

Public Policy, 28 May 2015 

Careers focusing on policymaking 

and public service will 

be at the heart of this event 

organised in collaboration with 

Oxford’s Blavatnik School of 

Government. 

WATERSHED 

Change a life 

Support the next generation of aspiring 

high-flyers by offering an internship 

From designing toilets in 

Cambodia to mentoring 

teenagers in New York, 

Oxford’s students are 

employing their skills and preparing 

themselves for the workplace or 

further study. Last year, 515 

internships were offered in 36 

countries and numerous sectors, 

thanks to the University’s 

Internship Programme. 

Oxford alumni are at the heart 

of the popular scheme: 55% of the 

employers offering full-time 

research and professional 

experiences during the summer 

vacation studied at the University. 

‘Alumni really value the students’ 

ideas and energy, and the students 

often find the experiences 

life-changing,’ says Dr Fiona 

Whitehouse, Internship Office 

Manager at the University’s 

Careers Service. 

The placements last between 

4 and 12 weeks, and all interns 

receive payment, or some in-kind 

support if they work for a not-forprofit 

organisation. Students are 

also supported by scholarships, 

administered by the University 

and local alumni groups, worth 

(Above) Cameron 

Brookhouse 

(back, grey shirt) 

canvasses the 

views of a focus 

group in 

Kampong, 

Speu Province, 

Cambodia 

a total of £380,000. 

‘The programme is heavily 

oversubscribed and we need more 

placements to meet demand,’ 

Dr Whitehouse adds. 

Cameron Brookhouse 

(St Edmund Hall, 2010, MEng 

Materials Science) used knowledge 

from his degree to help design a 

latrine shelter made of 

ferroconcrete with a corrugated 

steel roof when he interned with 

WaterSHED – a sanitation 

NGO – in Cambodia. 

Cameron says: ‘It was surprising 

and incredibly rewarding to find 

that I could apply the 

fundamentals from my studies to a 

totally different challenge. Once 

I’d settled in I made many close 

friends, and Cambodia quickly 

became one of the best places 

I’ve ever been.’ 

The Internship Programme 

began in 2008 with five internships 

offered by five providers. 

For more information about 

offering an internship or 

supporting the students financially, 

visit: bit.do/internshipRecruiters 

or contact: fiona.whitehouse@ 

careers.ox.ac.uk 

Children’s Literature, 

15 October 2015 

Our panel of illustrators, 

authors and publishing 

professionals will explore the 

landscape for children’s 

literature, including the impact 

of digital platforms and 

e-books. 

Mobile App Development, 

18 November 2015 

A discussion about the future of 

mobile technology will include 

advice from our panel about 

how to take your app from 

conception to reality, and all the 

way to the front page of Apple’s 

App Store. 

(Above) Most of the UK 

professional networking 

events take place in the Oxford 

and Cambridge Club in London 

Please visit bit.do/oxevents 

for the most up-to-date 

information about the 

professional networking 

events. For details of other 

events, offers and resources 

available exclusively to Oxford’s 

alumni, please visit the 

University’s alumni website: 

www.alumni.ox.ac.uk 

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE CLUB 



27

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS

Libraries and digital preservation Feature 

The uncrowned 

tech monarchs 

Librarians are the uncrowned kings and 

queens of the technology revolution, reports 

Richard Lofthouse 

The recently opened Weston Library (the 

‘new’ New Bodleian library of Sir Giles 

Gilbert Scott fame, situated on the corner 

of Broad Street and Parks Road) is a 

wonderful case study in information 

overload. When it was built in the 1930s, it was 

conceived of as a book storage solution for the next two 

centuries. A blacksmith was employed to keep an 

underground book conveyor belt rolling smoothly 

whilst dons across the road were blissfully ignorant of 

the surprising journey their book had just made 

underneath Broad Street. The University believed it 

would not have to worry a jot about storage until at least 

2130. In the event, it was full to the gills by 1976, 

leading to the building of an even vaster off-site storage 

facility in Swindon. 

Richard Ovenden, appointed Bodley’s Librarian last 

year, tells the story with evident relish, reminding me 

that running out of storage has been the bugbear of all 

24 of his predecessors. Moore’s Law in computing 

predicts that the number of transistors on a computer 

microprocessor will double every two years or so, 

providing regular leaps in computing power. So too 

have the books piled up. 

If the books are safe (Bodley today has over 

12 million) what about digital source material all 

around us, on the internet and across social media? 

Back in 1925, at the very dawn of the process that led 

to Gilbert Scott’s oddly English combination of Art 

Deco and Classical architecture in Broad Street, Sir 

Arthur Ernest Cowley, then Bodley’s Librarian, gravely 

informed the University that the Library would run out 

of space in ten years’ time – and that ‘chaos would 

reign.’ Today, you could say that his forebodings have 

already come to pass for digital information, the 

preservation of which has become an urgent and 

wide-open question. 


The Bodleian’s 

recently 

appointed 

Associate 

Director for 

Digital Libraries, 

Lucie Burgess, 

and Bodley’s 

Librarian, 

Richard 

Ovenden, chart 

the future of the 

library in the 

twenty-first 

century 


At the Oxford Internet Institute, round the corner at 

No. 1 St Giles, I meet Luciano Floridi, Professor of 

Philosophy and Ethics of Information. Within minutes 

of starting our conversation, he has jumped up in front 

of a whiteboard and sketched out a single important 

fact. ‘Since 2007,’ he says, ‘the world’s ability to save its 

data has been roundly overtaken by the amount of data 

it produces.’ Compare this situation to working all day 

on a laptop, but not being able to back up your 

computer completely. The result is massive, growing 

information loss. 

When I leave, Floridi offers me a copy of his earlier 

book, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of 

Pyrrhonism. It is the purest scholarship, and concerns the 

preservation and loss of the ideas of the late ancient 

sceptic. Evidently a long preoccupation of Floridi’s, now 

made urgent by technology, the preservation of 

knowledge is where scholars and archivists stand 

shoulder to shoulder. Knowledge is preserved and it is 

lost, over time. It is, as Ovenden puts it, ‘inherently 

friable’, like the floppy discs we used to save it on. In our 

own age of super computers, we may have unwittingly 

bought into the well-worn canard that ‘it’s on a server 

somewhere.’ But it might not be accessible, and it might 

not even be on a server. 

Back at the Bodleian, Ovenden admits he is kept 

awake at night by these issues. Never mind the Scottish 

referendum and other historical events that are 

increasingly played out across Twitter and email, where 

once they would have been a matter of paper sources; 

he is keen to mention war zones and political hot 

potatoes such as North Korea, the Ukraine and ISIS. 

Who is recording the ‘born-digital’ documents through 

which these conflicts are being waged? 

‘Born-digital’, he explains, is a term referring to 

information that has never been manifested physically, 

that is, published or written down on anything 

29

Feature Libraries and digital preservation 

from stone and parchment to paper. Increasingly, our 

lives are playing out through born-digital documents. 

Just as quickly as they are created, these digital sources 

are subject to destruction. 

Many ordinary, intelligent people worried about this 

when the tech revolution kicked off 25 years ago. They 

will consider it the height of irony now to be told by Vint 

Cerf, the vice-president of Google, to print out photos 

we hold dear. This is his advice, in 2015. He recently 

warned the American Association for the Advancement 

of Science that we face a ‘forgotten generation, or even 

a forgotten century’, owing to ‘bit rot’, where computer 

data files cease to be readable over time. He called for 

the digital equivalent of vellum, the calfskin parchment 

famous for its durability. 

Bodley’s recently appointed Associate Director for 

Digital Libraries, Lucie Burgess, is intent on producing 

just that. Recently hired away from the British Library, 

Burgess has worked at publishing and information 

company United Business Media, and before that for 

the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate 

Change secretariat. Her global outlook illustrates just 

how much the role of the librarian has changed. On 

the subject of the loss of digital information, she cites a 

research paper noting that fully 70% of links in the 

Harvard Law Review and other journals were found to 

be dead. ‘Link rot’ to join bit rot. As you can see, a lot of 

rot is setting in. Digital rot is now commonplace. 

Behind the facades of the libraries there are some 

dizzying initiatives to preserve digital knowledge. 

Burgess talks about cross-domain metadata issues and 

cross-disciplinary data science. The head spins. Later, 

I visit the EU project on Scalable Preservation 

Environments (SCAPE). 

Recently concluded, SCAPE ‘developed scalable 

services for planning and execution of institutional 

preservation strategies on an open source platform that 

orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, 

heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects.’ 

Nasty prose but very important, says Burgess. The 

significant words are ‘preservation’, ‘automated’ and 

‘large scale.’ Developed with the British Library by 

Californian not-for-profit The Internet Archive, a piece 

of software called a web crawler allows the Bodleian to 

take annual ‘snapshots’ of the web in collaboration with 

the British Library. Automating the process eliminates 

bias. The next challenge, says Burgess, is to make the 

results more accessible to the public, which means 

resolving a nightmare of copyright confusion. 

Even harder are private born-digital sources. ‘The 

process of making accessible born-digital archives (such 

as email correspondence) is technically complex, 

manual and resource intensive,’ notes Burgess. We have 

the correspondence of Victorian Prime Minister 

William Gladstone, but will we have the emails of David 

Cameron? Dame Lynne Brindley, former chief 

executive of the British Library and Master of 

Pembroke College, recently warned, ‘We are in danger 

of creating a black hole for future historians and 

writers.’ She was referring partly to the difficulty of 

preserving private emails for public consumption. 

For now, Ovenden and Burgess talk about the need 

to be ‘both pragmatic and visionary’. Burgess notes 

some ongoing digital preservation initiatives to curate 

Luciano Floridi 

sketches the 

yawning disparity 

between global 

data production 

and global data 

preservation 

‘The world’s ability 

to save its data has 

been roundly 

overtaken by the 

amount of data 

it produces’ 

digital special collections on NHS reforms, the death of 

Nelson Mandela in 2013, and the spread of ebola. 

These digital special collections will complement the 

print-source special collections that occupy 54 

kilometres of shelving in the Weston Library. 

As these examples demonstrate, it is falling to 

librarians to decide what to keep and what to lose. It 

gives them unparalleled importance in our society and 

makes them the hitherto uncrowned kings and queens 

of the tech revolution. 

As Floridi reminds me, citing Friedrich Nietzsche’s 

beautiful but troubling essay On the Uses and 

Disadvantages of History for Life, there is a much older 

philosophical conversation about what it is desirable to 

keep. Already groaning under the weight of 

information overload in the 1870s, 

Nietzsche protested against ‘the large 

and ever increasing burden of the 

past’, memorably contrasting the 

troubled brow of man to the blank 

happiness of beasts of the field. 

Not all data needs to be kept. 

Burgess cites the Large Hadron 

Collider, which generates a petabyte 

of data (that is, 1,024 terabytes) every 

single month. We do not need to 

preserve it all in aspic, but we might want to keep data 

sets allowing scientists to recreate experiments, she 

suggests. Floridi individual experience, in which we 

want to be guided by the past, not imprisoned by it. 

We might all agree that ‘what is superfluous is hostile 

to what is essential,’ as Nietzsche put it, but what is 

essential today isn’t what will seem essential fifty years 

from now. It is publicly funded librarians and archivists 

who are going to develop and populate the digital 

vellum. We need their expertise now as never before. 


30 



go behind the scenes in 

pompeii & herculaneum 

Andante Travels has been a leading provider of cultural tours for 30 years. Our tours are led by historians, archaeologists & writers. 

They include expert guides, tour managers, hand-picked hotels and often special access. Take a very civilised journey into history... 

Pompeii & Herculaneum - forever preserved at the moment of disaster 

The real story of the ancient sites devestated by the cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius. From slaves to 

Caesars; brothels to bathhouses, we find a haunting picture of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary 

disaster. Our tour includes a full day at Pompeii and visits to Herculaneum and the chance to visit newly 

opened villas and areas of Pompeii not previously accessible to the public. 

5, 7 & 8 Days | Departures throughout 2015 | From £1,200 

expert guides | small groups | special access | all-inclusive | hand-picked hotels 

Peru and Bolivia 

A trip of a life-time, uncovering the depths 

and heights of Andean civilisation across 

spectacular sites, cultures and landscapes. 

£6,695 inc. flights | 9th - 29th Sep 

Hidden Rome 

Discover the hidden treasures of Ancient 

Rome: explore tombs, temples and 

catacombs usually closed to the public. 

£2,650 inc. flights | 28th Sep - 3rd Oct 

We are delighted to offer fascinating 

cultural holidays to the ancient world, 

exclusively for Oxford Alumni. We have 

created unique itineraries for each tour, 

all led by scholars connected to Oxford 

University who know the culture and 

history of the places we travel intimately. 

over 140 expert-led tours - prices from as little as £515 

to request a full brochure please call 01722 713800 

tours@andantetravels.com | www.andantetravels.com

Feature Hawking at Oxford 

Hawking 

at Oxford 

With recent film The Theory Of Everything focusing on Stephen Hawking’s 

time at Cambridge and beyond, Jayne Nelson reminds us that the 

world-renowned scientist is actually an Oxonian 

Hawking, waving a 

handkerchief, and what are 

thought to be other 

members of University 

College Boat Club, for 

whom he coxed, 1961

Hawking at Oxford Feature 

If you asked a stranger which university they 

would associate with Stephen Hawking, there’s 

an overwhelming chance they’d reply 

‘Cambridge’. They’d be correct, too: the 

theoretical physicist and cosmologist holds office 

there as Director of Research at the Department of 

Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. The 

answer would be even more assured from those who 

have recently headed to the cinema to see The Theory 

of Everything, the Oscar-winning film based on the 

scientist’s life adapted from an autobiography by his 

ex-wife, Jane. Those wondering if Hawking might 

have studied anywhere other than Cambridge would 

have heard only a brief, almost throwaway mention of 

his days at Oxford at the start of the film. 

Yet Stephen Hawking and Oxford are just as linked 

as Stephen Hawking and Cambridge: he was born 

‘The Theory of 

Everything will 

only add to 

Hawking’s already 

considerable legend’ 

GILLMAN & SOAME 

here, after all, when his parents moved to Oxford 

during the Second World War. Both his mother and 

father studied at the University, and so it seemed 

natural for their son – whose nickname at school was 

‘Einstein’ – to attend as well. His medical researcher 

father, Frank, wanted Stephen to follow his path and go 

to University College; as the college had no fellow in 

mathematics he was steered towards a scholarship in 

natural science. Hawking later said he 

found physics ‘easy and obvious’ and 

enjoyed chemistry ‘because 

unexpected things, such as explosions, 

kept happening.’ But he was intrigued 

by the chance to discover where we 

came from thanks to physics and 

astronomy: ‘I wanted to fathom the 

depths of the universe,’ he recalls. 

Hawking took his scholarship exam 

in March 1959 and passed, beginning his studies at the 

age of 17. ‘Most of the other students in my year had 

done military service and were a lot older,’ he says in 

his autobiography, My Brief History, published in 2013. 

‘I felt rather lonely during my first year and part of the 

second. In my third year, in order to make more 

friends, I joined the Boat Club as a coxswain. My 

coxing career was fairly disastrous, though.’ 

His boating skills weren’t the only disastrous thing 

about his time at the University: surprisingly, young 

Hawking was very much a slacker. ‘The prevailing 

attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work,’ 

he recalls. ‘You were supposed to either be brilliant 

without effort or accept your limitations and get a 

fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class 

of degree was regarded as the mark of a “grey man”, 

the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.’ 

Hawking says he has since calculated that he did a 

thousand hours of work in three years, averaging a 

mere hour a day. ‘I’m not proud of this lack of work, 

but at the time I shared my attitude with most of my 

fellow students. We affected an air of complete 

boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth 

making an effort for. One result of my illness has been 

to change all that. When you are faced with the 

possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that 

life is worth living and that there are lots of things 

you want to do.’ 

The first signs of Hawking’s motor neurone disease, 

ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), started to occur 

while he was in his final year at Oxford; he found he 

was growing clumsier. ‘I went to the doctor after falling 

down some stairs, but all he said was “Lay off the beer”,’ 

he recalls. 

Hawking didn’t do as well as he’d hoped in his final 

exam, resulting in a borderline grade between a first 

and a second-class degree. He had now decided he 

wanted a research career and haggled for his final 

grade. ‘If they gave me a first, I told them, I would go 

to Cambridge. If I only got a second, I would stay in 

Oxford. They gave me a first.’ 

And so Stephen Hawking arrived at Cambridge to 

study general relativity and cosmology with a first from 

Oxford and a rapidly deteriorating medical condition, 

finally diagnosed just after his 21st birthday. He was 

given two years to live. ‘I was not making progress 

because I didn’t have much mathematical background,’ 

he says of his studies. ‘And anyway, it was hard to ➺ 

33

Feature Hawking at Oxford 

GILLMAN & SOAME 

WORKING TITLE/UNIVERSAL/THE KOBAL COLLECTION/DANIEL, LIAM 

focus when I might not live long enough to finish my 

PhD. I felt somewhat of a tragic character.’ 

At Cambridge, Hawking met Jane Wilde and they 

married in July 1965. He knew he had to support his 

family with a job, and to get a job he had to finish his 

PhD. ‘I therefore started working for the first time in 

my life,’ he says. ‘To my surprise, I found I liked it.’ 

The Theory of Everything begins with Stephen meeting 

Jane and then dramatises their relationship – at its 

heart, the film is a love story. Then it progresses 

through the extraordinary years that followed: his 

theory of Hawking radiation, later proven; his ‘no 

boundary’ model of the universe; and his thesis on the 

singularity at the beginning of time. Anthony 

McCarten wrote the screenplay using Jane’s book, 

Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, and the route 

to the screen took eight long years. 

‘Stephen hadn’t written an autobiography [yet] and 

was on record as saying he didn’t really seek any 

investigation of his personal life; he wanted the focus 

to be on his work and his science,’ says McCarten. 

‘So he was a bit of a closed door in that regard. 

But fortunately there’s a lot in the public domain about 

him, and we brought in a physicist who’d been an 

ex-student of Stephen’s to shine a light on the science. 

Jane’s book had given a lot of insight into Stephen’s 

feelings at that time, particularly the diagnosis. 

He hasn’t said a lot about what that was like – to be a 

young guy with your life ahead of you and be told you 

had two years to live, and those two years were going to 

be miserable. Jane showed the depths to which he’d 

sunk in a way that he didn’t.’ 

(Above) 

Still from 

The Theory 

of Everything 

(2014) 

(Left) 

Stephen 

Hawking at his 

graduation in 

1962 

British actor Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking, 

replicating the scientist’s ravaged body and 

mannerisms with impressive verisimilitude. 

‘He had to reposition some of his muscles to do 

this,’ explains the film’s director, James Marsh 

(St Catherine’s, 1982). ‘It did take a toll on him. He 

had an osteopath he saw almost every day to straighten 

himself out, for nine weeks. The preparation was 

probably four months, so that’s almost six months of 

this. But that was just the foundation for the emotion 

of the character to come through.’ 

It paid off: there are times when it’s genuinely hard 

to tell the difference between Redmayne and his 

subject. ‘Stephen Hawking had the same reaction 

himself!’ laughs Marsh. ‘To see 

‘To see an actor 

playing him so 

magnificently, he 

actually thought he 

was watching himself’ 

an actor playing him so 

magnificently, he actually 

thought he was watching 

himself. What an extraordinary 

compliment to Eddie.’ 

The Theory of Everything will 

only add to Hawking’s already 

considerable legend: he is, 

without a doubt, the most 

famous living scientist in the world. From his roots at 

Oxford – where he coasted, an ordinary student 

seeking his calling – right through to his appointment 

in 1979 as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at 

Cambridge (the post once held by Isaac Newton), to 

his ground-breaking scientific work and his defiance of 

that initial two-year prognosis (he’s 73), and now this 

biopic of his life, Hawking has achieved wonders. 

‘When I was 21 and contracted motor neurone 

disease, I felt it was very unfair,’ he says in the final 

chapter of his autobiography. ‘I thought my life was 

over and that I would never reach the potential I felt 

I had. But now, 50 years later, I can be quietly satisfied 

with my life.’ 

34 



OXFORD ALUMNI 

TRAVELLERS 

START THE ADVENTURE TODAY 

2015 Oxford Alumni Journeys 

Discover the world with fellow Oxonians on our small-group educational journeys. 

Led by expert trip scholars, you will access sites normally off-limits to the public and gain 

valuable insights into the local culture and landscape with our behind-the-scenes visits. 

Best of Borneo: White Rajahs, orangutans and the birdwing butterfly 24 June – 5 July 2015 

Ancient Routes of the Caucasus: Georgia and Armenia 9 – 23 September 2015 

Peru and Bolivia 9 – 29 September 2015 

Morocco’s Imperial Cities 3 – 13 October 2015 

Kingdoms in the Sky: Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan 14 – 29 October 2015 

Oman: Desert, sea and mountain 9 – 19 November 2015 

Namibian Odyssey 

Dunes, deserts, wildlife, and rock art 

Tribal and Sacred China 

Journey through Laos, Yunnan and Tibet 

DATE: 10 – 21 September 2015 

Join Professor Andrew Goudie, a specialist in desert 

geomorphology, to explore the spectacular sand dunes of 

the Namib Desert, home to some of nature’s rarest plants. 

Discover amazing rock art and visit shimmering salt pans, 

alive with herds of zebra, rhino, elephant and giraffe. 

DATE: 13 October – 3 November 2015 

An extraordinary journey from the charming Buddhist 

temples of Luang Prabang, through China’s traditional Dai 

villages, to the spectacular Potala Palace in Tibet. Our trip 

scholar, Professor Charles Ramble, has spent over 15 years 

living and researching in the Himalayan region. 

For details and prices, please visit: www.alumni.ox.ac.uk/oxford-alumni-travellers 

To receive a printed copy of our catalogue, please call +44 (0)1865 611621 or email travel@alumni.ox.ac.uk

Feature Oxford in 2065 

To be a thriving city in half a century, say 

Taissa Csaky and Richard Lofthouse, 

Oxford must grapple with fundamental, 

far-reaching decisions today 

Oxford in 

2065 

In Oxford in 2065, there will no doubt still be 

wisteria, good beer in pubs and college silver. 

Visitors will still recognise ‘that sweet city with her 

dreaming spires,’ as described by Matthew Arnold 

in his 1867 poem Thyrsis. And yet... 

...And yet Oxford risks becoming unliveable for 

almost everyone except undergraduates in subsidised 

college housing. It is already dystopian in significant 

ways, with gridlocked roads, wildly expensive and 

insufficient housing, dysfunctional governance and 

the lack of a far-sighted vision for the city. 

In this cover story Oxford Today consults a wide range 

of experts including existing University post holders, 

alumni and local entrepreneurs. Their collective vision 

for the city in 2065 displays considerable originality. 

Technology will help Oxford, and some of it will be 

brilliantly exportable to other cities grappling with 

growth and climate change. Housing will benefit 

from brownfield redevelopment. 

Transport, energy and food will 

all change dramatically. Walking 

and cycling, the hardy perennials 

of the city, will reassert themselves 

as Oxford becomes the second 

carless (or fossil-fuel-less) city 

centre in the UK, following the 

lead of London and Paris. Never 

mind the six million quid currently being spent on new 

roundabouts at the railway station, to ease traffic flows 

through the city centre, thereby encouraging more, 

not less, car use. 

The University has long been a part of the big 

conversation about Oxford’s future. Had the brutalist 

zoology tower shown on our cover been built in the 

early 1960s, Matthew Arnold would have turned most 

violently in his grave. Balance the ‘failures’ with the 

college gardens and University Parks, and Wytham 

‘How to retain the 

historic core of Oxford 

without pickling or 

Disneyfying it?’ 

Woods and Botanic Garden, all maintained with such 

devotion. They are exactly what makes the city so 

delightful. Not everyone agrees with the way the 

University has expanded its built environment in 

recent years, extending to the recent quarrel over 

graduate student housing overlooking Port Meadow. 

Yet the bigger picture transcends it all. The University 

is the biggest employer in the county, and it is a crucial 

stakeholder in the city’s future, whether for the 

housing of its students or the affordability of the place 

for its workforce, academic and non-academic alike. 

Now that London-style skyscrapers have been 

rejected for Oxford, and indeed any building higher 

than 18.2 metres within a 1,200-metre radius of Carfax 

Tower, there is corresponding pressure on Oxford’s 

greenbelt. Upwards expansion is off the table, depicted 

on the Oxford Today cover with the banned vertical 

arrow; outwards expansion is the subject of very 

heated debate. That leaves digging 

and tunnelling, immediately 

recalling Blackwells’ Norrington 

Room and the New Bodleian 

Library’s tunnelling in the 1930s. 

Oxfordshire County Council 

leader Ian Hudspeth has tabled 

the bold idea of a mile-long, 

£500-million tunnel that could 

convey electric buses from Magdalen Bridge to the 

train station. The idea was met with derision, yet such 

tunnels are ten a penny in mainland Europe. 

In the words of Professor Steve Rayner, ‘How to 

retain and enhance the historic core of Oxford 

without pickling or Disneyfying it? How to support a 

thriving local economy deeply rooted in Oxford’s 

800-year record as a “knowledge city”?’ 

Not changing is not an option; everyone agrees. 

Oxford has the least affordable housing relative to 

36 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk | @oxtoday

‘I’d like to think that by 

2065 fossil fuels are 

gone... our two-wheeled 

assets will be used for a 

whole cornucopia of 

services we can but dream 

of today’ Harriet Waters 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS 

Harriet Waters is 

the University’s 

Head of 

Environmental 

Sustainability. 

She has lived in 

Oxford since 

2003 and cycles 

up Headington 

Hill every day 

income in the whole of the United Kingdom. And its 

roads are at capacity and beyond. Those two issues are 

intimately linked, since the more people live away from 

the city, the more they have to travel into it. 

The broader demands of sustainability in the face of 

climate change introduce another dimension. Since 

2010 the University has pursued an integrated plan to 

tackle carbon emissions, water consumption, car usage, 

and waste, and to bolster biodiversity and the efficiency 

of buildings. In the broader city and county sense, 

Rayner puts an uncomfortable spotlight on the need 

for better governance, daring to dream of a city 

council and county council which have buried their 

differences and merged into a new city–regional 

government, in order to make big, enlightened, 

long-term decisions. 

Within these overarching concerns, food security 

will rise up the agenda, argues Tom Curtis, alongside 

awareness of the links between diet and carbon 

emissions, and biodiversity. The high table ‘tournedos 

of beef’ routine may have to give way to more 

vegetables, allowing dons to live even longer. 

Localised energy production and consumption will, 

argues Barbara Hammond of Low Carbon West 

Oxford, become extremely common. Again, no utopia. 

On 30 January the switch was flicked on at Osney Lock 

Hydro, near the railway station, a hydro-electric plant 

that harnesses the power of the Thames. 

In many respects the future is already here, 

in embryonic form. Former Keble Warden 

Sir Christopher Ball and his wife Wendy have already 

trialled a waterbus. One day it may connect with a 

monorail linking the city to West Oxfordshire, the 

brainchild of Andrew Sharp and David Leach and 

their company WestOx Monorail. So-called ‘last mile 

delivery’ services pioneered by Christopher Benton 

and his company Pedal & Post are already up and 

running. We already have drones, championed by 

alumnus Peter Madden and Lord Drayson, and shown 

to good effect on our cover, carrying a library book. 

www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk | @oxtoday 37


OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/ROB JUDGES 

GOVERNANCE 

Steve Rayner, professor 

‘Oxford in 2065 is very different from the place it might 

have been were it not for the politically courageous 

decisions of the elected mayor and councillors of the 

newly created Oxford City Region, established in 2025. 

The new city–regional government identified three 

challenges: how to retain and enhance the historic 

core of Oxford without pickling it or Disneyfying it? 

How to support a thriving local economy deeply 

rooted in Oxford’s 800-year record as a “knowledge 

city”? And how to maintain a sense of coherence and 

identity distinct from the growing urban behemoth 

that is its neighbour, Greater Reading? 

For years, Oxford’s developers and planners had 

avoided difficult and controversial decisions about how 

and where Oxford should grow by “spreading the 

misery” of new housing around outlying areas, which 

were often inadequately served by public transport, 

schools and healthcare facilities. 

The new city–regional government met the 

challenge of continuing rising demand for housing in 

two ways. Firstly, they set about making full use of the 

city’s brownfield sites and increasing the density of 

housing with new build on the sites of some of the 

mid-twentieth-century municipal housing stock that 

was of sub-optimal quality. Secondly, they made the 

decision to concentrate new development outside the 

ring road in just two locations, while ensuring that 

these developed as mixed-income communities with 

extensive services, not just as housing estates. 

The new council, collaborating with the city’s 

universities, concerned itself not just with the location 

of new buildings, but with the quality of the buildings 

themselves. The University, recognising the limitations 

of upgrading the energy performance of its historic 

building stock, sought to compensate by pushing the 

performance of its new buildings beyond even the 

highest BREEAM [Building Research Establishment 

Environmental Assessment Methodology] standards. 

This meant taking on board the concept of 

“regenerative sustainability” pioneered by its colleagues 

at the University of British Columbia. Going beyond 

sustainability as “damage limitation”, the University 

commissioned buildings that actually improved the 

living and working conditions of their occupants, as 

well as enhancing the quality of the surrounding 

environment. Oxford became the inspiration for a 

new generation of buildings that collect waste heat 

from neighbours to generate electricity, recycle water, 

process their own sewage on-site and clean up local air. 

Recognising that movement is as important to a city 

as place and space, the council adopted a revolutionary 

transport policy. After extensive debate, it rejected 

plans to install a system of light trams in favour of the 

more radical policy of replacing both buses and 

private cars with a public fleet of driverless minibus 

taxis, with flexible routes that can be customised to 

deliver travellers to a specific destination. These can be 

hailed by mobile phone, which also takes care of 

billing. In the words of the Oxford Bus Company’s 

slogan, “Cash free is carefree.” High-speed trains now 

connect “carfree” Oxford to other cities, while 

residents can pick up a driverless ‘country car’ from 

the park-and-ride for trips to smaller surrounding 

communities. As a result, Oxford’s streets have been 

liberated from the clutter of parked cars while the land 

once occupied by car parks has been freed up for 

higher-value uses. 

Consumption in the city has also been transformed. 

Prior to the industrial revolution, when production 

began to be centralised in factories, most goods in daily 

use were made by neighbourhood artisans. In the 2020s 

production returned to the neighbourhood through 

the 3D printer. Today, most of us have one in our own 

homes and offices 

for making small 

‘The city could easily have 

drifted into decline 

through mediocre building 

stock and traffic jams’ 

items. The corner 

shop, a common 

feature of Victorian 

and early-20thcentury 

Oxford, 

has reappeared as 

the 3D print shop, 

where we make 

larger items on the spot. Point-of-use production has all 

but eliminated the need for delivery vehicles, 

warehousing, and even those annoying drones once 

deployed by now-defunct internet shopping companies. 

Oxford in 2065 owes much to the visionaries of forty 

years ago. Without their courage and commitment to 

pursue bold planning policies, the city could easily 

have drifted into decline through piecemeal 

development, social inequality, mediocre building 

stock and traffic congestion. The decisions we make in 

2065 will be crucial in shaping the Oxford of 2115.’ 

Professor Steve Rayner is James Martin Professor of Science and 

Civilisation and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and 

Society, both at Oxford. He is a fellow of Keble College and Co-Director 

of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. He is also a member 

of the Lead Expert Group of the government’s Foresight Programme 

on the future of UK cities. Professor Rayner lives in Oxford and 

travels to work on foot. 

38 



Oxford in 2065 Feature 

Chris Benton with 

his cargo bike. He, 

with a lot of city 

planners, 

envisages a future 

in which 

city-centre 

deliveries will 

increasingly rely 

on zero-emission 

vehicles. Cargo 

bikes, including 

electric variants, 

will be a major 

part of this vision 

LOGISTICS 

Christopher Benton, entrepreneur 

Pedal & Post is an Oxford-based cycle delivery service 

that aims to provide more cost effective, reliable and 

greener delivery than motor vehicles. It is already the 

only service that can guarantee a particular delivery 

time, because of rampant traffic congestion in the city. 

Entrepreneur Chris Benton founded the company last 

year, having previously run a coffee stall on Little 

Clarendon Street. ‘Heavy goods vehicles regularly 

block that street, and cause pollution. We began with a 

coffee bike, but then realised we could deliver a wide 

variety of goods, including documents.’ Pedal & Post 

now makes deliveries for the Gatineau patisserie, 

Licious Interiors in Summertown and North Aston 

Organics. They use specialised bikes called 8Freights, 

which can carry up to 120kg, and heavy-duty tricycles 

that can carry up to a quarter of a tonne. Benton has 

recently found college-owned premises upon which he 

will set up a delivery hub. Lorries will drop off their 

wares; bicycles will perform the last mile. It’s a vision 

of the future. 

Chris also owns and manages Pedal & Pour, a bike-based, ‘off-grid’ 

artisan coffee business, and is a frequent sight at college May balls 

ARSAM SARABI 

Barbara 

Hammond poses 

with a model of 

Osney Lock 

Hydro, which 

began producing 

energy from the 

Thames, in 

central Oxford, in 

January. Osney 

Lock Hydro is run 

by community 

volunteers and 

was set up by 

West Oxford 

Community 

Renewables Ltd, 

also supported 

by a Community 

Grant from the 

University 

ENERGY 

Barbara Hammond, renewable energy leader 

‘By 2065 our energy system will be a lot more efficient, 

and we will use less of it. The energy we buy will be 

more expensive per unit, but overall we will spend less, 

with a direct reduction in fuel poverty. Our energy 

system will be local, smart, responsive and renewable. 

There is a fair chance that a system of interdependent, 

decentralised smart heat and power grids could be 

owned and managed locally, providing significant 

numbers of jobs. This is the energy future we must aim 

for if we are to have a secure supply, avoid economic 

shocks caused by volatile fossil fuel prices and deal with 

climate change. 

The change is already upon us. Didcot A power 

station closed in March 2013 and half of the iconic 

cooling towers have already been blown up. Didcot B 

may well disappear by the end of this decade, leaving 

Oxfordshire with no major power-generating facility. 

Our electricity bill will still be £1 billion plus, yet that 

money will all flow out of the county. 

We can do something about this. The whole 

operating span of the Didcot A power station was only 

40 years; it was turned 

‘By 2065 our energy system 

will be local, smart, 

responsive and renewable’ 

off by the same 

person who turned it 

on. Oxfordshire is 

already making about 

the same in GDP 

from the low-carbon 

economy as it spends on energy; the 570 businesses 

operating in the sector account for 7% of Oxfordshire’s 

economy and employ twice the number of people as 

the BMW Mini factory at Cowley. 

So we are amid the transition to a low-carbon 

economy. 30 January saw the first generation of 

hydro-electric energy from a brand new installation on 

the River Thames at Osney Lock, just off the Botley 

Road as you near the railway on the approach to the 

city centre. Supported by an Oxford University 

Community Grant, it will provide electricity for about 

60 houses and demonstrates that there are local 

solutions to energy production.’ 

Barbara Hammond (Corpus Christi, 1979) is Chief Executive Officer 

of Low Carbon Hub. She has previously run the UK Renewable 

Energy programmes at the Department for Trade and Industry 

and worked as International Director for Sir David King when 

he was the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. She lives on 

Osney Island and walks to work. 




39

AVAILABLE NOW WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD. 

Thousands of great Oxford images 

From unique architectural heritage to images of academics, staff and students, 

Oxford University Images brings together Oxford’s rich visual identity into one 

easily searchable website. Browse and buy high resolution digitised images of Oxford. 

Special offer of 20% discount for Oxford Today readers. 

www.oxforduniversityimages.com

Christopher and 

Wendy Ball sit 

adjacent to 

Hythe Bridge 

Street, where 

the canal 

terminates. 

They, like so 

many others, 

believe that the 

city will one day 

recreate the 

‘Port’ and 

turning basin, 

an ugly car park 

since 1951 


WATERWAYS 

Christopher and Wendy Ball, social entrepreneurs 

‘There is a story that T E Lawrence, famous for Seven 

Pillars of Wisdom and heroic actions in the Middle East 

during World War I, circumnavigated Oxford in a punt 

when he was an undergraduate. He probably did: it isn’t 

difficult, provided you can get the boat over the weirs 

on the Cherwell. The Oxford canal provides a link 

between the Thames and the Cherwell via Isis Lock or 

Duke’s Cut to the north-west of the city. And the 

Cherwell rejoins the Thames below Magdalen Bridge. 

Our dream is 

‘Our dream is to provide a 

waterbus service and relieve 

a little of the pressure of 

road traffic in the city’ 

(for someone) 

to provide a 

waterbus service 

– for tourists and 

residents – on 

Oxford’s two 

rivers and canal, 

and perhaps relieve a little of the pressure of road 

traffic in the city. Last summer we hired a boat and ran 

a trial service on the canal from Hythe Bridge Street to 

Aristotle Lane. It was very well-received, even if it didn’t 

quite cover its costs. In the future we hope to buy two 

boats and extend the service towards Wolvercote on 

the Thames, as well as continuing the canal trips. 

If all goes well, we might add further boats to take 

passengers down the Thames past Folly Bridge towards 

Magdalen Bridge and Mesopotamia up the Cherwell, 

or down to Iffley Lock. The final step would involve a 

waterbus service running from the Parks to North 

Oxford up the Cherwell. 

The boats are safe, “green”, quiet and comfortable: 

they are powered by electricity partly generated from 

solar panels. The qualified skippers are well-trained, 

cheerful and careful, and know Oxford and its 

waterways. We love Oxford and its rivers and canal, 

and want to make a difference. 

When you next visit the city, come and see if the 

waterbus service is running from Pocket Park, where 

the canal comes to an untimely end at Hythe Bridge 

Street – though there is talk of recreating the Pool in 

the car park below Nuffield College one day. Now, that 

would be quite something!’ 

Sir Christopher Ball (Merton, 1956) and Lady (Wendy) Ball trialled 

the Oxford WaterBus in 2014. He is a former Warden of Keble 

College, who ran his first marathon at the age of 68 and writes 

poetry, using the pen-name John Elinger. She raised six children, and 

later ran large science conferences in Oxford. Following the trial 

season in 2014 the Balls are exploring possibilities for continuing 

and extending the waterbus service in the future. They walk (or cycle) 

everywhere in Oxford when not running. 



41


Meat and three 

veg. Real meat 

will become 

more precious in 

the future, says 

Tom Curtis 


FOOD 

Tom Curtis, food consultant 

‘In 2065, Oxford takes fewer chances with its 

food supply. The first half of the century saw 

some shocks to the food system. These 

ranged from culture-changing fallout from 

an obesity epidemic – with fat and sugar 

treated warily, like alcohol – to harvest and 

trade system failures resulting in periods of 

disruption to global supply chains. Oxford 

resisted any wholesale collapse and no-one 

went hungry, but the production and 

consumption of food changed dramatically. 

First, new enterprise structures were 

created: “strategic food partnerships” 

involving authorities, businesses and citizens. 

A “land enterprise zone” was created along 

the Thames Valley. Up to a quarter of 

Oxford’s food came from this “patchwork 

foodscape” including most of our fruit and 

veg, a strategic reserve of staples like wheat, 

and “precious” products like real meat and 

fine wine. 

Second, technology came to bear on food. 

Far from a retreat to a pre-industrial 

agrarian idyll, global trade in food 

continued, but technology helped Oxford to 

sidestep dependency on particular raw 

materials. Techfoods began to be rendered 

from interchangeable substrates, shipped in 

from biomass production hotspots. 

FoodAppz and YouFood cooked up a 

(reconstituted) storm and millions were 

spent on marketing the authenticity of 

instant steak, grown in a lab. Techfoods were 

supported by techcrops, engineered to suit 

local soils and prevailing climatic and 

disease risks. 

It is still a subject of fierce debate whether 

these opposing currents of local food and 

techfood will result in a two-tier food system 

or an integrated one that achieves the best of 

both worlds. The University has led the way 

for the future of food, cross-fertilising 

economics, biology, human sciences and 

business innovation.’ 

Tom Curtis (Linacre, 1998) is a partner at 3Keel, an 

Oxford-based consultancy. After an MSc in Forestry, 

he worked for the Woodland Trust and Earth Trust 

before founding Landshare CIC, the social enterprise 

which carried out the Foodprinting Oxford project. 3Keel 

provides strategic advice on natural resource systems 

and supply chains. 

TRANSPORT 

Lord Drayson, businessman, politician, transport visionary 

Lord Drayson 

and his hybrid 

BMW i8. BMW is 

a major investor 

and employer in 

Oxford, and 

makes the Mini 

in Cowley 

‘Looking back from 2065, it’s amazing the 

transformation that has taken place in 

Oxford. Of course, the climate change crisis 

forced us to make some radical changes to 

our way of life, and transport was no 

exception. Still, it’s quite astonishing to think 

how far we’ve come. 

An obvious solution to both the climate 

change and air quality problem was the shift 

to all-electric vehicles, but it wasn’t until 

Oxford chemists perfected a truly 

transformational battery chemistry that 

range anxiety became a long-forgotten 

problem and led to the UK being the first 

country to ban all fossil fuel engines from 

city centres in 2022. 

Recently the new electric Mini flying car, 

now being made at Cowley, used the Oxford 

battery tech to set a new record for electric 

flight duration: 24 hours! Not bad for a 

vehicle costing less than £1 million. The 

internal combustion engines in museums 

are now regarded with the fond affection 

previously reserved for steam engines. 

But it was the development of two other 

technologies, both used for the first time in 

Oxford, which cemented Oxford’s 

reputation as a world leader in transport 

innovation. Dynamic wireless charging of 

electric vehicles, first used on Oxford buses 

and taxis, really took off when it became 

possible to transfer energy wirelessly. 

Wireless charging by pads built under the 

street surface enabled electric vehicles to be 

charged as they moved and this, together 

with the development of artificial 

intelligence and automated vision systems, 

meant that vehicles became completely 

autonomous and able to drive themselves. 

The school run became a thing of the past 

for mums and dads as kids were driven to 

school by the family robot car or, even better, 

walked or cycled. Walking and cycling 

became much more mainstream in Oxford 

as robot cars were programmed always to 

give way to pedestrians and cyclists, which 

dramatically improved safety and made road 

traffic offences a thing of the past. 

Driving became something you did for fun 

(on a track or outside the cities) because of 

the third innovation: the Oxford city 

transport data and energy network, where all 

vehicle transport is controlled by a smartsensor 

network that provides both the 

charging infrastructure and the data 

network. Oxford was again the first city to 

get Civil Aviation Authority approval to 

integrate the control of both ground vehicles 

and air vehicles in a single combined traffic 

control system as robot air vehicles 

42 



BESPOKE FURNITURE HANDCRAFTED FOR LIFE 

Somewhere that takes care of everything 

FREE 100 page brochure 

BUY NOW PAY IN 12 MONTHS * 

Celebrating British design 

& craftsmanship 

Free local design service 

10 year guarantee 

Available throughout Europe 

Whether you hoard hundreds of books or gather works of art from around the 

globe, we all at some time crave extra space. 

For over 25 years Neville Johnson have been using the finest materials and 

craftsmanship to create bespoke furniture with longevity and style, leaving you 

to sit back and relax, in the comfort of your own home. 

CALL FOR OUR LATEST BROCHURE 

0161 873 8333 

nevillejohnson.co.uk/oxford 

CODE OFXM20 

*Buy now pay in 12 months, finance offer is available on orders over £3,000 + VAT. Finance is subject to status, terms apply. 9.9% APR Representative. 

STUDIES BEDROOMS LOUNGES LIBRARIES HOME CINEMA


(flying cars and delivery 

vehicles) became more common. 

Controlling them made better use 

of the three-dimensional space 

above Oxford’s city streets and 

dramatically reduced congestion 

and parking problems as robot 

vehicles were able to wait outside 

the city once they had dropped off 

their passengers. 

Looking back, it’s clear these 

innovations only happened 

because of ground-breaking 

research at the University, working 

in partnership with the local 

councils, with a world-class vehicle 

manufacturer, and with the world’s 

best motorsport engineering talent 

on its doorstep – all of which 

helped to make Oxford the world’s 

cleanest city in 2065 – and the 

easiest to get around.’ 

OXFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL/BLINK IMAGE 

Lord Drayson is Chief Executive of Drayson 

Racing Technologies. Based just outside 

Oxford, Drayson Racing Technologies 

develops energy efficient technologies through 

R&D for motorsport. From 2003–5 Lord 

Drayson was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at 

Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He served 

as a Minister of State from 2007 to 2010. 

He is also an external member of the 

University’s Council. 

The A40 connects Oxford to West Oxfordshire, and suffers from severe congestion. 

David Leach and Andrew Sharp aim to address this with a monorail. They recently set 

up a limited company, WestOx Monorail (westoxmonorail.com), and received a letter 

of support from Witney MP, Oxonian and current Prime Minister David Cameron. 

The monorail would probably begin in Witney and end either at the Pear Tree park-andride, 

or, ideally, the railway station. Estimated costs are £125m. 

TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION 

Peter Madden, city strategist 

Peter Madden above the British 

Library in London, with a toy drone 


‘At first glance, Oxford will look much the 

same in 50 years’ time as it does today. As in 

other great cities, the street patterns and 

buildings are set to persist. 

Look closer and you’ll see drones 

delivering books, robot scouts cleaning 

rooms and autonomous travel pods shuttling 

revellers home at closing time. But the more 

profound changes will be less obvious: 

sensors will record everything from student 

lecture attendance to air quality in quads; 

machines will communicate and collaborate 

with a myriad of other machines; data pulled 

from buildings, people and streets will be 

analysed to help use resources more 

efficiently. Oxford’s historic centre will be 

draped with a layer of digital intelligence 

that will make it smarter – and a better place 

to live and study. 

Naturally all that will require power – and 

the majority will be low-carbon electricity. 

Transparent solar cells, perhaps made by 

Oxford PV, will replace glass in windows; 

electricity will be channelled to new, 

efficient storage devices like those being 

created in the Department of Materials; 

predictive analytics and dynamic pricing 

will mean that supply and demand 

meet more closely than ever before. 

The population will be different, too. 

By 2050, there will be 2.5 times more people 

aged over 60, so expect an older contingent 

of students descending on Oxford to retrain 

for 40 years of retirement. Women will be 

making a greater impact than ever around 

the entire world, so there should be just as 

many female professors as male, too. 

One thing about the future, though, is that 

it’s already with us. Universities are using 

predictive analytics to reduce student 

dropout rates, autonomous cars already 

drive on Oxford’s roads, while integrated 

solar tiles are being designed for the roof of 

the new shopping mall, the Westgate Centre. 

The other thing? How much the past always 

persists. You can be certain that, in 2065, 

Oxford’s dominant transport technology 

will still be the bicycle.’ 

Peter Madden (Wadham, 1984) is Chief Executive of 

London-based Future Cities Catapult, set up in 2013 

to bring together businesses, universities and urban 

leaders to develop solutions to the future needs of cities. 

Madden was previously chief executive of Forum for 

the Future and has also been Head of Policy at the 

Environment Agency. He walks to work. 

44 



Images: Oxford University Images 

Meeting Minds: Alumni Weekend in Oxford 

18–20 September 2015 

University of Oxford alumni and guests are warmly invited to our 2015 

Meeting Minds: Alumni Weekend, an inspiring programme of discussion and 

debate led by some of Oxford’s brightest minds. 

Cross subjects and centuries with our diverse, thought-provoking programme 

Engage with fellow alumni in an intellectually challenging environment 

Learn about ground-breaking research from academic staff at the top of their fields 

Explore ‘hidden’ Oxford with behind-the-scenes tours and unique insights into 

the city and University across the ages 

Our programme will showcase the best and brightest of Oxford – past, present and 

future. Sessions will range from the topical to the specialist and include the following: 

The Ebola Virus: The race for a cure 

Liveability or gentrification? Making cities great places to live 

How to Get Published 

The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence 

Party Games: Coalitions in British Politics 

Wine is bottled poetry: Literary wine tasting 

Gardeners’ Question Time 

The Cult of Saints 

Food Security and Environmental Change 

The Magna Carta: 800 years on 

A Practical Introduction to Japanese Calligraphy 

Tutored gin and tonic tasting 

Simultaneous Chess Exhibition: Play against a Grandmaster 

Booking for the Weekend will open on 29 June and close on 8 September. 

To join our mailing list, please visit: www.alumni.ox.ac.uk 

Follow @OAWeekend and #OAW15 

18–20 SEPTEMBER 2015

Napoleon’s death mask Feature 

© THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD 

Napoleon’s 

last resting place 

Christopher Danziger marks the bicentenary of Waterloo 

by explaining how Napoleon came to rest in Oxford 

Oxford is such a quirky place that it 

should come as no surprise to learn 

that it is the last resting place of the 

Emperor Napoleon – in a manner of 

speaking. This is not about the 

conspiracy theory that the bones in Les Invalides 

are not those of Napoleon but of his butler, Cipriani. 

This is an entirely different matter. 

On 5 May 1821, eight minutes after sunset (the time 

and date are important) on the sub-tropical island of 

St Helena, 2,000 miles from Cape Town and 4,600 

miles from Oxford, Napoleon took his last breath. One 

of his entourage closed his eyelids; another stopped 

the hands of the clock. It was 5.48pm. One by one they 

filed past to kneel beside the bed and kiss his hand. 


Considering that he had been ailing for ten months 

and that the terminal stages of his illness had lasted at 

least two weeks, his death seems to have taken the 

French party unprepared. Only now did they decide 

that a death mask should be taken. In the days before 

photography (Napoleon died only five or six years 

before the first photograph was taken) one of the few 

ways to preserve the likeness of great men for posterity 

was to make a face mask, either from life or in death. 

The prime mover in this decision was Fanny, née 

Dillon, wife of the chief of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, 

Henri Bertrand. Recent events have reminded us that 

there is no one as extreme as a convert to a cause. 

As the daughter of an Englishman, Fanny was a classic 

convert. Her father inherited an Irish regiment in 


(Above) View 

of Longwood 

House on 

St Helena, where 

Napoleon lived 

and died 

47

Feature Napoleon’s death mask 

French service in the Caribbean, where he married a 

creole from Martinique who happened to be a cousin 

of the future Empress Josephine. 

Fanny was their sixth child, famously theatrical and 

temperamental. When Bertrand volunteered to 

accompany Napoleon to St Helena, she tried to 

dissuade him by throwing herself through one of the 

portholes of the Bellerophon. Bertrand saved her by 

seizing her legs while the Duc de Savary, no admirer, 

roared, ‘Let her go!’ 

Once resigned to her fate, however, Fanny made a 

virtue of her captivity. By 1821 Bertrand was the only 

one of the so-called ‘four evangelists’ left on the island. 

Fanny and her four children were at the bedside when 

the Emperor died. She now called for a death mask but 

with one stipulation: on no account should it be made 

by an Englishman! 

Patriotism was all very well but there was no 

Frenchman on the island capable of taking the mask. 

The doctor attached to the French entourage was a 

Corsican called Antommarchi, who was at best an 

anatomist and at worst a quack. Napoleon’s mother 

had recommended him for the job because a medium 

had persuaded her that Napoleon had already escaped 

from the island and therefore the quality of the doctor 

was irrelevant. 

Antommarchi said the job could not be done 

because there was no plaster of good enough quality 

on the island. Someone ground some statuettes into 

powder, which he rejected as inadequate. For the 

whole of the next day, 6 May, arguments raged about 

how and by whom the mask should be made. 

Meanwhile the great man was decomposing visibly; 

observers commented on both the change in his 

features and the very unpleasant stench. 

Various sketches of him were made by the soldiers 

on guard and by a 19-year-old Englishman, Joseph 

Rubidge, who had stopped off in St Helena on a tour 

which he hoped would launch his career as a portrait 

painter. They all show him with sunken cheeks and 

angular features, unlike the chubby, rounded contours 

of familiar portraits. It was largely the result of the 

sharp loss of weight he had suffered in his final illness. 

The plot thickened when an English surgeon to one 

of the regiments guarding Napoleon not only claimed 

to know where suitable gypsum could be found but 

also offered to make the mask. Antommarchi again 

disparaged the quality of the gypsum and pronounced 

the project unworkable. However, it eventually became 

clear to Fanny that the mask would have to be made by 

an Englishman or not at all. 

So, early on 7 May, 36 hours after Napoleon had 

died, Dr Francis Burton, uncle to the future explorer 

and pornographer, Richard, was commissioned to take 

the mask. The body was now in an advanced state of 

decomposition and the features were beginning to 

collapse. The stench had become noticeably worse. 

While Burton worked at his stressful and distasteful 

task Napoleon’s valet held his master’s head steady. 

Antommarchi now wanted to get involved too and, 

to his credit, Burton accepted his offer. It was not until 

7pm that the cast was complete, and while Napoleon’s 

body was placed in his coffin, Burton went home for 

some well-deserved rest, leaving what we might call the 

‘negative’ cast to dry. 

Napoleon to 

John Bull: ‘Take 

notice I have got 

on my seven 

League 

Corsican Boots 

that never fails 

me; depend 

upon it, I’ll step 

across the 

Water one of 

these days and 

pay you a visit, 

Master Bull’ 

‘Observers 

commented on both 

the change in his 

features and the very 

unpleasant stench’ 

The next morning, 8 May, he came back and filled 

the ‘negative’ cast with plaster to make a ‘positive’ cast. 

The usual practice was to do it in three sections – the 

face, the skull, and the back of the head and ears. The 

intention had been to make several positives from the 

original negative, but the new plaster stuck to the old, 

and the face of the negative had to be destroyed to 

disengage it. 

Now they had a negative of the skull and the back of 

the head and a positive of the face. Burton proposed 

that from these he would make a single complete mask 

on his return to England. However, Fanny Bertrand 

had not shot her bolt yet. As soon as Burton left 

Longwood again, Mme Bertrand stole the face mask, 

promising that when a complete mask had been made, 

Burton would receive a copy. 

In a great rage, Burton 

responded by taking away the 

negative of the back of the head. 

What happens next is so 

murky, one can guarantee 

that no Napoleonist will agree 

with every detail of my 

account. Fanny Bertrand and 

Antommarchi, knowing that 

their time on the island was running out fast, wanted 

to create a prototype mask before they left. Without 

Burton’s negative of the back of the head, they did not 

see how they could complete the task. Gritting their 

teeth, once again they had recourse to the help of 

an Englishman. 

They asked Joseph Rubidge, the aspiring portraitist, 

to reconstitute the sections of the mask which they 

were missing. What he produced – a positive prototype 

mask – is therefore part original and part supposition. 

Antommarchi took charge of the finished product and 

took it back to France when he sailed on 27 May, a little 

over three weeks after Napoleon’s death. 

By 1826 Rubidge had died; his grieving father wrote, 

‘May I be the next in this book.’ While Dr Burton was 

still alive, however, Antommarchi could hardly claim 

that the mask was all his own work. But as soon as 

Burton died in Dublin in 1828, Antommarchi released 

a subscription edition in bronze, signed with only his 

own name. Numerous copies survive, identifiable 

48 



VJV 

PRICE 

GUARANTEE 

discovering a World of Wonders . . . 

Travelling with Voyages Jules Verne, with over 35 years of experience, opens the door to a World of Wonders, 

rich in history, culture and natural beauty. Our tours of limited-sized groups span the globe following 

carefully 

devised itineraries by air, road, river and rail that capture the true essence of your destination. 

No Single 

Supplement 

(limited availability) 

Egypt 

Early 

Booking Offer 

SAVE £20 

(book 4+ months before dep.) 

Tunisia 

Extension 

available 

Sicily 

© Photo Hutter 

© Toomas Volmer & Tallinn City Tourist 

Office & Convention Bureau 

The Original Nile Cruise 

10 nights full board from £1595 

The original ‘long cruise’ re-launches from 

Cairo to Luxor, where the old way of life 

is largely unchanged and the ancient sites 

rarely visited. Explore the Pyramids and visit 

sites at Beni Suef, Beni Hassan, Amarna, 

Abydos and Denderah. VJV Special Event 

Prices 

reduced 

by up to £50 

(selected dates) 

Lithuania, 

Latvia, Estonia 

Hannibal & Carthage 

7 nights full board from £725 

Visit the classical sites, ports, medinas and 

oases of Tunisia, exploring the ancient Roman 

City of Dougga, Carthage, Tunis, Sousse, 

El Djem, Tozeur, Matmata and Kairouan. 

VJV Special Event included. No Single 

Supplement (limited dates/availability). 

Early 

Booking Offer 

SAVE £50 

(book 4+ months before dep.) 

India 

Secret Sicily 

7 nights from £945 

Explore Sicily’s rich cultural and natural heritage 

in the footsteps of ‘Inspector Montalbano’, 

staying in Acireale and the Baroque towns 

of Noto and Ragusa. Enjoy wine tasting, visit 

the Roman villa of Tellaro, Vendicari Nature 

Reserve, Modica and Chiaramonte Gulfi. 

4 lunches 

& 4 dinners 

included 

Vietnam, Laos, 

Cambodia 

Baltic Capitals 


Explore the distinctively different capitals of 

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Stay in Vilnius, 

Riga and Tallinn, with visits to Gediminas Castle, 

Trakai Island Castle, Rundale Palace, St. Peter’s 

Church, Nevsky Cathedral and Peter the 

Great’s house and palace. VJV Special Event. 

Images of India 


Travel from the spectacular Golden Temple at 

Amritsar and the foothills of the Himalayas, to 

the majestic Taj Mahal in Agra, including Mumbai, 

Jaipur, Delhi, McLeod Ganj, Shimla and the 

Rajasthani wildlife park of Ranthambore. VJV 

Special Events included. Extensions available. 

Grand Tour of Indochina 


Discover Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, visiting 

Ho Chi Minh City, Hoi An, Hue, UNESCO site 

Ha Long Bay, Hanoi, Luang Prabang, Vientiane, 

Phnom Penh and the fabled temples of Angkor 

Wat. Enjoy a medley of river cruises, a Baci 

ceremony and an Apsara dance with dinner. 

For more information on these and other arrangements, please call or visit our website 

0845 166 7376 020 7616 1000 

www.vjv.com/oxford 

Sales & Information: Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm and Saturdays 9am to 5pm

Feature Napoleon’s death mask 

COURTESY OF BONHAMS 

by a seal stating Souscription Dr Antommarchi 1833. 

So far, simple enough, although the story has taken 

us no nearer to Oxford. However, before the French 

party left St Helena, several casts were taken from the 

prototype death mask, and of these, four, or possibly 

six, are known to survive. These casts have a special 

place in the iconography of Napoleon as being the 

only ones with an indisputable link to St Helena. 

One of them remained with General Bertrand, and 

this one is now at Malmaison, the Empress Josephine’s 

beautiful chateau on the outskirts of Paris. One of 

them Antommarchi took himself, and gave to the 

sculptor Canova for a projected statue of Napoleon. 

However, Canova died in 1822, and by a mysterious 

process the mask remained in the family of the British 

Consul for Florence for decades before it reached the 

Musée de l’Armée in Paris. 

The other two masks have an even stranger history. 

Both of them ended up in the possession of the British 

chaplain on St Helena, the Reverend Richard Boys. 

Boys was in the classic mould of irascible clerical 

eccentrics who earned many enemies but also a 

reputation for incorruptible honesty. He would insist, 

for instance, on registering ‘in bold characters’ the 

fathers of all slave children born on St Helena, usually 

officials or officers of the highest rank. In 1821 he was 

officially reprimanded for shouting at a shopkeeper 

that he was a liar and a spy. 

It has often been asked why Boys should have 

snaffled two of what was such a scarce commodity. 

One suggestion is that his anti-establishment views 

had earned him the affection of the French 

community, which was probably true but insufficient to 

warrant the gift of two masks. One indisputable fact is 

that in 1818 he agreed to give Napoleon’s butler, 

Cipriani, a Christian burial, of which Napoleon said, 

in amazement, ‘No Catholic priest would have done 

One of the two 

masks ‘snaffled’ 

by the Reverend 

Richard Boys, 

the British 

Chaplain on 

St Helena 

as much for a Protestant.’ For this he was given one 

of the Emperor’s snuff boxes, although probably 

through a third party. Current thinking is that he 

and Napoleon probably never met. 

In 1829, after his tour of duty on St Helena was 

complete, Boys returned to the life of a parish priest. 

His parish was in Kent, and he himself was a graduate 

of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, so we are still a 

long way from Oxford. One of the masks he 

bequeathed to his son, Markby; this mask spent many 

generations in family attics before it was offered for 

sale ‘in the hope that more people would then be able 

to see it and enjoy (it).’ Another way, one might have 

thought, would have been to donate it to a museum. 

This mask was auctioned at Bonhams in 2013, and 

bought by an overseas bidder. The Ministry of Culture 

temporarily banned its export to give British 

institutions time to raise an equivalent sum, but none 

did so. Apparently the mask has gone to a private 

Russian collection where no one is now able to ‘see it 

and enjoy it.’ 

Which leaves one more mask: that one, Boys left to 

his daughter. She married a Mr William Sankey, and at 

last we are nearing our destination. At the end of the 

19th century, the Sankey family was living in Oxford. 

A Dr Julius Sankey was at one time living in the Turl, 

and had a practice in Broad Street. A Richard H 

Sankey was born in Oxford in 1880, and his son, also 

Richard, was born in Oxford in 1913. When the family 

decided in 1926 that they did not have proper storage 

facilities for the mask, where better to deposit it than in 

the Ashmolean Museum? 

However, the Ashmolean also claimed that they 

lacked the space to do it justice, so when the Maison 

Française, a research centre in the humanities and 

social sciences, opened in 1967, it was decided, with the 

approval of the Sankey family, to offer it to the Maison 

as a gesture of international fraternity. That is where it 

rests today, slightly self-effacing but accessible to the 

public, one of only four prototypes in existence and 

the only one, in the bicentenary of Waterloo, in the 

keeping of what Napoleon described as ‘the most just, 

the most brave and the most generous of my enemies.’ 

The Sankey mask shows us a recognisable Napoleon, 

with a strong brow and a small, neat mouth and chin, 

but with very slightly sunken cheeks, as one would 

expect of someone after a long illness. The closure of 

the eyes looks peaceful and there are almost no lines 

or wrinkles on the face. Apparently, to mimic the 

marmoreal perfection of antique statues, Rubidge 

sandpapered this mask smooth, so there are no facial 

hairs, pores or crease marks. The result is a sobering 

encounter. We may not go as far as Kolbe in declaring 

that ‘Napoleon was not of the stuff that kings are made 

of – he was of the marble from which gods are made.’ 

History takes strange twists, and it is ironic to think 

that Oxford, the ‘home of lost causes’ and the last 

dodo, should also be where one may meet one of the 

immortals face to face. 

This is Christopher Danziger’s sequel to his last essay in Oxford 

Today, ‘The big junket’ (26.2, Trinity Term 2014), in which he wrote 

about the prematurely triumphant visit to Oxford of European 

sovereigns in 1814. Chris teaches at Oxford’s Department of 

Continuing Education. 

50 



LOOKING TO INVEST IN BUY-TO-LET PROPERTY? 

For a comprehensive buy to let acquisition service within the UK’s most buoyant rental market look 

no further than Oxford. scottfraser, Oxford’s leading property consultancy, specialise in sourcing 

and securing high quality investment property and ongoing residential lettings and management. 

The Oxford market has performed remarkably well both during and since the 2007 financial crisis and our 

longstanding clients continue to reap the rewards of their tailored investment portfolios. For gross yields of 5% 

plus and a secure prospect for capital growth (12% in 2014) we can provide dynamic investment opportunities 

usually unavailable to the open market. 

We offer expert advice on: 

• Investment Property Search and Acquisition 

• Refurbishment and Interior Design 

• Project Management and Development 

• Residential Lettings & Management 

• Tailored Asset & Portfolio Management 

• Residential Sales 

• Mortgages and Tax Efficiency 

Andrew Greenwood 

Group MD 

John Gebbels 

Property Investment Manager 

To enable you to own prime property either within the heart of Oxford or Oxfordshire, whether 

for investment or personal occupation, we provide an entirely comprehensive service. 

TWO RECENT BUY TO LET ACQUISITION CASE STUDIES 

EAGLES CLOSE, WANTAGE, OXFORDSHIRE 

• Five brand one and two bedroom flats acquired off plan 

• Discounts of £10,000 secured per property 

• Conveniently located in the centre of a popular market town 

• Furnishings sourced and supplied through interior design specialists 

• Local professional tenants secured within days of completion 

• Gross yields of 5% secured for clients 

LOWER FISHER ROW, OXFORD 

• Modern two bedroom Oxford city centre apartment 

• Acquired ‘off market’ on behalf of investment clients 

• Sale price agreed at 7.5% below market value 

• Ideally positioned for academic and visiting tourist tenants 

• Full refurbishment, redecoration and furnishings undertaken 

• Successful ‘short let’ occupancy achieved at a net yield of 6% 

CALL FOR A FREE CONSULTATION AND INFORMATION ON AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITIES 

For further information and FREE consultation at our Head Offices at 

10 Lime Tree Mews, 2 Lime Walk, Headington,Oxford, OX3 7DZ 

please contact John Gebbels today on 01865 760055 

or visit scottfraser.co.uk

Unique signed and numbered limited edition prints of Oxford Colleges 

VA P r i n t s i s a n O x f o r d c o m p a n y p r o d u c i n g b e a u t i f u l l y c o l o u r e d a n d d e t a i l e d a r c h i t e c t u r a l p r i n t s 

o f O x f o r d a n d t h e U n i v e r s i t y C o l l e g e s . 

Queen’s View from the High No.2 

Brasenose View from the High 

Mansfield The Quad 

Oriel Oriel Square 

St. Edmund Hall The Quad and Chapel 

Christ Church Tom Quad 

Exeter View from Broad Street 

Harris Manchester View from Mansfield Road No.2 

Worcester The Cottages from the Gardens 

New College The New Buildings 

FRAMED PRINTS BY POST - UK ONLY 

Lady Margaret Hall Front Quad 

Hertford The Old Buildings Quad 

Oxford Cambridge Venice 

This is a small selection of the Oxford prints on our website. 

Our prints make an ideal gift for alumni and those just 

graduating. They are a lasting memento of the college and the 

timeless architecture of Oxford. 

You can buy securely online or by telephone with all major 

debit and credit cards. Prints sizes are 483 x 329mm or 594 x 

210mm. Unframed prints cost £109 each + p&p and are 

posted worldwide in large diameter cardboard tubes. (UK 

£6-50. EU £8-00. World £12-00. 

Tel: 01865 864100 

www.vaprints.co.uk 

Corpus Christi View from Merton Street 

All our prints are also available framed for delivery by post to UK mainland addresses. They can 

be framed in a silver-gilt or gold frame with a double ivory mount for a traditional look or 

choose a black, white or oak frame for a more contemporary feel. Framed prints are £183 plus 

£16-50 p&p to UK mainland only. 

All Souls 

Balliol 

Brasenose 

Christ Church 

Corpus Christi 

Exeter 

Harris Manchester 

Hertford 

Jesus 

Keble 

Lady Margaret Hall 

Linacre 

Lincoln 

Magdalen 

Mansfield 

Merton 

New College 

Nuffield 

Oriel 

Pembroke 

The Queen’s College 

St Catherine’s 

St. Edmund Hall 

St. Hugh’s 

St. John’s 

St. Peter’s 

Said Business School 

Trinity 

University 

Wadham 

Wolfson 

Worcester

Book essays and reviews Common room 

Common Room 

Book essays and reviews 

Who painted the 

Tradescants’ Orchard? 

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM 

Barrie Juniper and Juliet Ralph believe 

they have solved a great mystery 

In the basement of the Bodleian Library lies a 

leather-bound volume (MS Ashmole 1461) 

containing some 66 watercolours of fruits. It 

was described in the early Ashmolean 

catalogue as ‘A Book of Fruit Trees with their 

Fruits, drawn in Colours about the year 1640’. 

This loose-leaf collection of paintings had lain there 

seemingly undisturbed since Elias Ashmole acquired 

it. It came to him on the death in 1678 of the widow 

Hester Tradescant, second wife of John Tradescant 

junior (1608–62). No commentary on the collection 

by any library or museum visitor is known to exist, 

but by the nineteenth century, the volume had 

acquired the name The Tradescants’ Orchard. 

Barrie Juniper and Hanneke Grootenboer were 

commissioned to write a commentary and in 2013 the 

work was published under the title The Tradescants’ 

Orchard: the Mystery of a Seventeenth-Century Painted Fruit 

Book. Every facet of the collection was examined. 

The paper, in several different batches and of good 

quality, was identified as having been made in Bruges. 

The collection is unbalanced as an early/mid-17thcentury 

fruit record. Only one apple variety appears, 

for example, whereas a contemporary and balanced 

representation, such as John Parkinson’s Paradisi in 

Sole Paradisus Terrestris of 1629, would be expected to 

include about a dozen. The original set may have 

approached 100 plates. 

One possible purpose of the illustrations was as a 

tradesman’s catalogue of fruits, to be carried around 

and displayed on the great tables of the landed gentry. 

A rival theory says they were amateur works for 

a purely decorative purpose. The curiously 

unhorticultural and inconsistent nature of the captions 

might make more sense in this context, along with the 

charming insects, birds and other little creatures which 

pop up here and there. There are no such creatures in 

the Parkinson illustrations. 

Remove any underlying serious botanical or 

commercial intent, and the incidental creatures 

become an acceptably playful touch. Such details, 

and the overall style, resemble embroidery. They are 

remarkably similar to fruit and flower pictures created 

ONLINE 

Read the 

full essay: 

oxfordtoday. 

ox.ac.uk 

BODLEIAN LIBRARY 

Did ‘Uncle’ John 

Parkinson supply 

fruit specimens to 

Hester Tradescant, 

and ‘yollow’ 

colloquialisms? 

The caption above 

(enlarged detail) 

reads, ‘The grete 

early yollowe 

peech’ 

(Above right) 

Portrait of Hester 

Tradescant and her 

stepson (detail), 

attributed to 

Thomas de Critz 

in 17th-century stump work. If so, who painted them? 

The matter was unresolved in 2013, when the book 

was published by Bodleian Publishing. 

Then came a new suggestion, put forward recently 

by Juliet Ralph, that someone in the Tradescant 

household might have been the unacknowledged 

talent behind this beautiful collection. 

The evidence, although circumstantial, favours 

Hester. She became the second wife of the younger 

Tradescant in 1638. She was part Dutch by birth – her 

maiden name Pooks or Pookes is from North Holland. 

She was related by blood to two of the great artists’ 

families of northern Europe, the De Critz and 

De Neve families; there are several portraits of the 

Tradescant family by De Critzes and De Neves. These 

all date from after the known introduction of Hester 

to the Tradescant household. She lived in an 

atmosphere of linseed oil, with relatives who were 

professional painters. She could procure paper from 

Bruges via the next family member travelling there. 

But she was semi-literate and there was no formal 

artistic training to be had in England at that time, even 

though it was available in the Low Countries and Italy 

where female artists signed their works. ‘Uncle’ John 

Parkinson, a good family friend, probably supplied 

some of the fruit specimens; with his northern accent 

and ‘yollow’ colloquialisms, he may have influenced 

the captions (illustrated). Hester supervised a large 

household, which may explain the rushed nature of 

the pictures, yet through her family she acquired 

techniques such as the use of gouache to enhance the 

iridescence of the fruits. We rest our case. 

Dr Barrie Juniper (St Catherine’s, 1952) is Fellow Emeritus, also at 

St Catherine’s, and Reader Emeritus, Department of Plant Sciences. 

Juliet Ralph is Open Access Subject Librarian at the Bodleian Library. 



53

Common room Book essays and reviews 

The Night Malcolm X 

Spoke at the 

Oxford Union 

By Stephen Tuck 

University of California Press, £15 

T 

he most remarkable thing 

about this book, which 

was published to coincide 

with the fiftieth anniversary of 

Malcolm X’s visit to Oxford, is the 

telling of untold stories – of the 

struggles of non-white students 

who were refused lodgings in 

Oxford because of a ‘colour bar’, 

of the University tenuously 

accepting to challenge these 

forms of discrimination. Stephen 

Tuck, Professor of Modern 

History at Pembroke College, 

argues that the legacy of Malcolm 

X’s speech was to undermine the 

system of University discipline. By 

the end of the Second World War, 

non-whites constituted 6% 

of students matriculating at the 

University. Oxford was 

increasingly at the centre of 

an inadvertent production of 

radical students. Tuck 

geographically widens the ‘civil 

rights’ movements – so often 

caricatured as a US-only 

narrative. If there is a lesson to be 

carried from this book, it is in the 

need to internationalise our 

struggles and our histories. 

Mahmoud Ally is an undergraduate at 

Pembroke College. 

St Cross College 

at Fifty 

By Jan-Georg Deutsch, 

Diarmaid MacCulloch 

and Tim Pound 

St Cross College, £20 

More than a college 

history but also a very 

good one. The authors 

remind us that in the 

1960s the University had 

swelling ranks of faculty 

and post-grads with 

no college affiliation. 

St Cross and others – 

Wolfson was the twin – 

came to the rescue. 

European 

Intellectual History 

from Rousseau 

to Nietzsche 

By Frank M Turner 

Yale University Press, £30 

Best known for his 

intellectual biography 

of John Henry Newman, 

which ignited a 

controversy over the 

cardinal’s sexuality, 

the late Frank Turner 

was among the finest 

intellectual historians of 

his generation, as this 

terrific book attests. 

The History of Bhutan 

By Karma Phuntsho 

Haus Publishing, £30 

This 650-page book, the first 

comprehensive Englishlanguage 

history of Bhutan, 

performs the extremely difficult 

task of extracting Bhutan from the 

looming shadow of Tibet and 

China, from the silly Shangri-la 

sentimentality of westerners, and 

latterly from Bhutan’s nascent 

tourist industry that would pander 

to this western view. 

Phuntsho (Balliol, 1997) strikes 

out a definite path by claiming that 

Bhutan, even in matters religious, 

is less obviously an extension of 

Tibet than the Tibetologists would 

have us believe. He convincingly 

works through the etymology of 

names, places, oral and written 

historical evidence, to sift out the 

Drukpa lineage of Buddhism as it 

came to rest in the country from 

the early 13th century. The 

modern name Bhutan is a legacy of 

British colonialism and European 

confusion about the Himalayan 

region. The desire to hold on to 

what is evidently special about 

Bhutan is strengthened rather than 

weakened by a scholarly treatment. 

The biodiversity of a country that 

spans lush tropical rainforest to 

soaring Himalayan peaks, and the 

coherence of its Buddhist culture, 

remain causes for hope. 

Richard Lofthouse (LMH, 1990) is the editor 

of Oxford Today. 

The Oxford 

Illustrated History of 

the Reformation 

Ed. Peter Marshall 

OUP, £25 

Accessibly written by 

a stellar cast of leading 

scholars, OUP’s beautiful 

edition reminds us of the 

vast geography and time 

span of an ‘event’ that 

was much, much more 

complex than we had 

been raised to believe. 

The illustrations are 

carefully chosen and 

bring it all alive in a way 

that multimedia cannot. 

Tetralogue 

By Timothy Wilson 

OUP, £11 

The Wykeham Professor 

of Logic grapples with 

questions about truth 

and falsity, knowledge 

and belief, relativism 

and dogma. He does so 

by creating an imagined 

conversation on a train 

between four individuals 

with radically different 

outlooks. They discuss 

everything from witches 

and witchcraft to faked 

moon landings, used car 

salesmen and slavery. 

ONLINE 

For our ‘book of the week’ feature, visit 

www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/bookoftheweek 

54 



Book essays and reviews Common room 

Nye: The Political Life 

of Aneurin Bevan 

By Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds 

I B Tauris, £25 

Churchill called him a ‘voluble careerist’ 

while the seedier elements who 

clustered around Lord Beaverbrook, 

Bevan’s unlikeliest friend, mocked him as a 

‘Bollinger Bolshevik.’ The Gaitskell set 

dismissed him as a splitter and a demagogue. 

These attacks drew strength from the 

chasm between Bevan’s public socialism and 

his more complicated private thinking. 

Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, a lecturer in 

politics at St Edmund Hall, emphasises 

Bevan’s canny behaviour during a career that 

took him from Sirhowy Valley to the Attlee 

cabinet as Minister for Health and Housing. 

This biography asks readers to take Bevan 

seriously as a thinker, but his writings come 

off second best when compared to Tony 

Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, with its 

brilliant critique of Marxist dogma about class 

collisions, the anti-competitive dimensions of 

socialist thought, and the disappointments of 

the nationalisation project. Bevan could not 

compete here, although we do learn that he 

wrote poetry in his spare time. 

Bevan’s reputation as a great man continues 

to rest on the establishment of the NHS, the 

subject of the best chapter in this book. Here 

we see the policy process in all its intricacy as 

Bevan sought to convince the British Medical 

Association that he had no desire to destroy 

their access to private income. His goal was to 

end the ‘buying and selling of medical 

practices’ insofar as they touched on the poor. 

With a little help from Attlee and Dalton 

offstage, this is exactly what he did. 

Dr John-Paul McCarthy (Exeter, 2000) completed his 

DPhil on Gladstone in 2010. 

Anna Karenina 

By Leo Tolstoy 

OUP, £19 

Oxford-based 

independent scholar 

Rosamund Bartlett has 

garnered widespread 

acclaim for her new 

translation of Tolstoy’s 

900-page epic love 

story. Conveying his 

meaning with great 

nuance, she takes the 

reader directly into the 

author’s encylopedic 

depiction of Russian 

life in the 1870s. 

The Iron Wall 

By Avi Shlaim 

Penguin, £15 

Born in Baghdad and 

raised in Israel, today at 

St Antony’s, the author 

locates the roots of 

Israel’s unilateral, ‘act 

from military strength’ 

policy — the ‘Iron Wall’ 

— to the 1920s, and 

then demonstrates how 

it has been ruthlessly 

deployed ever since. This 

new edition adds four 

chapters and a fresh 

epilogue, all dispiriting. 

Any Other Business 

By Martin Vander Weyer 

Elliott and Thompson, £19 

The Oxonian business 

editor for the Spectator 

gathers together 

a delicious bevy of 

scribblings charting 

a rich life as a banker 

turned journalist. A 

notable early essay 

surveys the ‘failure’ of 

the University’s Gridiron 

Club, vintage 1976. Yet 

that is not how it looks 

now. It was just that the 

world was changing. 

It’s Been Said Before 

By Orin Hargraves 

OUP £13 

Only a lexicographer 

of Hargraves’ 

standing could enter 

so confidently into 

this particular arena 

and emerge again 

unbloodied. Concise, 

witty and elegant, he 

demolishes tired clichés, 

advances others and 

over the course of eight 

chapters categorizes 

them by type, constantly 

distancing mere idioms. 

Oxford Alumni Cardholders are entitled 

to a 15% discount at Blackwell’s 

George Eliot 

and Money 

By Dermot Coleman 

Cambridge UP, £55 

Coleman (Univ, 1981) 

has done the Eliot field 

a huge service, and his 

own direct experience 

in money management, 

plus the freight of 

the Great Crash of 

2007–8, imparts to this 

monograph a voice that 

speaks strangely to our 

own times. The issues on 

the table are distinctively 

and surprisingly familiar. 

The Churchill Factor 

By Boris Johnson 

Hodder & Stoughton £25 

You only have to romp 

to page 49. Randolph, 

Winston, [Boris,] united 

by Tory Democracy. 

Asked to define it, 

Randolph said it was 

‘opportunism, mostly.’ 

But it was more. It was 

‘giving workers the tea 

break, and so on – while 

always remaining, on the 

whole, a steady defender 

of free markets.’ 



55

Effi ciency 

with Style 

Ever thought a heating system could be part of your room’s 

style and décor? No? 

Well now, thanks to Sunflow’s latest low input electric heaters, 

it can. British made, not only are they highly efficient thanks 

to their refractory clay cores and advanced thermostatic 

controls, their slim, contemporary, fluted design is available 

in over 600 subtle as well as striking colours including 6 very 

attractive metallics. 

Whatever your current décor, a Sunflow electric heater can 

either compliment its current look or add a daring contrast. 

• Latest in heat technology 

and conservation 

• Intelligent temperature 

control 

• Quick and easy to install 

• 10 year guarantee 

• Vertical and horizontal sizes 

• Made with pride in Britain 

British Standards 

Institution Tested 

For a FREE brochure call our 24 hour brochure line now on - 

0800 158 8270 

Questions or FREE no obligation survey? 

Call Suzanne on 0800 158 8272 

www.sunflowltd.co.uk

The good sport Common room 

The good sport 

Turning kart wheels 

Freddie Parker reflects on the spectacular rise of one of Oxford’s less familiar clubs 

STU STRETTON PHOTOGRAPHY 

You think of Oxford and sport and it always 

seems to boil down to half-remembered 

anecdotes about blades and rivers, running 

around with a ball in a field, or ballroom 

dancing as a dating strategy. 

Oxford University Motor Drivers’ Club (OUMDC) is 

not widely known. Club President Doug Henderson has 

researched its origins, which lie in the 1930s. 

‘Back then it was a club simply for student car owners, 

which evolved into road rallying. From around 2000 the 

club became involved in karting and its focus switched 

to racing rather than simply being petrolheads.’ 

Karting, for the uninitiated, is not for the faint of 

heart. The Club100 TKM 2-stroke karts driven in the 

British University Karting Championships do 0–60mph 

in 4.5 seconds, the same or less than your average 

Ferrari. With your backside an inch off the tarmac, 

it’s about as visceral as motorsport gets. 

On 16 November last year, the chaps – they are all 

chaps I’m afraid, a great frustration of the club and 

motorsport generally – battled through stiff 

competition to qualify for the British Universities’ 

Karting Championship (BUKC). 

Both the A and B Oxford teams qualified, while the 

C team qualified for the Rookie championships. 

OUMDC’s Team A (we might as well call it the A-Team) 

achieved a remarkable result, coming fourth out of 

45 competitors. 


Above, from left: 

James Lambton 

(Balliol, 2013), 

Callum Hughes 

(Balliol, 2013), 

Scott Houghton 

(Wadham, 2011) 

and Doug 

Henderson 

(St Edmund Hall, 

2011) 


Club Captain Scott Houghton was effervescent, 

saying, ‘This was a fantastic outcome for us. Getting 

both the A and B teams through to the premier 

championship is even better than we expected. 

People outside karting have no understanding of the 

level of competition. We have some extremely fast 

drivers and can expect some very strong results 

in 2015, and hopefully some race wins.’ 

The day also had a derby element. Oxford Brookes A, 

Nottingham A and Hertfordshire A came first, second 

and third respectively, so there is plenty of motivation 

for OUMDC to go further and faster in 2015. 

The karts are rented for races; this 

keeps costs under control and 

maintains a level playing field, explains 

Henderson. OUMDC is the grateful 

recipient of sponsorship from BCMS 

Corporate, a market leader in the sale 

of privately owned companies. The 

club also gets financial subsidy from 

the sport’s governing federations. 

‘Whereas the perception is that this 

must be a very expensive sport, it isn’t,’ 

says Henderson. ‘Personal expenses 

are the same as for any other club, 

consisting mostly of transport costs 

and race entry fees.’ 

Looking ahead, the club’s thoughts 

have already turned to the Varsity 

race against Cambridge in late 

April or May. 

‘Varsity takes the form of an 

individual 25-minute race of 24 

drivers – 12 from each university – 

preceded by testing and qualifying. 

Typically, we test for an hour, during 

which time we try to get an idea of the 

track and the conditions. Then follows a 15-minute 

qualifying session to give us a grid for the race. That 

grid then goes forward to the race itself. Each driver 

competes individually to earn points for his or her own 

finishing position, and at the end of the event the 

points each of the universities has earned are tallied 

up and that determines the winning team. Earning a 

Half Blue requires that your individual result is a 

podium finish, so it’s a very difficult thing to achieve.’ 

The other halo event for the forthcoming season is 

the BUKC 24-hour race in June. In 2014 Oxford almost 

won it, but for a late-stage mechanical failure, so will be 

looking to avenge the defeat. 

You can follow OUMDC on Twitter (@OUMDC) and 

Facebook facebook.com/OUMDC 

57

Asia Minor. The major attractions. 

Classical Turkey 11–20 May 2015; April 2016 

All the major ancient Greek and Roman sites and many that are off the 

beaten track. Led by archaeologist Henry Hurst. 

Exploring Istanbul 13–19 September 2015; October 2016 

The full spectrum of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman sites in this 

extraordinary city. Led by author Jane Taylor. 

Eastern Turkey 3–15 October 2015 

Lesser-known Turkey, from Lake Van to Mount Ararat and the Black Sea. 

Led by art historian Rowena Loverance. 

Also in 2016: 

Central Anatolia – Cappadocia & the civilizations at the heart of Turkey • April 

Ottoman Turkey – Bursa, Iznik, Istanbul & Edirne • May 

Istanbul Revisited – Special access to the lesser-known sites • October 

MARTIN RANDALL TRAVEL 

the UK’s leading specialist in cultural tours 

Contact us: 

+44 (0)20 8742 3355 

www.martinrandall.com 

ABTA No.Y6050 

5085 

© Weddings by Nicola and Glen 

Did 

you 

know? 

The Ashmolean Museum 

and Rhodes House hold 

civil ceremony and civil 

partnership licences. 

Bookings are taken 

throughout the year for 

both ceremonies and 

receptions. 

www.ashmolean.org/weddings 

events@ashmolean.org 

01865 610406 

© Barker Evans Photography 

www.rhodeshouseoxford.com 

events@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk 

01865 282599

Food and drink Common room 

Food and drink 

The genius in the bottles 

Hanneke Wilson reflects on the changing business of running a college wine cellar 

MARIA USPENSKAYA/SHUTTERSTOCK 

An Oxford wine steward runs a small business, 

and the Bursar didn’t want a duffer in charge. 

When my predecessor, the ancient 

philosopher Ben Morison, left to take up a 

post at Princeton in 2009, he persuaded Governing 

Body to offer the job to an outsider, for I am neither a 

fellow nor full-time staff. I still do some teaching 

elsewhere in the University, but I am also a part-time 

wine merchant working for Haynes Hanson & Clark. 

First I met the Finance Bursar for a ‘chat’, actually a 

rigorous interview conducted with exemplary courtesy. 

Since then the Bursar has become a good friend, and I 

have come to love my job. 

‘When you took over as wine steward, did you find 

fascinating old bottles that had been forgotten about?’ 

This is a romantic misconception. It is a job, and in 

term time there is some piece of cellar business to 

attend to most days. 


Hanneke Wilson 

is a philologist. 

She also coaches 

the Oxford team 

for their annual 

Varsity blindtasting 

match, 

which they won 

in February 


‘Surely your wine cellar must have vaulted arches?’ 

I have seen beautiful cellars in Oxford, but Exeter’s 

isn’t one of them: it is a cramped downstairs space with 

wine racks so close together that the butler has had to 

put the tall Austrian bottles on the top racks so that we 

don’t bump into them. 

‘Presumably you go to France to buy wine for the 

college. Wouldn’t that be much cheaper?’ Imagine the 

scenario. The Bursar and I tootle off to France and 

load up a white van. At Calais we get stopped by 

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. ‘It’s for our 

daughter’s wedding’, William says, a little too quickly, 

and produces a smartly printed invitation card. 

‘I remember that one from three months ago, sir. 

Would you like to step into my office, please, and you, 

too, madam?’ Daily Mail material. Yes, in theory one 

could self-import through a UK bonded warehouse, 

but in the end, a wine merchant will do this safely 

and for less. 

Stocktakes are done three times a year using an 

Excel spreadsheet started by Ben Morison’s 

predecessor, a naval officer, and appropriately headed 

‘SCR Wine Stock Muster’. 

So what is being counted? A cellar reflects the tastes 

of past wine stewards and current fellows, fashion and 

affordability. When I took over, the mainstay at Exeter 

was claret. My predecessors had bought well, but the 

crus classés that we used to buy are now priced well out 

of our reach. However much they liked their claret, my 

colleagues were in favour of diversification, and now 

Exeter cheerfully drinks wines from all over Italy, 

Spain and Austria. I continue to organise wine 

evenings to introduce the SCR to these novelties. 

I guide them through the wines and give them 

handouts, but despite my déformation professionnelle, 

these evenings tend to get rather giggly. Still, if one 

finds oneself having to re-order Blaufränkisch and if 

half of a large holding of Sangiovese from the 

Maremma has gone because the college staff chose it 

for their Christmas dinner, one can say that Exeter is 

taking its medicine rather well. 

One final misconception needs to be addressed. 

SCR members pay for their wine on high table: there 

is no boozing at the tax-payer’s expense, or for that 

matter anyone else’s. 

Oxford dons and their guests continue to enjoy their 

wine, and with ingenuity, trade contacts and hard 

work it is still possible to supply the cellar with good 

wines at affordable prices. The guiding principle has 

to be le meilleur rapport qualité/prix. The wine steward is, 

after all, servus servorum Bacchi, the servant of the 

servants of Bacchus. 

Dr Hanneke Wilson (Merton, 1981) is the wine steward of Exeter. 

59

Oxonian Lives Portrait 

Oxonian lives 

Portrait 

Robin Wilson and Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley 

Artists-in-residence at Wytham Woods 

Jim Keeling 

Potter and founder of Whichford Pottery 

Richard Lofthouse reports that Oxford is to build 

a Japanese kiln – and make it pay, too 

T 

wo Japanese-style anagama kilns will be 

built later this year by Oxford artists-inresidence 

Dr Robin Wilson and Rosie 

Fairfax-Cholmeley, together with 

Wytham Woods conservator Nigel 

Fisher and Jim Keeling, the founder of 

nearby commercial pottery Whichford. They will be 

joined by occasional Japanese artists-in-residence 

housed at Lincoln College. 

It surely says something about the rapidly changing, 

entrepreneurial face of the University that such an 

improbable project could even be contemplated, let 

alone delivered. 

An anagama, or ‘cave’, kiln is a long, slender, tunnellike 

oven that traditionally slopes up a hillside. The 

inspiration for the project is one of the oldest and least 

‘modernised’ continuing traditions of this style of 

ceramic making in Bizen, a small Japanese city south 

west of Kyoto. 

Sited on such a slope near the entrance to the 

University’s research woodlands at Wytham, one of the 

kilns will be built to a thousand-year-old design centred 

around a willow frame, while the other will be brick 

built. Both will be fuelled by Wytham-sourced timber, a 

byproduct of the sustainably managed woodland. 

The University pottery will offset its costs in five years’ 

time by selling its wares, but the purpose of the project 

is multifaceted. The chief objective draws on Wilson’s 

background in anthropology, and concerns research 

into what he calls ‘meaning-making’. In Japan, 

unglazed tea-ceremony ware has been the focal point of 

a cultural practice little understood in the west. 

Equally, notes Wilson, the purpose of Anagama, the 

name of the overall project, is to recover a sense of the 

hand-made and ‘simple, sustainable processes and 

lightly refined, local materials’ as an alternative to 

‘machinery and bland, processed materials.’ 

To make it a success, Wilson and Fairfax-Cholmeley 

[pictured], who together already have a terrific 

reputation for fine-art prints, have the full support of 

Jim Keeling, one of the most experienced potters in 

Britain, and the blessing of Isezaki Jun, one of Japan’s 

‘national treasures’, meaning that he is considered 

ED NIX 

to be a leading guardian of a craft process central 

to Japanese heritage. 

The Bizen connection stems from Keeling’s earlier 

career, and in turn draws a broader inspiration from 

the example of the acknowledged father of modern 

British potting, Bernard Leach. Leach built a similar 

hillside kiln in St. Ives in 1920 and became a revered 

figure in Japan alongside Kawai Kanjiro, founder of the 

Japanese ceramics folk movement in the 1930s. 

Aesthetically, or rather anti-aesthetically, Leach, 

Kanjiro and other modernists turned their backs on the 

highly decorative Imperial pottery of Kyoto and 

returned to the simple purity of hand-thrown wares. 

The greatest Japanese examples of this newly 

awakened tradition are much-esteemed (and massively 

pricy). They display weird fusions of material and 

colour, the result partly of fortuity – how the firebox has 

played across the surface of the material over a very 

long and intimate cooking process. In this manner the 

artist is handmaiden to a natural process, not a 

controlling demiurge. 

Follow Anagama via bit.do/flagstone; 

Wytham Woods at bit.do/wytham 

(Opposite) 

Japanese 

woodblock print: 

making Imari 

pottery in 

Hizen Province 

(1830–31), 

by Utagawa 

Kuniyoshi 

(Below left) 

Robin Wilson 

and Rosie 

Fairfax- 

Cholmeley; 

(below right): 

Jim Keeling 

of Whichford 

Pottery, 

pictured with 

Japanese 

pottery 

from Bizen 


60 



©THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Expert-led Cultural Tours 

in Turkey, Greece & Italy 

Archaeological Tours 

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, TOO, 

CAN HAVE THE OXFORD EXPERIENCE 

Food Tours 

THE OXFORD TRADITION (grades 10-12) 

THE OXFORD PREP EXPERIENCE (grades 8-9) 

Every summer these academic programs bring students 

from more than 80 countries into 

Pembroke, Corpus Christi, and Oriel Colleges. 

One of the world’s ‘Top 10 Learning Retreats’ 

- National Geographic Traveller 

Gulet Cruises 

A “100 Best Holidays” Company 

2015, 2014 & 2011 

- The Sunday Times 

COURSES INCLUDE: 

British History, Medical Science, Classical Civilization, Physics, 

Entrepreneurship, English Literature, Psychology, Drama, 

Molecular Medicine, International Business, Studio Art, 

Politics & Economics, International Relations, 

Forensic Science and many others 

www.petersommer.com - Tel: 01600 888 220 

WWW.OXBRIDGEPROGRAMS.COM 

EMAIL: info@oxbridgeprograms.com 

TEL: 800-828-8349 · +1-212-932-3049 

Meet somebody worth talking to 

Oxford University Prints 

Charles Broadhurst was born in Birmingham 

on 22nd August 1903. He moved to Oxford 

when he was very young. He did not realise 

his artistic talent until a footballing injury gave 

him time to experiment with pencil and paper. 

Now 100+ years on, and just short of 100 

images later, his sons are making his artistry 

available to the world at large. 

Available sizes: 

A3 (297 x 420 mm) • A4 (210 x 297 mm) 

www.oxforduniversityprints.co.uk 

bluesmatch 

Where Oxbridge and the Ivy League find love 

www.bluesmatch.com 

Established in 2001 Over 4,000 current members 

Rated in the top five dating sites by Daily Telegraph

Obituary Oxonian lives 

Obituary 

Margaret 

Aston 

Historian 

The historian Margaret Evelyn Aston (née 

Bridges) CBE, FBA, died on 22 November 

2014, aged 82. She was born on 9 October 

1932 in Kensington, the youngest of four 

children of Edward Bridges, later first Baron Bridges, 

and his wife Kitty, daughter of the second Baron 

Farrer. Her father was described by the Oxford DNB as 

‘probably one of the two greatest civil servants of the 

twentieth century’, serving as wartime Secretary to 

the Cabinet then Permanent Secretary to the 

Treasury until 1956. She was the granddaughter of 

Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, and niece of Dame 

Frances Farrer, for thirty years General Secretary of 

the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. 

She was educated at Downe House (where she was 

head girl) and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where 

she read Modern History, graduating with a first in 

1954. It was as an undergraduate that she discovered 

a passion for medieval (especially ecclesiastical) 

history. Almost immediately after graduating she 

married the brilliant but troubled historian Trevor 

Aston, a newly appointed tutorial fellow of Corpus 

Christi College. The marriage was difficult and 

ended in separation, and eventually divorce in 1969, 

but she retained his name as an author. (He later, in 

1985, committed suicide after an increasingly 

fractious relationship with his colleagues at Corpus, 

and especially the President, Sir Kenneth Dover.) 

Margaret Aston was a lecturer at St Anne’s College, 

Oxford, from 1956 to 1959, a Theodor Heuss scholar 

in West Germany (1960–1), and a research fellow at 

Newnham College, Cambridge (1961–6), the Folger 

Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (1966–9), and 

Queen’s University, Belfast (1984–5), but held no 

other academic posts. She received an Oxford DPhil 

in 1962 for her thesis (supervised by K B McFarlane) 

on Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury 

during the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and 

Henry V; a book version appeared in 1967. Her 

subsequent work ranged widely across late medieval 

history, but she was especially known for her writings 

on John Wycliffe and the Lollards, and on late 

medieval iconography. In particular, her book 

England’s Iconoclasts (1988) traced laws relating to 

idolatry against the background of reactions to 

images in the practice of religion from medieval 

times through the Reformation. In 1994 she 

published The King’s Bedpost, a study of a group 

portrait in the National Portrait Gallery depicting the 


ONLINE 

A fuller list of 

obituaries is 

available at: 

www. 

oxfordtoday. 

ox.ac.uk/obits 


dying Henry VIII passing on the legacy of his 

anti-papal struggle to Edward VI. She continued 

writing until the end of her life. She was elected a 

Fellow of the British Academy in 1994 and appointed 

CBE in 2013. Her work was celebrated in a conference 

in 2008, resulting in the book Image, Text and Church, 

1380–1600 (2009). 

In 1971 she married Paul Buxton, a diplomat 

(and descendant of Thomas Fowell Buxton, the 

‘Great Liberator’) whom she had met in Washington. 

In 1974 he became a civil servant at the Northern 

Ireland Office, and from 1981 to 1985 its undersecretary. 

During this time their house beside Belfast 

Lough was blown up by the IRA; they had early 

warning, but her papers were scattered. Despite this 

she described their marriage as ‘total contentment’. 

She became stepmother to his three children, 

Charles, Toby and Mary, and they had two further 

daughters: Sophie, and Hero, who had Down’s 

syndrome. Paul Buxton had inherited the Castle 

Farm estate in Ongar, including Castle House (where 

they lived after his retirement) and Ongar Castle, 

where for many years Margaret hosted a medieval 

fair. It was while walking in the grounds of the castle 

that she died. Her husband predeceased her, as did 

her daughter Hero. 

Obituary writen by Dr Alex May (St John’s, 1982), research editor at 

Oxford DNB. 

63 

PHOTO COURTESY OF BRENTWOOD GAZETTE

Miscellany Classified Ads & Services 

Miscellany 

Classified ads & services 

To advertise call Aleksandra Iwanik on 020 3004 7204 

or email aleksandra_iwanik@themediasaleshouse.co.uk 

Annual multi-trip travel insurance 

uExtensive cover, including £10m emergency 

medical expenses, and much more... 

Annual premiums from just... 

uUK & Europe £45.95 uWorldwide £54.95 

Call CTC on 0845 230 29 39 for details 

Terms, conditions and excess apply. Premiums shown based on an individual 

up to age 65, please call for couple/family premiums and persons aged 66 to 79. 

Our House in Tuscany 

Perched on a vine and olive clad hillside near Lucca. Less than an hour from Pisa 

and Florence. Peace, walks, breathtaking views and food/wine. Enjoy being in a 

real Italian hamlet. To let when we’re not there. Sleeps 4/5. £590.00 a week. Or ask us 

about local friends’ houses which may be available. Similar to ours, or larger or 

smaller. some with pool. Tel 020 7602 3143 or 0039 0583 835820 Mike 

Wilson (Christ Church, Oxford) and Jessica Corsi (St John’s, 

Cambridge) Email: to-mike@hotmail.co.uk 

Web: www.tuscanycastello.com 

Fine selection of genuine old maps and prints. 

Oxford, Cambridge, Public Schools, 

Antique maps 

& prints 

UK and foreign topography. 

Antique Maps & Prints 

PO. Box 5446, Oakham, LE15 8WW 

www.antiquemapsandprints.co.uk 

AUTHORS 

Please submit a synopsis plus three 

sample chapters for consideration to: 

Beautiful, 

understated, lawyer. 

This tall, slender, woman is quite stunning. 

50. There is an ethereal quality about her 

that is so appealing. 

This gentle lover of Jane Austen is one of 

the most respected barristers in the city. She is self deprecating 

and grounded with a brilliant sense of the ridiculous. 

Add to that her adventurous spirit and prowess on the ski 

slopes and you have a rather special woman. 

For a complimentary introduction call 

Sarah at Carpe Diem Introductions 

0208 313 0918 sarah@carpediemintros.com 

The Stress of Combat 

The Combat of Stress 

CARING STRATEGIES 

TOWARDS EX-SERVICE 

MEN AND WOMEN 

ROY BROOK 

“A comprehensive, carefully researched and invaluable 

source of information on this important aspect of 

psychology and the conduct of military operations . . .” 

Rt Hon Paddy Ashdown MP 

“Should bury, once and for all, any lingering doubts 

about the existence of battle stress. It brings home 

starkly what is perhaps not generally appreciated, that 

thousands of veterans, suffering varying degrees of 

distress as a result of service to their country, need 

continuing help . . . A list of useful contact addresses 

runs to 16 pages and there are indispensable glossaries 

of medical and military terminology . . .” 

Soldier Magazine 

“Given its comprehensive nature and easy-to-read style we have no hesitation in 

recommending it.” 

Scottish Legion News 

Paperback available from 

Foreword by Sir Charles Huxtable KCB CBE, 

booksellers and Amazon, 

Commander in Chief, UK Land Forces, 

or direct order in the UK, 

1988–1990 

tel. 01524 68765 

and in the US, tel. (312) 337 0747 

ISBN 978-1-84519-407-9 336 pages £14.95 www.sussex-academic.com 

To have and 

to hold...! 

A highly confidential, 

exclusive, dedicated 

Introduction Agency for 

professional men and women 

For an informal, no obligation chat – 

call us on 0203 102 4680 

Or email us at: enquiry@inthemixintroductions.com 

www.inthemixintroductions.com 

64 



Classified Ads & Services Miscellany 

AEGEAN TURKEY 

NEAR EPHESUS, boutique 

hotel; pool, courtyards, library, 

free WiFi (+90) 256 667 1125 

www.museshouse.com 

WALKING 

SUMMER WALKING in 

lesser-known Europe. Choose 

from 24 self-guided routes at 

www.onfootholidays.co.uk or 

talk to Simon Scutt (Ch Ch) on 

+44 (0)1722 322652 

AN AFRICAN SAFARI 

THE HOLIDAY EXPERIENCE of 

a lifetime: game drives, walking 

safaris, local culture, Victoria 

Falls. Call 0121 472 1514 or visit 

www.AfricaAway.co.uk 

MAURITIUS 

BEACH FRONT VILLA. 

Sleeps 7. Authentic experience. 

Friendly Concierge service. 

Website: villamichel-mauritius. 

com. Dr Jean-Marc Michel 

(Pembroke) 07885-268422 

jeanmarc.littleorchard@gmail.com. 

A SHROPSHIRE PAD 

SHREWSBURY’S exclusive, 

boutique self-catering holiday 

home, a stone’s throw from 

Darwin’s birthplace. 

www.ashropshirepad.co.uk 

FRANCE 

NICE. Overlooking rooftops of 

the old town. Quiet sunny 2 room 

balcony flat. Lift. Sleeps 2/3. 

£500pw. Tel 020 7720 7519 or 

01736 762013. 

SOUTHWEST FRANCE 

STONE FARMHOUSE in rural 

Aveyron with pool. Sleeps 12. 

For details: 

dianajoanlucy@gmail.com. 

CRUISING 

CRUISE the rivers and canals on 

our comfortable hotel barge. Top 

French cuisine. 01992 550616; 

www.bargedirect.com. 

TARN-ET-GARONNE 

COMFORTABLE, FULLY- 

MODERNISED FARMHOUSE 

sleeps 6-10 (3 bath/shower 

rooms). Pool, large gardens, 

views. Wonderful area: medieval 

villages, outdoor activities, 

masses to explore. Visit www. 

landouhaut.com or email richard. 

smyth@live.co.uk. 

GERMANY 

DRESDEN. 

Beautiful flat close to centre, all 

amenities. Sleeps 6. Terms on 

request. 01243 530618, 

admin@selectofficeservices. 

co.uk. 

UMBRIA/TUSCANY 

BEAUTIFUL FARMHOUSE 

with tennis court and pool, in 

magnificent hillside location near 

Monterchi. sleeps 12 (6 

bedrooms, 5 bathrooms). 

Call 01732 762012 or visit 

www.belvederediprato.com 

ITALY 

MARCHE, NEAR URBINO 

Lovely farmhouse with fantastic 

views between Apennines and 

Adriatic coast. Idyllic and 

peaceful. Sleeps six. 

www.stefioli.webs.com 

Tel. 07765825195 

HOTELS 

HOTELS The best independent 

guide to charming, unpretentious 

hotels in Paris, Provence and the 

most scenic regions. 

www.memorablehotels.co.uk 

PYRENEES. 

FAB 4 BED HOLIDAY HOME 

equidistant Pau and Lourdes. 4 

stars; sleeps eight + baby. Large 

pool; BBQ; all mod cons. Visit 

www.maisonberchon.com 

SEVILLE 

SEMI-DETACHED HOUSE for 

rent. 10km from the historic 

centre of Seville. Granada 

approx 1hr, Córdoba approx 2hrs. 

Residential area with shared 

swimming pool (June- 

September), padel courts and 

gym. Sleeps 5. £350 per week. 

Please contact leahherring@ 

hotmail.com 

PROVENCE, VAISON LA 

ROMAINE 

DELIGHTFUL OLD COTTAGE 

amongst vineyards. Lovely views, 

garden, private pool, pool house, 

barbeque and terraces. Sleeps 4. 

See: www.dubois.me.uk for 

further details and 

availability. 07941 419859 

SPANISH PYRENEES 

ARAGON, comfortable house, 

sunny garden, spectacular views, 

sleeps 8. Summer mountain 

walking; winter skiing. Camino de 

Santiago and historic town of 

Jaca nearby. 

tel: 01865 861891. 

HEALTH 

BIOMECHANIST FOR 

EXERCISE, INJURY & 

NUTRITION. More versatile than 

Physiotherapists. Dramatically 

beyond personal trainers. First 

Class Honours Degree Nutrition. 

45 years experience. Specialities: 

Over 45s & Ladies Exercise, 

Injury and Nutrition. 

www.alangordon-health.co.uk 

FREE TRIAL 

RISING DAMP PROTECTION 

with NO BUILDING WORK 

INVOLVED - an alternative to 

traditional methods 

- electronically, active reverse 

osmosis 

www.damp-protection.co.uk 

Tel 02070609554 

IS THERE A WARM AND 

FRIENDLY LADY OUT 

THERE? 

QUIET, HOMELY, SENSITIVE 

SCIENTIST, 66, former partner 

died five years ago, enjoys nature 

walks and Art History in the 

summer and skiing in the winter, 

seeks warm and loving lady, 

existing family no problem, for 

long-term future together. 

Currently London/Surrey but 

relocation possible. Please reply 

to oxfordscientist66@gmail.com. 

BOOKFINDING SERVICE 

All subjects. Also journal articles, bibliographic research, CDs & DVDs. 

Books are willingly mailed overseas. Visa, MC and AmEx welcome. 

Barlow Moor Books 

29 Churchwood Road, Manchester M20 6TZ 

Telephone: 0161 434 5073 

email: books@barlowmoorbooks.co.uk 

Le Château de Seyre - Toulouse, France 

Weekly rentals for family parties, weddings, anniversaries 

Elegant castle in France: 40 people or 26 without the romantic top floor. 

Reception room: 80 people. Grounds 5 hectares, pool and tennis court. 

1/2 hour from 2 airports: Toulouse “Renaissance town”, Carcassonne 

(old City), Pyrenees and Méditerranéan sea 1 hour. Week price 5.500/7.000E. 

Ben Stevenson, Texas Ballet Theater Artistic Director wrote: “Sixteen of us 

had the most wonderful stay at your castle. We hope to be back soon”. 

For more information or pictures, please email chateau.seyre@gmail.com 



65

Oxonian lives My Oxford 

My Oxford 

TERI PENGILLEY 

Trinity, 1969 

Sir Peter Stothard 

The editor of the Times Literary Supplement 

explains to John Garth why Oxford remains 

important to him, and to criticism 

Why did you apply to Oxford? 

I don’t remember much ‘What do you want to do when 

you grow up?’ In 1969 free choice, like free love, had 

not quite drifted as far as the Essex estate where I was 

living. I went to Oxford because that’s what people 

who were good at Latin and Greek did. 

What were your impressions of Oxford at that time? 

I remember the interview being dark: it was winter. But 

when I arrived, the beauty of Trinity was extraordinary. 

So was the kaleidoscopic range of different people 

representing the past and different views of what might 

be the future. There were people who thought they 

were revolutionaries, and the earls and viscounts were 

far more unabashed than today. 

What kind of student were you? 

I was a bit of a disappointment to my tutors in terms of 

hard graft, but I read hugely. I grazed in Latin poetry 

and prose. When I wrote On the Spartacus Road, my first 

book of classical memoir, I discovered that a lot of the 

poetry and prose I’d read had stayed in my mind. 

What was your social life like? 

I was always an outsider, which is why journalism 

attracted me; I don’t think I was ever a member of a 

group but I closely observed them all. 

Peter Stothard 

as a student 

ONLINE 

To read more 

interviews go to: 

bit.do/oxfordtoday 

Did you take part in any extra-curricular activities? 

I was swept away by Oxford and the opportunities to be 

a critic, a theatre director, a newspaper writer. I’d won a 

competition to be the Daily Telegraph young jazz critic. 

That was enough to get me a job at Cherwell (and also a 

place on the Trinity rugby team!). When I edited 

Cherwell there were rows about long-unpaid bills, 

looming new technology and a female nude advertising 

a play by Pirandello. A less controversial nude, a 

Tatler-like photograph of the step-daughter of A J Ayer, 

produced a summons to the proctors and an apology to 

the subject’s mother. With hindsight, many of the 

themes of late 20th-century Fleet Street were there in 

Oxford in 1971. 

What were your tutors like? 

Mark Inwood, my philosophy tutor, managed to make 

me feel like a philosopher without my actually having to 

be one. The flamboyant James Holliday taught me a lot 

of ancient history in the King’s Arms which turned out 

to be as long-lasting as anything from a tutor’s room. 

He was the first person to show me a copy of the TLS, 

which I now edit – he was using it to mop up spilt beer 

in the back bar. 

Has your Oxford qualification helped in your career? 

Classicists study a whole civilisation – literature, art, 

sculpture, wars, peace – from a grounding in some 

kind of first principles. Studying a whole civilisation is 

good training for the kind of thinking newspaper 

editing requires – when things are coming at you from 

all directions, and it’s about balance and proportion 

and seeing things in the round. 

What have you taken away from Oxford? 

A continuing desire to be there. I have an Honorary 

Fellowship at Trinity which I’m proud of. Oxford is 

hugely important to the TLS; I feel the TLS family at 

Oxford is still part of the family I joined in 1969. In the 

last dozen years editing the TLS I’ve felt as though I’m 

almost still there, among people like Jonathan Bate, 

Katherine Duncan Jones and other great critics from 

the TLS based in Oxford. 

How have you remained involved here? 

I’ve spoken at the Reuters Institute and was on the 

board of Cherwell for many years, particularly in the 

years when it wasn’t on a proper financial footing, and a 

few of us in London helped it to achieve that. 

How do you think of Oxford now? 

I love Oxford, though it’s sometimes more inwardlooking 

than I would like. The humanities are under 

terrible threat in the world at large. The nature of 

criticism – argued opinion as opposed to just saying 

what you like – has to be protected and nurtured. I see 

a lot of recent Oxford graduates, and if I can encourage 

them to turn their skills into argued literary criticism, 

I put a lot of energy into it. 

66 



If you left a gift in your will, 

what brighter future would you create? 

The Francis Napier Fund is a legacy that 

helps students with disabilities advance 

their education. Sophie Wedlake is a 

talented fifth year medical student with 

partial hearing difficulties. 

Sophie found it challenging to take in 

the teaching in the noisy hospital 

environment. With the extra support of 

the fund, Sophie bought new hearing 

aids and a new stethoscope, which uses 

Bluetooth to transmit sound. 

“I am now able to participate 

confidently in bedside teaching at 

the hospital and I am on an equal 

footing with other students. 

This has had an enormous impact 

on my studies.” 

Find out how to make a gift in your will 

www.campaign.ox.ac.uk/createyourlegacy 

or call us on +44 (0)1865 611520 

Photo by Keith Barnes

Welcome 

to your Club 

For nearly 200 years alumni living and working in London, or just 

visiting, have chosen to take up membership of a spacious and elegant 

private club in the heart of the West End. 

The Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall is the perfect place to meet for a 

drink, entertain friends and colleagues in magnificent surroundings, play squash, 

take a break, host a party or just find a quiet corner to prepare for a meeting. 

A thriving social scene, sports facilities, a lively calendar of events including 

talks, tastings, dinners and balls, an exceptionally well-stocked library, extensive 

wine cellars and more than 40 bedrooms mean our members use their club for 

recreation, relaxation and business - and now you can too. 

The Club welcomes applications from all alumni, from home and abroad, with annual 

subscription ranging from £195 to £1,661 depending on age and home address. 

For more details please visit www.oxfordandcambridgeclub.co.uk or call 020 7321 5103

oxford today trinity_2015-digital

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?