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Thirty-three years at Wolfson<br />
Harvey Brown (GBF 1984– ) spoke at this year’s Iffley<br />
Dinner which celebrates the origins of Wolfson<br />
1984 marked the tenth anniversary of the <strong>College</strong>’s<br />
move from Banbury Road to its present site, and the<br />
eighteenth anniversary of the rebirth of Iffley <strong>College</strong><br />
as Wolfson <strong>College</strong>. It was also the year I received an<br />
invitation from Oxford to be interviewed for the New<br />
Blood university lectureship in philosophy of physics.<br />
At the time I was in the sixth year of a permanent<br />
teaching post at a Brazilian university. My Brazilian<br />
wife Maita was working as an architect, and we were<br />
expecting our first baby.<br />
During the interview itself, the then President of<br />
Photo by Amy Richards Wolfson, Sir Harry Fisher, asked me if I wanted to be a<br />
Fellow of the <strong>College</strong>. The question surprised me. Didn’t the lectureship come with<br />
an official attachment to the <strong>College</strong>, and hadn’t I been invited to visit the <strong>College</strong><br />
the day before? What choice did I have? In hindsight I suppose that Sir Harry was<br />
simply being ultra-courteous, a facet of his personality I was to get to know later. In<br />
fact there were a lot of things about the <strong>College</strong> I was unaware of when Maita and I<br />
finally arrived in Oxford in late 1984.<br />
These things have to do with luck.<br />
We moved directly into college accommodation, and when our daughter Frances<br />
was born some months later we were in H block, surrounded by other families,<br />
some of them actually Brazilian. We did not appreciate initially that Wolfson at that<br />
time was one of the few colleges in Oxford that offered rented accommodation to<br />
families, including and especially those of graduate students. And Maita was amazed<br />
to discover that the Wolfson crèche was one of the very few in the University.<br />
We did not realise initially how lucky we were in having Sir Harry Fisher and his<br />
wife Felicity to welcome us to <strong>College</strong> life. They could not have been kinder to us.<br />
Their role in making the cultural transition from Brazil to the UK as soft a landing as<br />
possible is something we will never forget. We also did not appreciate initially how<br />
different Wolfson was from the traditional Oxbridge college. After the informality of<br />
the Brazilian campus, and Brazilian life in general, I often wonder how easy it would<br />
have been for us to parachute into one of the old colleges. There was the informal<br />
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