Cambridge Alumni Magazine
Issue 67 Michaelmas 2012
In this issue:
Concrete Cambridge
Hot Chip
The name game
Tragedy for today
Of man born
CAM/67
Contents
CAM
Cambridge Alumni Magazine
Issue 67
Michaelmas Term
2012
Regulars
Satoshi Hashimoto
Letters
Don’s diary
Update
Diary
My room,
your room
The best...
Secret Cambridge
Debate
14
University matters
My Cambridge
Reading list
Cambridge
soundtrack
10 A sporting life
11 Prize crossword
12
26
41
42
44
02
03
04
08
45
47
48
Features
Marcus Ginns
32
Extracurricular
The name game
14
How do scientists go about naming their latest discoveries?
Lucy Jolin finds that the world of nomenclature is as much
art as it is science.
Of man born
18
Dr Jens Scherpe says that legal frameworks that permit
only binary identities can have devastating consequences.
Hot metal
Marcus Ginns
47
CAM is published three times
a year, in the Lent, Easter and
Michaelmas terms and is
sent free to Cambridge alumni.
It is available to non-alumni
on subscription. For further
information contact the Alumni
Relations Office.
The opinions expressed in CAM
are those of the contributors
and not necessarily those of the
University of Cambridge.
Editor
Mira Katbamna
Managing Editor
Morven Knowles
Design and Art Direction
Smith
www.smithltd.co.uk
Print
Pindar
Publisher
The University of Cambridge
Development Office
1 Quayside
Bridge Street
Cambridge CB5 8AB
Tel +44 (0)1223 332288
This publication contains
paper manufactured
by Chain-of-Custody certified
suppliers operating within
internationally recognised
environmental standards
in order to ensure sustainable
sourcing and production.
Editorial enquiries
Tel +44 (0)1223 760149
[email protected]
Alumni enquiries
Tel +44 (0)1223 760149
[email protected]
www.alumni.cam.ac.uk
www.facebook.com/
cambridgealumni
@CARO1209 #cammag
Cover: Alexis Taylor.
Photo: ©Tom Oxley /NME/ IPC+
Syndication
Copyright © 2012
The University of Cambridge.
Before the desktop publishing revolution, producing
a student newspaper was a dirty, smelly and sticky business.
William Ham Bevan speaks to those who still remember
Cow Gum and linotype.
Tragedy for today
28
Far from being an elite theatrical form, the classical
conventions of tragedy still influence the way we interpret
personal and public events, says Dr Jennifer Wallace.
Advertising enquiries
Tel +44 (0)20 7520 9474
[email protected]
Services offered by advertisers
are not specifically endorsed
by the editor or the University
of Cambridge. The publisher
reserves the right to decline or
withdraw advertisements.
22
Gold Award Winner 2010
Robert Sibley Magazine of the
Year Award 2010
Concrete Cambridge
32
In between the medieval arches and soaring spires you
can spy the city’s alternative history – one built in concrete.
Fred Lewsey reports.
CAM 67 01
EDITOR’S LETTER
Your letters
Thrill of the new
W
elcome to the Michaelmas edition of
CAM. The return to Cambridge,
especially after a long vacation, always
seems to me to be imbued with a spirit of adventure.
In libraries and common rooms, on staircases
and in the archives, conversation buzzes with the
thrill of the new and the unexpected.
This issue of CAM is no different, and is perhaps
our most wide-ranging yet. On page 18, Dr Jens
Scherpe investigates what it is to be a man or
a woman, and asks why family law in most jurisdictions still requires individuals to declare their gender.
On page 14, Lucy Jolin hears why it matters that
the planet Uranus was almost called George, and
why nomenclature is as much an art as a science.
And on page 28, Dr Jennifer Wallace points out
that classical notions of tragedy still define the way
we interpret public events in the 21st century.
Elsewhere, on page 22, we delve into the archives
to uncover the reality of printing a student newspaper before the advent of desktop publishing.
We examine Cambridge’s alternative concrete
heritage on page 32, and make the case for a British
Europe, rather than a European Britain (page 26).
Finally, you may also notice a change to our
back pages, with the introduction of a new section:
Extracurricular. Treats this time include an interview
with Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, our new books
column, Reading List, and of course the ever-popular
prize crossword. On these innovations, as on everything else, we look forward to reading your letters.
Mira Katbamna
(Caius 1995)
02 CAM 67
was taken in and out by a Hornby
Dublo locomotive on 00-gauge
track! Research into particle
physics in those days was carried
out rather more cheaply than
nowadays at CERN.
Richard Wilson (Trinity 1957)
Olympics
Bun of delights
What a delight to learn that
Fitzbillies continues to treat
students to the exquisite joy of
Chelsea buns. In 1975, early
in our now 41-year marriage, my
wife and I spent an unforgettable
year in Cambridge as I studied
Public International Law. Our flat
was on Grange Road, conveniently situated for what became
routine visits to Fitzbillies.
Chelsea buns were our
particular favourite, though
occasionally we would sample
some of the other delicious
pastries available. So great was
our affection for this Cambridge
institution that when we purchased a 10-year-old Austin
Minor, we dubbed it Fitzbillie!
David Fleming (Queens’ 1976)
Monumental mushrooms
I remember seeing the CockcroftWalton generator in its location in
the Cavendish Laboratory, having
been briefly shown it in 1956
by Dr Crow – who used to work,
so I was given to understand,
with Rutherford. At the same
time, I was shown a cyclotron,
surrounded by steel tanks of water.
However, there was a small gap
through which a particle collector
I note that of the 19 athletes
hoping to compete in the Olympics, six are listed as engineers and
six as scientists. What is it about
scientists and engineers that
makes them top athletes? Given
the amount of time that has to
be spent in the lab, it seems even
more surprising that they find
the time for training.
Peter Burrows (Peterhouse 1960)
Sport, luck
There is possibly no other sport
that combines luck with skill as
does cricket (CAM 66). A batsman
might get an unplayable ‘jaffa’
first ball; or he might be dropped
first ball and go on to score
a century. Millimetres and split
seconds can determine whether
you hit the ball and get a nick,
or miss it and survive. And all this
without even taking into account
the luck of the weather, which
can cause the best-prepared
players to feel unlucky because
their match is rained off!
Rev Bob Short (Emmanuel 1970)
Luck is of fundamental
importance to all sportspeople.
Take Usain Bolt. It is pure luck
that his parents provided him
with the genes that built him in
the way they did. Bolt himself had
absolutely no say in the matter.
Maurice Winter (Downing 1943)
Lucy Jolin introduced her
interesting interviews relating to
Sport and Luck (CAM 66) with
We are always delighted to receive
your emails and letters.
Email your letters to:
[email protected]
Don’s Diary
Write to us at: CAM, Cambridge Alumni
Relations Office, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street,
Cambridge, CB5 8AB.
Please mark your letter ‘for publication’.
You can read more CAM letters at
alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.
Letters may be edited for length.
a popular but mistaken attribution.
The golfer Gary Player was not the
first to dismiss the element of luck
from his successes. The maxim “The
harder I work, the luckier I get” is
listed in the Yale Book of Quotations
as originating with FL Emerson, and
elsewhere with Thomas Jefferson.
It certainly predates Mr Player.
Alan Warren (Corpus 1953)
A moving story
Professor Wolpert argues: “We have
a brain for one reason only: to
produce adaptable and complex
movements.”
But brains must have evolved
to enable an organism to survive.
To do so surely requires more than
mere muscle control; a brain must
exist to enable the organism to, say,
move towards energy such as food
or sunlight. I therefore propose that
the purpose of a brain is to predict
the future: a particular sequence
of movements aids survival, whereas
other sequences do not, and the
organism dies.
Michael Gage (Caius 1961)
The End is Nigh (again)
I am surprised by Dr James’s version
of Wells’s views on race (Letters,
CAM 66). Of course, in his long
career he changed his mind on a number of issues; but chapter 9 of Anticipations (1901) makes it clear that
– at least at that time – he held racist
views and was willing to contemplate
their application. There is a list of
inferior types, which in his chilling
words, “must go”.
Max Hammerton (Churchill 1970)
Michaelmas, Lent, Easter
Your excellent Issue 66 reached
me here in Versailles last Saturday
28 July. I notice the cover is marked
“Easter 2012”. A moveable feast?
John Penhallow (Sidney Sussex 1963)
Dr Peter Wothers is a Teaching Fellow in the Department
of Chemistry and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College.
O
ne thing that upsets an academic is the
assumption that, as soon as the term ends
and the students leave, we are on holiday.
If only this were so. For many, the ‘vacation’
presents the best time to get down and do some
research. And for me, as a teaching fellow, the
lectures never stop.
Take the Easter holidays. Before Lent Term
even finishes, I am frantically trying to put
the final touches to the demonstration lecture we
put on as part of the Science Festival in March.
The mild panic as I wait for my laminaria
digitata seaweed to arrive is eventually replaced by
the rather unpleasant smell of incinerating algae
(though it could be worse – who could forget
the odour of distilled horsehair?). However,
the intense satisfaction when we see the beautiful
purple colour of the iodine extracted from
the ashes makes it all worthwhile. Even better,
the thousands of schoolchildren and members
of the public attending the lectures seem to agree.
Or perhaps they just like the exploding
(guncotton) chickens?
Easter Term is always relatively quiet, with just
a few supervisions to calm down stressed students.
In fact, the exams are just as stressful for us
examiners (well, almost) as we first have to hope
students won’t find any errors in the paper, and
then face hundreds of scripts to mark.
But exams or not, lectures continue – just not
in Cambridge. First, I lecture at the National
Physical Laboratory in Teddington to a group of
teachers on behalf of the Prince’s Teaching Institute, and then later at the Royal Institution, in one
of their prestigious Friday Evening Discourses.
In between all of this, I manage to fit in rowing
for the College second VIII in the May Bumps.
I always relish this opportunity, which brings
Fellows, graduates and undergraduates together
to compete as a crew. It’s a shame that, this year,
we got over-bumped by the First and Third Boat
on the last day.
Finally, the exams, Bumps and May balls are
over and the proud parents arrive to see their
sons and daughters graduate. This is always a fun
occasion – often the first chance we dons get to
meet the parents. It can be quite an enlightening
event!
As the students leave, my Cambridge Chemistry Challenge committee arrives. We spend
the weekend checking over 4,300 scripts that
have been sent in from schools across the UK.
Taken at the end of the school year “just for fun”,
this competition provides students with a more
challenging alternative to the AS papers they have
just sat. With this year’s modal mark at around
18 out of 60, students certainly did find the paper
demanding; but it is impressive to see 40 students
with more than 75%. This group is invited to
a residential camp in Cambridge over the summer.
Once the 2,500 certificates are printed and sent
off and the committee have left, the UK’s Chemistry Olympiad team come up for an intensive
week’s training before setting off to compete in
the international competition. Our students acquit
themselves admirably, winning two silver and
two bronze medals, but the event also provides
me with a valuable chance to meet talented
students from across the world – a number of
whom are either holding offers from Cambridge
or have questions about admissions.
Then it’s back to the UK, and a week-long
residential course for teachers organised by the
Goldsmiths’ Guild, followed by a week-long
residential course for students organised by the
Sutton Trust. Finally, our Cambridge Chemistry
Challenge winners arrive for their course. Irrespective of whether they continue with chemistry
at university, it is a real pleasure to teach such
an enthusiastic, talented group of students from
so many different backgrounds. I hope I will have
the pleasure of lecturing to some of them again in
the future.
As the students leave, I slump, exhausted, and
pleased that my flight is not until tomorrow evening. I finally write this article while waiting for
the flight to Australia, having arrived in Singapore
two days before and spent a day lecturing to
a group of very keen students at the Raffles Institution. In a week’s time, I will be returning to the
UK with 10 demonstration lectures behind me
and a couple of weeks to prepare myself for the
beginning of term. I wonder who will be the first
student to ask if I had a nice holiday...
Dr Peter Wothers will be giving the 2012 Christmas
Lectures at the Royal Institution. The series is entitled
The Modern Alchemist and will be broadcast on
BBC Four at the end of December.
CAM 67 03
UPDATE
MICHAELMAS
TERM
UNIVERSITY
Vice-Chancellor addresses
Regent House
I
04 CAM 67
Alumni Weekend
Over three days in
September, the University
welcomed back almost
800 graduates for the 22nd
Alumni Weekend. With an
eclectic programme of
lectures, talks, tours and
social events, it lived up to
its billing as a true festival
of the mind.
The opening reception
took place in the
Fitzwilliam Museum, and
guests were afterwards
able to tour the galleries
and see the spectacular
Han China exhibition.
Later on Friday, the “Come
and Sing” event proved
as popular as ever, with
an alumni choir – most of
whom had only met that
morning – raising the
fan roof of King’s College
Chapel with Mozart’s
Vesperae Solennes de
Confessore.
Saturday saw Cambridge
bathed in sunshine.
Lecture highlights included Dr Hugh Hunt on how
Barnes Wallis’s bouncing
bomb was recreated
60 years after the Dambusters raid, and Prof Tim
Crane on the mental lives
of animals. In a first for
Alumni Weekend, Dr Allan
McRobie even enlisted
a nude model to show how
mathematics informs both
engineering and art.
The Chancellor, Lord
Sainsbury of Turville,
joined the Vice-Chancellor
for a lively talk on “Leading
a world-class university”,
chaired by BBC journalist
Stephen Sackur. At
Newnham, meanwhile,
Clare Balding swapped
sporting tales with fellow
College alumna Anna
Watkins – who brought
along her London 2012
gold medal.
The 2013 Alumni Weekend
will take place between
27 and 29 September.
For more information visit
alumni.cam.ac.uk/weekend
Ben Hawkes
n his annual address, the Vice-Chancellor
summoned the spirit of London 2012,
telling Regent House on 1 October that
“we too are in a global competition of Olympic
proportions”.
Entitled “The scale of our ambition”,
Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz recognised the
success of Cambridge’s sportsmen and women
at the Olympics and stressed the importance of
the University continuing to compete at a
similarly high international level, and thus the
key significance of the major new development
planned for north-west Cambridge.
“Having been
selected, we have a
responsibility to run
the race as well as
we can,” he said.
He highlighted three
priorities for the
University’s
continued success.
“First, Cambridge
needs to grow,” he
said. “Second, we
need to change; and third, we need to ensure that
growth and change are informed at every step
by our values, our principles and by the spirit
and ambition that has seen us flourish for our
first eight centuries.”
Academic development should be driven by
increasing the number of graduate students and
postdoctoral researchers, the Vice-Chancellor
said. He lauded the plans for the north-west
Cambridge development, but added: “Our
success does not depend on buildings and
facilities, but on continued growth and change
in our academic staff. Here, support from
philanthropy will be vital, and this will be a key
component of our next campaign, to build on
the success of the 800th Anniversary.”
However Cambridge embraces change, it
must remain true to its traditional values,
he said. “Our relationship with society, our
commitment to academic freedom and to
nurturing talent have stood the test of time, and
changing them is not on the agenda.”
Events: Festival for the mind
UPDATE
MICHAELMAS
TERM
Open maths journals launched
Cambridge University Press is launching two
prestigious open-access journals in mathematics.
Its periodicals division, Cambridge Journals,
will make Forum of Mathematics, Pi and Forum of
Mathematics, Sigma freely available online.
Both publications will maintain the same high
level of peer review as a traditional subscription
journal, with standards set by an international
editorial board of the highest calibre. Pi will publish
papers of broad interest, while Sigma will be home
to more specialised articles.
The University Press has agreed to waive
publication costs for three years, though authors
with access to funds for open-access journals will be
encouraged to pay £500. Content will be available
from the beginning of 2013.
Visit journals.cambridge.org/forumofmathematics
for more information.
OLYMPICS
Cambridge athletes triumph
UNIVERSITY
North-west Cambridge
development approved
T
he University has received
outline planning permission for
a major new development in
north-west Cambridge.
Under the ambitious scheme, 1,500
homes for University and College
staff, 1,500 homes for sale, and
accommodation for 2,000 students
will be built on the 150-hectare site.
The plans also include 100,000
square metres of space for research
facilities, a community centre,
a primary school and a GP surgery.
The site also includes an area of
open space almost as large as Parker’s
Piece – and around one third of
the site will be used as public space
for sports, informal recreation and
ecological use.
“This development is a major part
of the University’s long-term future,”
said the Registrary, Dr Jonathan
Nicholls.
“It will enable us to remain globally
competitive in the market for junior
researchers and postgraduates by
providing much of the residential and
research accommodation the
University will need as it grows over
the next 20 years.”
All parts of the site will be built to
high standards of sustainability,
including a transport plan to minimise
car use.
Subject to Regent House approval,
the first phase of the works will
begin in 2013, to be completed by
mid-2015.
Following Team GB at the Olympics proved to be
edge-of-the-seat stuff – and Cambridge students and
alumni played a significant role in Britain’s success.
The first Cambridge medal arrived on 1 August,
when rower Tom Ransley (Hughes Hall 2007)
won bronze in the men’s eight. Two days later, CUBC
president George Nash (St Catharine’s 2008) took
a bronze in the men’s pair, and Anna Watkins
(Newnham 2001) won gold in the women’s double
sculls. They were soon joined by Tom James (Trinity
Hall 2002), who won his second consecutive Olympic
gold in the coxless four.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “We were delighted to see so many
Cambridge students and alumni competing at the Olympics, and thrilled to see them do so well. If Cambridge
were a country, we would be in the top 40 in the medals
count!
“Sport has always been an important part of the
Cambridge experience, and it makes us all the more
determined to push forward with fundraising for
the Cambridge Sports Centre.
“We hope this will provide a foundation for future
sporting success, encourage greater participation at all
levels and form part of the University’s unique Olympic
engagement in the future.”
CAM 67 05
UPDATE
MICHAELMAS
TERM
CAMCard discount at Heffers
The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni
discount is going up from 10%
to 15% – a perfect incentive to give
books as Christmas presents this
year. Shop in person with your
CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at
alumni.cam.ac.uk
/benefits/camcard/bookshops.
CARO
E: [email protected]
T: +44 (0)1223 332288
W: alumni.cam.ac.uk
ALUMNI
Go global with the alumni
groups directory for 2013
GIFTS
A Light Blue Christmas
There are over 52,000 Cambridge graduates living
outside the UK – and if you are one of them, tucked
into this issue of CAM you should find the 2013
directory of all alumni groups.
The directory lists contact details for over 400
volunteer-led groups around the world. Between
them, these groups organise a vast range of events
and initiatives – from skiing to campaigning – and all
give a warm welcome to new members.
If you are based in Algeria or Egypt, please note
that we no longer have active groups in these locations.
For those interested in re-establishing an alumni group,
please contact [email protected].
Of course, for those of you in the UK there are still
plenty of opportunities to join in with your fellow
alumni – the London group, for example, is one of the
largest of the University’s alumni groups.
To find out more, download the 2013 directory from
our website.
alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups
R
E S TA B L I S H E D I N E N G L A N D 1 9 0 5
T
urn Christmas Light Blue with our
exclusive range of University alumni
gifts. From silk ties to ultra-stylish rings
from Eva London and University fountain
pens from Onoto, there’s something for all
the Cambridge people in your life. Whether to
mark the start of a student career, as a
celebration of graduation or a PhD, or simply
as a special gift to another alumnus or yourself, we can help you find the perfect
item. Please note that orders need to be placed by 3 December to ensure delivery
by Christmas. Overseas deadlines and prices vary.
For information and to order, go to alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/merchandise.
06 CAM 67
CAM 67 07
DIARY
MICHAELMAS
TERM
Global Cambridge
November 2012 – March 2013
Cambridge is not just a place – it’s also a
worldwide network with a presence on almost
every continent, which means you don’t need to
be in the UK to participate.
In addition to regular events organised by
alumni groups across the world – from boat
races and dinners to networking and social
events – the Vice-Chancellor regularly traverses
the globe to promote the University’s education
and research agenda. He endeavours to meet
as many Cambridge people as possible, and his
next major trip will be to Hong Kong, Singapore
and Australia in early spring 2013.
Cambridge alumni are also regularly invited
to events around the world with alumni who are
members of the League of European Research
Universities (LERU) or of the International
Alliance of Research Universities (IARU).
Alumni in North America are supported by
the Cambridge in America office, based in New
York, where Kathy Lord is Alumni Relations
Director. “All alumni – whether based in the US
or just visiting – are very welcome at our regular
social and networking events,” she says.
“Whether it’s our regular monthly gatherings in
Washington and San Francisco or talks by
illustrious alumni such as Gillian Tett or Howard
Jacobson that interest you, we’ll be glad to see
you.”
So how can you find out what’s happening
near you? First of all, make sure CARO knows
where you are based – that way, we can ensure
you are invited to local events. Sign up to the
e-bulletin for advance notice of what’s going on.
If you are in the US, get in touch with the North
American office (cantab.org). And if you’re
looking for something super-local, find out what’s
happening near you – whether it’s in Bhutan
or inside the Beltway – by visiting our website.
David Semple
alumni.cam.ac.uk
08 CAM 67
DIARY
MICHAELMAS
TERM
Old friends, new friends
Other events
Christmas networking drinks
CU Wine Society
and CamSAN Alumni
Wine Tasting
Varsity Rugby
Friday 23 November, 7pm
London
Watch Cambridge and Oxford
fight it out in the fiercely
contested Battle of the Blues at
Twickenham this December.
This will be the 131st time the
opposing teams will have met,
with Cambridge traditionally the
stronger team (61 wins to
Oxford’s 55). So to join those
shouting for the Light Blues, visit
www.thevarsitymatch.com for
booking and more information.
thevarsitymatch.com
10 December, London
Network in style at this drinks and canapés reception held
in the exclusive surroundings of Sir Paul Judge’s (Trinity
1968) 18th-floor apartment, overlooking the City skyline.
This annual networking event is a unique opportunity
to connect with up to 200 fellow alumni – from those with
an established career to those who are starting out.
The evening is kindly hosted by Sir Paul and the Alumni
Advisory Board, and has become a firm favourite with
recent graduates. This event is open to all alumni and their
guests. Tickets are £39 per person.
alumni.cam.ac.uk/events
Join CamSAN, the Cambridge
Student Alumni Network and the
CU Wine Society for an evening
of imbibing and networking in
the fabulous surroundings of
the Oxford and Cambridge Club.
Alumni and current graduate
students will be able to sample
a fantastic range of wines, with
guidance provided by a range of
experts. Tickets cost £25.
alumni.cam.ac.uk/events
The Art of Modern
Calligraphy
November 2012 – January 2013
Fitzwilliam Museum
A remarkable exhibition of
contemporary calligraphy will
go on display for the first time
at the Fitzwilliam this Christmas.
Featuring work from a new
collection of modern calligraphy
acquired by the Fitzwilliam in
2008, the show includes pieces
in stone, carved wood, glass and
ceramics as well as works on
paper, parchment and papyrus.
A selection of exceptional works
from the Museum’s historic
collections will be on
simultaneous display in adjacent
galleries, including medieval
illuminated manuscripts and
Islamic ceramics. Admission free.
fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
Thursday 6 December, kick-off
2pm, Twickenham
Winifred Nicholson
at Kettle’s Yard
29 September – 21 December
The painter Winifred Nicholson
was an important influence on
Kettle’s Yard’s founder, Jim Ede
– her theories on colour and
light, set out in a seminal article
published in Circle in 1937,
were particularly important.
This exhibition will include
works not normally on display,
and correspondence between
Nicholson and Ede.
kettlesyard.co.uk
Save the date!
Cambridge 10
Christmas Drinks
Thursday 29 November, 7pm
The Commander Bar, London.
cambridge10.com
CARO events
E: [email protected]
T: +44 (0)1223 332288
W: alumni.cam.ac.uk
Cambridge Science
Festival
11– 24 March 2013
cam.ac.uk/sciencefestival
CAM 67 09
MY ROOM,
YOUR ROOM
ROOM I 08, NEW COURT, CORPUS
Words Stephen Mackey
Photograph Charlie Troman
Hugh Bonneville (Corpus 1982) is an actor. As well
as starring in the ITV series Downton Abbey as the
Earl of Grantham, he recently starred as the
organisationally challenged Ian Fletcher in the BBC
Olympic spoof Twenty Twelve.
10 CAM 67
Sam Dickson is a first year History student who
says that because he didn’t have a gap year before
Cambridge, he’d like one afterwards – especially
if he can go back to South America. “I’ve been
a couple of times before and I love it!”
I
t may be 30 years since Hugh Bonneville last sat in
room I 08 but he remembers it well. “I know it’s
Oxford where they talk about the dreaming spires,
but this room has a magical rooftop view. It’s one of
my abiding images, along with the lovely evening light
and the sunsets,” he says.
Current resident Sam Dickson agrees, and says that
he is always impressed by I 08’s dimensions. “My first
thought when I came in was how big it was, because on
the JCR website it looks absolutely tiny,” he says. “Wait
– so you can see the room online before you come up?”
asks an astonished Bonneville. “It’s like TripAdvisor!”
Bonneville remembers cavernous washing facilities
(known fondly as “the Crystal Palace”), buttery
tickets and a huge – and beautiful – roll-top desk. “It’s
probably firewood now,” he muses. “But it was one of
those big ones with a roller that went up – like an old
banker’s desk, with hidden pockets.”
He also has warm memories of an old gas fire with
a latticework grille. “It was blooming cold here in the
winter, so sometimes I’d snuggle the bed right up
against the fire,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why
It was blooming cold here in the
winter, so sometimes I’d snuggle the
bed right up against the gas fire.
I was getting blinding headaches
until someone pointed out that I was
inhaling the gas!
The best...
library in Cambridge
Oscar Williams-Grut read History at St John’s
How do you choose the best library
in Cambridge, a city so full of them?
There are seemingly countless types:
College, old, departmental, public,
museum and, of course, the UL.
To begin with, we can discount
College libraries. Some are undoubtedly fantastic, like Caius’s Cockerell
and Trinity’s Wren libraries; but
really, the only College library you
can ever truly love is your own.
That leaves faculty and specialist
libraries. And for me, the best of
the bunch is one you’ve most likely
never been to and possibly never
even heard of: the Centre of African
Studies Library. A single room on the
top floor of the new Alison Richard
Building on the Sidgwick Site,
it has only eight plain white desks,
little more than a dozen Homebaseesque metal shelves, a single
computer in the corner and a selfcheckout system that is cranky at
the best of times.
If that doesn’t sound promising,
let me explain. The top-floor location
is perfect: raised above the clamour
below, this library is a genuinely
peaceful place to work. The room
itself, though sparse, is also quite
beautiful. Wide windows give a view
out over the entire Sidgwick Site,
perfect for people-watching,
and fill the room with light even on
the greyest of days. The chairs look
as though they’ve been lifted from
a particularly minimalist space
station, and the old study-style
lamps are an aesthetic treat.
But what really sets it apart is
its obscurity. This is a hidden
gem of a library among the many
over-popular and overpopulated
ones that Cambridge has to offer.
The eight desks are never crowded,
and those who frequent the library
become familiar faces.
The library may lack the
traditional grandeur of the Wren,
the holdings of the UL or the space
of the Seeley, but it has something
else: charm. The monthly newsletter
displayed at the desk and the
branded African Studies tote bags
on sale next to them may seem
ridiculous for a department so small,
but they make me feel part of a tiny
but perfectly formed community.
Steve Bond / Nicholas Hare Architects
I suddenly started getting blinding headaches until
someone pointed out that I was inhaling the gas!”
Bonneville wants to know whether Dickson still ‘sports
the oak’ – a phrase that has to be explained. “When I
was here, most of the rooms had a double door. If the
oak door – the outside door – was shut, you were
sporting the oak and it meant you didn’t want to be
disturbed. And when it was open, it meant you could
knock and come in.”
Sadly, Dickson doubts that sporting the oak is likely
to make a return. “Everything’s on Facebook now,”
he says. “Rather than going to people’s rooms, Hall is
the big place to see people. Everyone’s off doing their
own thing, and then we all come back for lunch or
dinner. And then for about an hour afterwards, you go
to the bar.”
Students’ social lives are not the only things to be
changed by technology. Buttery tickets are ancient
history, replaced by a very convenient University card.
“Everything goes on the card now, so getting an email
from your tutor about your bill at the end of term is
horrendous. I don’t open an email if I think it’s going to
be one of those!”
Dickson says he spends several hours in the Taylor
Library each day. “I’m on course for a 2.1 – that
would be absolutely fine with me. I work mostly from
one to six, with lectures in the morning and rugby or
something in the evening. It’d be a shame to come here
and just do the work – there’s so much more going on.”
Was Bonneville as diligent? “I’m a classic example
of someone who, if they had their time again, would
do it properly. I really mean that. My brain is in
a position where I want to learn the subject, theology,
that I neglected because I was doing, as it turned out,
something that prepared me for my career.”
Indeed, Bonneville’s first year was mostly taken
up with acting. He remembers plays with directors
Dominic Dromgoole (now artistic director of
The Globe) and Christopher Luscombe, and hours
spent rehearsing in the Corpus Playroom. Dickson says
he hasn’t tried any acting, but is kept busy with rugby
and has just taken up hockey.
“The hockey is quite painful – running around bent
over. I must definitely be doing it wrong. I don’t even
know how to play really, so I kind of run around
mindlessly, not able to do anything very well. It’s great
fun, though.”
This, it turns out, is the kind of sporting life Bonneville can relate to. “I was pretty rubbish. But I did
end up rowing in the Gentlemen’s Boat. The rule was
that we only rowed after lunch in the summer term.
I did most of my exercise going round to see people!”
CAM 67 11
SECRET CAMB RI DG E
ODE
TO
TOBACCO
Words Becky Allen
Illustration Jonny Hannah
W
hen Bacon Brothers shut up shop in 1983,
after nearly two centuries of service to
smokers, news of its demise was greeted with
sadness, if not dismay.
According to the Cambridge Evening News, the shop
was “a bit like walking into a vast cigar box, with
its wood-panelled walls holding the lovely reek of fine
tobaccos. Rows of great china jars held stocks of
rare and exotic mixtures. White meerschaums carved
as skulls glimmered in dim corners. But the 1980s
have caught up with Bacon’s at last. You cannot run
a business like Bacon’s on stray students coming in for
a packet of Camels.”
Bacon’s beginnings were at Star Alley in the City of
London – the firm moved to Sidney Street, Cambridge
in 1810. Charles Darwin had lodgings above the shop,
which neighbour Thomas Hunnybun recalled was
a rowdy place. His father visited the Master of Christ’s
College regularly to complain about students’
behaviour. “Sporting young gentlemen over Bacon’s
12 CAM 67
Young gentlemen
were in the habit
of leaning out
of the window
and, with tandem
whips, flicking the
passers-by
were in the habit of leaning out of the windows and with
tandem whips flicking the passers-by,” Hunnybun told
the College’s magazine.
High jinks followed the firm when it moved to Market
Square. As the focus of dozens of ‘rags’, Bacon’s shop
front saw “many vicissitudes”, according to the
Cambridge Daily News. “After more than one of these
occasions, the men’s rooms above the shop have been left
with scarcely a sound pane in their windows. Such a scene
of excitement was the memorable ‘women’s degree day’
rag of May 1897 [when a proposal to admit women to
full University degrees was defeated].”
But today, all that remains of the reek and rowdiness
are Bacon’s archives at Cambridgeshire County Council,
and the Ode to Tobacco. Cast in bronze, the poetic tribute
to tobacco and Bacon’s survives at the corner of Rose
Crescent and Market Square on the shop that the firm
occupied from 1828.
The ode was written by Charles Stuart Calverley,
Fellow of Christ’s and one of Cambridge’s most colourful,
if lesser-known, literary figures. “Indolently brilliant,”
was how Graham Chainey, author of A Literary History
of Cambridge, described Calverley. “Scholarly without
ever appearing to work, athletic in an uncompetitive
manner, a master of gentle irony and studied parody,
‘C.S.C.’ became the archetype for a certain style of
Englishness,” Chainey wrote.
As an undergraduate, a contrite Calverley was
admitted to Christ’s in 1852 after being sent down from
Oxford for what the Master of Balliol described as his
“desultory and idle habits, and wicked acts of gross
immorality”. Cambridge was more tolerant of his
exploits, which included hurdling the railings around
Christ’s First Court after nights out, liberating the Green
Man’s pub sign and running back from Trumpington to
College with it on his head, and leaping over a horse
and cart blocking his passage down Green Street – while
wearing a cap and gown, and with his hands in his
pockets.
Naturally, Calverley was a loyal customer of Bacon’s,
whose ledgers read like a roll call of the University’s most
famous sons and most enthusiastic smokers. Among their
pages are recorded Calverley’s purchases of tobacco jars
and meerschaums in 1857. Thirty years earlier, Alfred,
Lord Tennyson (whose statue in Trinity Chapel includes
a pipe half hidden among its marble laurel wreaths) had
an account there, as did Charles Kingsley, who bought
Bacon’s Bird’s Eye Mixture by the pound and clay pipes
by the dozen. His student, HRH the Prince of Wales, is
recorded as having spent 15 shillings on a ‘cigar case with
feathers’ in 1861.
Soldiers, too, loved Bacon’s. Fighting far from
Cambridge during the First World War, dozens of men
sent notes of thanks to the firm for the parcels of tobacco
they received at the front. “The cigarettes were as fresh as
if they had just been bought at your shop,” W Bavester
told Bacon’s in 1916: “I handed one of the tins of
cigarettes round the section, and being Cambridge boys,
you can guess how delighted they was to have some
Cambridge cigarettes.” The postcard letters of thanks are
packed in an old blue Player’s Navy Cut box, the troops’
longing for home and tobacco finding echoes in the
opening stanza of Calverley’s ode: “Thou, who when
fears attack / Bidst them avaunt, and Black / Care, at the
horseman’s back / Perching, unseatest; / Sweet when the
morn is gray; / Sweet when they’ve cleared away / Lunch;
and at close of day / Possibly sweetest!”
CAM 67 13
Thename
game
14 CAM 67
How do scientists go about naming
their latest discoveries? Lucy Jolin
finds that the world of nomenclature is
as much art as it is science.
Illustration Satoshi Hashimoto
M
arch 1781. William Herschel, German
musician and amateur astronomer,
is at his house in King Street, Bath,
sweeping the heavens through his telescope,
as he does every night. But tonight he notices
something different: a strange moving star in the
constellation of Taurus.
Herschel is sure the object must be a comet. He sends a message to his
friends in London – Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and
Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal – announcing his discovery,
and describing its position and the direction of travel. What Herschel
had discovered was the planet Uranus. Except, actually, he hadn’t.
“Several people had seen the planet before Herschel,” Professor
Simon Schaffer of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
points out. “His description of its direction and movement were wrong.
His assumption that it was a comet was wrong. And once he was finally
persuaded that it was in fact a planet, he wanted to call it not Uranus –
that name was given several years later, by common consent – but George,
because Herschel needed a job and the king would have loved to have
had a planet named after him. Unsurprisingly, elsewhere in Europe,
George was not considered an appropriate name.”
CAM 67 15
20 CAM 65
Naming scientific discoveries, as Herschel’s story shows, is not a
particularly scientific process. So many forces come into play, including
the cultural, the political and the practical. A name must fulfil many
functions: it needs to be descriptive, predictive or geographical, or all
three. It must be unique and accurate, but universally understood. It must
help, not hinder, scientific progress. And it is very often dependent on
what already exists. Herschel would have been unlikely to see his star as
a new planet because at the time, there wasn’t such a thing.
S
o how do you name a scientific discovery? First, check that you
have the right to name it. In botany, the rule of priority applies: the
first published name is the accepted one. “This is a principal
applied strictly, particularly in the past, and it is still used today,” says
Dr Tim Upson, curator of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.
“You might have a plant that has been well known under a particular
name, and then someone finds an obscure 17th-century book in German
where someone else has published a different name for the same species
earlier. According to the rules of priority, we have to change it.”
Upson admits, with considerable understatement, that this can be
frustrating. So frustrating, indeed, that plant names as well as the plants
themselves can now be subject to conservation. If an earlier name is found
for a very well-known species, a botanist can make a case for the betterknown name’s continued use. This, says Upson, helps to ensure stability in
the use of names, avoiding unnecessary changes.
Next, check the conventions for your science. Genetics is a relatively
young science – the Arthur Balfour Professorship of Genetics will
celebrate its very first centenary this year – and consequently, naming
conventions are still recent. Where botany has several centuries of
Linnaean tradition to call upon, full guidelines on human gene names
were not issued until 1979.
Dr Ruth Seal is former literature curator for the FlyBase genetic
database at Cambridge. She is now genomenclature advisor to the
Human Genome Organisation nomenclature committee at the European
Bioinformatics Institute. Dr Seal explains: “Our aim is to give a unique
symbol and name to every human gene. Each gene has a full name, which
hopefully has a meaning. Ideally within human and other vertebrate
species, it should describe the function of the gene. And the symbol is a
short-form abbreviation which we encourage researchers to use in their
papers so that people can easily search for that gene.”
Whimsical names, she says, are not encouraged, particularly in human
genes. “We always imagine that at some point, a clinician may need to
discuss this gene with a patient,” she points out. “You have to represent
the gene and try to describe its function and also be fairly sensible. For
example, one gene symbol is PARN, which stands for poly (A)-specific
ribonuclease. Because it chews up the poly (A) tail on mRNAtranscripts.
That describes what it does in a nutshell.”
In other species, however, researchers like to be more descriptive.
The tinman gene in drosophila (fruit flies) denotes an organism which has
no heart, while methuselah confers longer life. Tribbles, which indicates
uncontrollable cell division, was clearly named by a Star Trek fan.
Do not, under any circumstances, be tempted to name your discovery
after yourself. It is not considered good form. “Though there’s nothing to
stop you, technically,” Upson admits. “Apart from peer review … and the
scorn of your colleagues.”
You may yet achieve immortality through your name, but someone
else must confer it. But geographical, predictive and descriptive names, or
names that honour someone else, are acceptable. For example, Upson’s
team found a new lavender – lavandula – in Morocco. It had divided
leaves, so they could have called it pinnata. But that had already been
taken. It came from the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco so they could
have called it either after Morocco, or after the Anti-Atlas mountains; but
these, too, had also already been taken.
“So we chose to name it in honour of Professor Mohammed Rejdali,
in recognition of his work as an eminent Moroccan botanist on the flora,”
says Upson. “It was named lavandula rejdali. And that was a very
appropriate thing to do – it was recognising someone from that country.
We haven’t always been so sensitive.”
Bear in mind that once your chosen name is in the public domain, it is no
longer yours. It can be twisted, criticised or simply ignored in favour of
a more media-friendly alternative. Simon Schaffer is convinced that the
Large Hadron Collider would never have been quite such front-page news
if it had simply looked for the Higgs boson rather than the so-called
“God particle”. This was originally known as the “Goddamn particle”
because of its elusive nature, but cleverly truncated – not by a scientist, but
by the astute editor seeking a title for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Leon Lederman’s book.
Professor Shaffer says: “Here we have a story about a large, dark
tunnel in Switzerland doing things nobody can understand. And that’s
going to be a massive news story for the next 30 months. Who’d have
thought it?”
Professor Peter Higgs, after whom the ‘Higgs’ part of the Higgs boson
is named (the boson being named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath
Bose) told a press conference that the ‘God particle’ name was “nothing
to do with me. It’s a joke.” But it has become common currency, seeping
into the popular consciousness. When the team at CERN announced that
the Higgs boson had probably been found, the Guardian ran an online
poll asking whether the ‘God particle’ nickname should be abandoned.
Seventy-nine per cent of participants said yes; none of the newspapers
took any notice whatsoever.
And this is the point at which names cease to serve as essential
pathways through scientific disciplines. They stop being ways to access
and unlock information – and start to be ways of spreading misinfomation. Ask any plant geneticist who has seen his or her life’s work to
engineer disease-resistant strains of wheat dismissed as ‘Frankenstein
food’, with all the negative connotations that the phrase implies. This is
a far bigger problem than the debate over whether or not a genetic researcher should name a discovery after a creature in an episode of Star Trek.
“In terms of naming, we all muddle through pretty effectively,”
says Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias of the Department of Genetics.
“However, I think it is much more serious that the press do not understand the difference between a gene and a mutation, which is a very basic
nomenclature issue. And very often, I read about people ‘having a gene for
this’ and ‘not having a gene for that’ when actually we all have the same
genes – the question is whether we have the mutation or not.
“That is a very serious misconception, because if one is not careful,
people can start discriminating against those who they claim have ‘a gene
for obesity’ or ‘a gene for drug addiction’ when actually it is a mutation.
I think there is something quite profound there. These serious misconceptions can set off a chain of events that might lead someone to find
themselves in a very difficult position.”
Yet we shouldn’t be surprised at the seemingly random ways in which
names become assigned, says Schaffer. “Often, we have a very misleading
image of the scientific method, which is just our name for what scientists
do. We then tend to be surprised or embarrassed to discover that scientists
are social groups of human beings distributing credit and trust as
accurately as they can, which is something that the rest of us also do.”
There’s also a kind of social law, he says, which dictates what names
catch on – a law that links together science and the media. After all, the
history of Western science developed in tandem with journalism. “The
word scientist and the word journalist were invented in the same decade,
in London in the 1830s, and probably by the same man, Coleridge.
When these two new institutions were invented, a lot of scientists began
to discuss extremely explicitly how to name things so that they should be
pithy, memorable, and have the right associations. A name didn’t just have
to work in the journals, but also the popular press.”
And for all its faults, confusions, disagreements and misnomers,
sometimes scientific nomenclature simply gets it right. On 6.14am BST
on Monday 6 August this year, a NASA rover successfully landed in the
Gale Crater on the surface of Mars – the most difficult, complex and
challenging rover landing ever attempted. The mission took thousands
of man-hours and more than a billion pounds, and may discover evidence
that there was once life on the Red Planet. The rover’s name? Curiosity.
CAM 67 17
18 CAM 67
Dr Jens Scherpe says
that legal frameworks that
permit only binary gender
identities – man or woman
– have devastating
consequences.
Words Simon Wilson
Photograph Marcus Ginns
CV
2002
PhD in Law, University of
Hamburg; Otto Hahn Medal
awarded by the Max Planck
Society
2002
Senior Research Fellow,
Max Planck Institute for
Comparative and
International Private Law,
Hamburg
2006
College Lecturer and
Fellow, Caius
“I’m just a boring lawyer,” declares Dr Jens Scherpe,
with a smile. True, he can usually be found in suit and
tie, either in his office at the Law Faculty, at his College,
Caius, or at his chambers, QEB, in London. He is
married – “and in England, that means to a woman” –
and is about to become a father for the first time.
As he says, a boring lawyer. But as a leading thinker
on gender and family law, Scherpe regularly asks
governments, fellow lawyers, and of course students, to
think the unthinkable on the role of gender in family
law.
“In most areas of the law, we don’t use gender that
much,” he says. “But in English family law, you are
either the mother or the father of a child, and only a man
and a woman can get married. So your gender has farreaching implications.
“But why do we need a gender category? Why
mother? Why not birth parent? Why does marriage need
to be between a man and a woman? Or civil partnership
between two men or two women? Does that mean if you
are neither clearly nor exclusively biologically male nor
female, you should not have the right to marry?”
Scherpe is quick to point out that removing the
category of gender from family law is not to deny the
importance of gender more generally. “People often
object to the idea of removing gender because they say it
is a defining element of your personality – to which I can
only say, yes, of course. Socially, gender is not only very
obvious but also a very important category.
“But it is no more a defining element than your
ethnicity or your religion and the other things that make
you who you are. Why should the state have the right, or
indeed the duty, to record your gender?”
2007
University Lecturer and
Senior Lecturer (2010)
Faculty of Law
2010
Honorary Fellow, St. John’s
College, Hong Kong
2011
Academic Door Tenant,
Queen Elizabeth Building
(QEB), Temple, London
2012
Early Career Fellowship,
Centre for Research in the
Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities (CRASSH)
Of man born
CAM 67 19
24 CAM 65
If a transsexual
person changes
legal gender from
male to female,
at what age may
she draw a state
pension?
This may seem a relatively esoteric question, or perhaps
to some, ‘political correctness gone mad’. But the way in
which governments resolve these issues can have devastating real-life consequences.
For example, if a transsexual person changes legal
gender from male to female, at what age may she draw
a state pension? If a trans man gives birth to a child, is
he the mother, or is the child legally motherless? In many
jurisdictions, no legal mother means no one has automatic parental responsibility for the child.
Scherpe also points out that just because an issue
appears niche, it does not mean it is not important. “As it
happens, we’re not talking about a completely insignificant fringe group – current estimates are that these issues
affect around 0.1% of people, or 700,000,000 worldwide,” he says. “But referring to low numbers is a strange
way to think about it, because it’s a matter of principle.
If you lived in a country where there were only three
Anglicans, you wouldn’t say that it was OK to discriminate against them because very few people were affected.”
In fact, many governments across the world, including
the UK, are beginning to acknowledge these problems
and allow a change in gender. Belgium and the Netherlands have gone further, ruling that gender does not have
to be determined immediately at birth, and Australia has
dropped the binary system for passports, allowing
individuals to list their gender as ‘indeterminate’.
So just how did a self-confessed conventional German
lawyer end up an expert in family law and gender in
Cambridge? Scherpe admits that, even putting aside his
specialism, it is still a slight surprise that he ended up
a lawyer.
“I actually applied for a communication and design
degree course, but I was away from home when the
letter came announcing I had not got a place,” he recalls.
“I asked one of my best friends to sign me up for something that was still available and he thought law would be
most appropriate!”
It may have been an unlikely beginning, but Scherpe
thrived, and was eventually asked if he wanted to do a
PhD. While working at the Max Planck Institute for
Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg,
the opportunity arose to work on an ‘amicus brief’
for the German Constitutional Court on nationality and
gender. “It got me thinking about changing gender and
what that would actually mean in legal terms,” he says.
“And then you start to meet trans people. One young
person, who came to one of my lectures, was struggling
because his family could not come to terms with his
gender identity. He later committed suicide. When you
meet people directly affected by these issues, it becomes
more than a legal point.”
In 2004 Scherpe moved to Oxford, where he had
something of a conversion. “I found I absolutely loved
the supervision system. I firmly believe that it is the best
way to teach people. So I gave up my German academic
career, burnt my bridges, and started to apply for jobs –
and happily, ended up in Cambridge.”
Does he think being a ‘boring lawyer’ is an advantage
when working in this area of law? “A good lawyer’s
answer is yes – and no,” he says. “Certainly, I am often
asked to make clear that I am heterosexual and that I
have not changed gender and have no intention to do so.
“People assume self-interest, and the fact that I don’t
have any can give some of the work greater credibility.
In a way, it’s a bit of a bizarre thing – if you work on the
law of murder, no one assumes you will have direct
experience. But on the other hand, it also means there are
things I just can’t know and that I have to talk to a lot of
people in order to find out.”
Having advised governments and litigants from the
UK to Hong Kong, Scherpe now believes the only way
forward is to complete a comprehensive survey of the law
as it stands, with a view to making practical proposals to
at least gradually remove gender as a legal category.
He says: “Jurisdictions can choose to deal with the
problems of a binary system pragmatically. So they say,
‘We’ll just put an ‘M’ here and it doesn’t really matter –
here’s your driving licence’. And if you are willing to
accept that, then it’s fine. But if you have a passport that
says you are Peter and you look like a Mary, then every
time you have to produce your passport, it will cause
problems.”
Instead, Scherpe believes focusing on function rather
than gender could be a more practical solution. So in the
case of maternity leave, rather than specifying that
a mother is entitled to additional leave, family law should
focus on why one parent requires more protection.
“Maternity leave is generally more generous than
paternity leave, with good reason,” he says. “But if you
look at the trans person who gives birth to a child but is
legally a man, that person will also need longer parental
leave, even if he is not the ‘mother’. And more broadly,
once the post-birth period is over, why shouldn’t parents
be able to choose for themselves who should stay at home
to look after their children, rather than it having to be the
mother?”
Could there be exceptions to this rule? “I’m sure my
research will discover areas where gendered categories
are still necessary, for example in the criminal law
or domestic violence. I am not advocating a blanket
approach. But I do think it is important to have the
debate and move beyond gender in most cases,” he says.
Does he believe a change in the law will also change
attitudes? Maybe. “There is a limit to what the law can or
should do – but on the other hand, the law can perhaps
assist with these developments,” he says.
Working in such a controversial area of law – as far
from being a ‘boring lawyer’ as he could be – means that
Scherpe is often accused of being anti-religion and antitradition. But he is remarkably sanguine.
“There is a very good book by a colleague of mine,
Stephen Cretney – one of the greatest family lawyers in
the UK – where he describes public discussions
surrounding changes to family law of the last centuries:
things like whether there should be divorce, or whether
you should be allowed to marry your deceased brother’s
sister. Everyone always says it’s the end of the world,
that society will be changed for ever, and then 15 or 20
years down the line, no one can remember what the fuss
was all about.
“It reminds me of the changing of German postal
codes, which became necessary after reunification.
The resistance was fierce! Removing gender from law
will be hugely beneficial for those directly affected.
But will it really make a difference to the identity of
a nation? Not really.”
Dr Jens Scherpe is a Fellow at Caius, a University Senior Lecturer in
Law and an Academic Door Tenant at Queen Elizabeth Building. His latest
book, Marital Agreements and Private Autonomy in Comparative
Perspective is published by Hart.
CAM 67 21
Hot metal
Before the desktop publishing revolution,
producing a student newspaper
was a dirty, smelly and sticky business.
Words William Ham Bevan
Photography Marcus Ginns
Heidelburg single
revolution, single
colour, sheet-fed press
Regarded by many as
the Rolls Royce of
letterpress printing, this
type of press combined
high volume with high
quality output.
22 CAM 67
A
s with all text in CAM, this feature was written
on a personal computer and emailed to the
magazine offices in Bridge Street. A graphic
designer will have laid out the magazine on screen –
words and pictures alike – using an industry-standard
software package. On receiving the editor’s final nod,
the pages will have been transmitted electronically to
a facility at Scarborough, a touch under 200 miles away,
for printing.
When the paper emerges from the rollers, it will be
the first time this issue of CAM existed as anything more
than a thread of ones and zeroes in digital media.
And throughout this term, many scores of Cambridge
students will have used similar technology to produce
Varsity, The Cambridge Student, and countless more
esoteric (and short-lived) publications.
But before the desktop-publishing revolution in the
mid to late eighties, producing a student newspaper was
rather more laborious – not to mention dirty, smelly and
sticky. For many alumni, the most evocative Cambridge
memory will be the astringent odour of Cow Gum, the
brand of rubber cement used to paste galley proofs to
pages (now, sadly, discontinued). The generation before
them may even recall the clink and rattle of Linotype
machines glimpsed during the weekly trip to the print
works; but all are likely to remember regular clashes
with authority, political in-fighting, and an uneasy lurch
from one financial crisis to the next.
Now the long-standing fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune and one of the most respected
figures in the industry, Suzy Menkes (Newnham 1963)
enrolled at Varsity on her first afternoon at Cambridge.
She recalls that in her early days on the paper, she looked
after “a column called Dolly Girls about parties and
fashionable goings on”. But in 1966, she became the
first female editor (“I remember that my appointment
competed with that of the first woman welder”) and set
about changing Varsity’s editorial dynamic.
“As the 1960s was the moment of sex, drugs and
rock ’n’ roll, there had to be some reflection in the paper
of this period of upheaval,” she says. “This was the time
when Marianne Faithfull was hanging around in
Cambridge with John Dunbar. We got hold of a hunk of
‘hashish’, as we called it exotically. The national press
went wild and it turned into a huge ‘shock horror’ story.
To our alarm, it meant that the police cracked down on
every party held in Cambridge – so not such a brilliant
piece of journalism.”
Alongside the excitement, the drudgery of taking
pages to press sticks in her mind. “My memory of Cambridge is of an immense effort to get all the copy in and
edited, and writing headlines and working on layouts,
all between delivering essays. When it was finally ready
with all the pages at two in the morning, a group of us
would pile into a small coach and go off to the printer at
Chipping Sodbury, or some other country town.
“We would come back to Cambridge at dawn with
the papers, and I would go and have a shower and
attend the first lecture of the day – my college having
brutally insisted that there was no time off for being an
editor of Varsity.”
By the time Andrew Nickolds (St Catharine’s 1969)
claimed the editor’s chair, Varsity had relocated to
cramped offices on Bridge Street, next door to a set of
public lavatories. Working on the paper meant fighting
a continuous battle with the volume of detritus
generated by the editorial process.
Right: Curved
printing plate
Semi-circular metal
plates such as these
contained the text
and images for
a single page of
newsprint.
Clamped to
cylinders inside the
printing press, they
revolved at great
speed producing
about 18,000
impressions per
hour.
Right: Flong
Before DTP, and prior
to the use of film,
curved plates were
made using a flong.
This was a thick
piece of card which,
when pressed
against metal type
and images, created
a negative mould
from which the
curved plate was
made.
Right: Galley Press
The lines of hot
metal output by
typesetting
machines such as
the Linotype were
placed inside a
‘form’ which held it
in place on a press.
These lines of type
would be proofed on
a galley press and
handed to subeditors to read,
check and mark-up
for correction.
Right: Hunter
Penrose Galley
Camera
Large cameras such
as these were used
to photograph
original artwork and
text, outputting large
sheets of lith film for
plate making.
CAM 67 23
“Whoever was nearest the big waste-basket
overflowing with paper had to climb inside and flatten
it, like treading grapes, to get another day’s worth of use
out of it,” he says. “That was everybody – future owners
of Factory Records [Tony Wilson], future presenters of
Newsnight [Jeremy Paxman]... and the room was
extremely dingy, undecorated except for these bits of
stories hanging from the walls.”
Varsity went on being printed using hot metal type
well into the 70s. Once a week, the editors would
decamp to the print works at Kettering, spend most
of the day waiting for the presses to run, and return to
Cambridge after dark. Nickolds – who went on to
become an acclaimed writer for radio and television –
remembers it as an opportunity to do some showing off.
He says: “They used to show late-night movies at the
Arts Theatre, and the thing to do was to walk in with a
rolled-up copy of the newly printed newspaper sticking
out of your pocket. Someone would shout, ‘Is that
tomorrow’s Varsity, old boy?’ Well, we were only 18.”
The relationship between precocious student journalists
and print workers was not always a smooth one.
Printing with hot metal demanded that all material was
re-typed on a Linotype machine by unionised
operatives, and controversial items – such as Varsity’s
occasional sex surveys – could be relied upon to cause
problems. However, Nickolds recalls that his biggest
dust-up was on a matter of vocabulary.
“There was a new Master at one of the Colleges,”
he says. “He’d described himself as an ‘apolitical civil
servant’, so that was our headline: ‘Apolitical civil
servant takes over at Emmanuel’, or whichever College
it was. And the printers just wouldn’t accept that there
was such a word as ‘apolitical’. We argued for most of
the afternoon, but out it came as ‘a political civil
servant’ – the exact opposite of what we meant.”
The set-up costs for hot-metal printing were prohibitive
to smaller, fringe publications, but more rough-and-
Printing with
hot metal
demanded that
all material
was re-typed
on a Linotype
machine.
Controversial
items – such as
Varsity’s sex
surveys – could
be relied upon
to cause
problems.
Left: Ludlow Headline Caster
Developed in 1911 as a semiautomatic slug casting device,
the Ludlow produced lines of hot
metal at larger sizes than that of
the Linotype machines. These
larger lines of text were inserted
into the main columns of text
typeset by the Linotype machine
to create complete pages.
24 CAM 67
ready solutions existed. Daily Telegraph writer Neil
Lyndon (Queens’ 1966) first became involved in
journalism while involved with the Free University, an
experiment in open education organised by left-wing
students and dons during the summer of 1968.
With the journalist and broadcaster Simon Hoggart
(King’s 1965), Lyndon would stay up into the early
hours and produce a daily bulletin called Penny Red on
a Roneo – a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that
could turn out thousands of smudgy copies each night
from a typed template. Its success prompted him to
think about producing a regular newspaper for the
Cambridge left, using the upstart technology of offset
lithography. He says: “We had some clever people who
understood offset printing, which had just entered the
frame. They said we could produce a weekly paper, sell
it on the streets, and price it at an amount that would
cover our costs, the office rent, and the lease of an IBM
golf-ball printer, which was absolutely cutting-edge
technology.”
The break-even price gave the new publication its
title, and the Shilling Paper was to become one of the
most controversial student newspapers in Cambridge’s
history. Before it petered out in the early 70s, several
attempts were made by University and College
authorities to have it shut down – the first one coming
when Lyndon had barely begun publication. He says:
“The head of one of the Colleges, who was a very
cunning lawyer, instituted proceedings under the Post
Office Act because we hadn’t registered with them as a
newspaper. But it turned out that you were only required
to do that if you were sending it by post, not selling it on
King’s Parade. So all he could do was glower at us.”
If the Shilling Paper’s editorials often advocated
redistribution of wealth, its sales model supplied the
practice to go with the theory – though not quite in the
way its editors had intended. “It was quite quickly
identified by drunks and derelicts on the street as a
source of ready cash,” says Lyndon. “They used to come
in, pick up a pile, and go out and flog them, actually
bullying people on the street to buy them. And of course,
everybody was too scared to say, you can’t do this.”
As the Shilling Paper and other niche publications
showed, it was possible to achieve a reasonable level of
print quality by typing up articles in-house, cutting and
pasting them to page boards, and sending the sheets to
be photographed and printed. But to achieve a truly
professional look using offset litho, the typesetting had
to be outsourced – adding another tier of fuss.
In 1977, Tim Brooks (St John’s 1976) became editor
of Stop Press, the newspaper that had overtaken Varsity,
and then absorbed it. “It was unbelievably laborious,
when you compare it with what happens now,” he says.
“The copy would all be written on typewriters, and one
of us would edit the stories for length and sense, and
mark up how we wanted them typeset.
“The bundle of work would be taken to Cambridge
Rail Station, and we had to get there before the parcels
office closed at 7pm. Its destination was a typesetter in
Royston – a very kindly, long-suffering gentleman. I’m
sure we were his least profitable customer.”
Throughout the day, the articles would be set into
“galleys” on long sheets of paper, and then dispatched
by railway parcel to Cambridge. “These would be cut
up with scalpels, and pasted on layout sheets. And when
sections were complete, we’d send them to Royston for
him to photograph and turn into print-ready film –
With many thanks to Terry Marshall, Duncan McEwan, John Hutchinson and
the John Jarrold Print Museum for their assistance.
which would again be sent back by rail parcel. Then,
when the film was all complete, that went over to
a busy commercial printer in Bicester on a Thursday
evening. The finished newspapers came back to
Cambridge on Friday afternoon, and then volunteers –
though they were paid – drove from College to College
and dropped them off.”
The print technology may have advanced with the
times, but the newsroom surroundings had not. Brooks
–later to start Media Week magazine and become managing director of Guardian News & Media – remembers
“water beading down the wall, paint peeling, and no
carpets”, as well as an unlikely cohabitee.“During the
winter months, we shared the premises with a tramp,”
he says. “A lot of gentlemen of the road would come
down from the North as the weather turned, and winter
in Cambridge where it was milder. The man who ran the
student union at the time was a kindly soul, and he
allowed one of these chaps to sleep in the cellar where we
put the paper together. We made interesting bedfellows.”
For the Sunday Times Far-East correspondent
Michael Sheridan (Jesus 1977), who took over the
editorship of Stop Press with Andrew Gowers (Caius
1977), the main lesson of student journalism was “the
tyranny of the production process”, which began a full
six days before each issue went to print.
Above: Linotype 78
typesetting machine
Linotype machines were
universally used in the
newspaper industry for
typesetting. Invented in
1886, machines like these
mechanised the typesetting and
casting process. Copy was
entered via a keyboard. Lines
of hot metal type were then cast.
Combined, these lines of type
formed long strips of text called
‘galleys’.
“We worked on a cycle, which began every Saturday
with a ‘lunch’ in a big, cold room at Jesus,” says
Sheridan. “The previous week’s paper was reviewed and
torn apart, and plans for the next week were discussed.
A typically Cambridge quirk was that no lunch was
actually served, and it often turned into a battleground
for 70s ideological disputes.”
Gowers adds: “Stop Press was at what Private Eye
would call the Spartist end of the spectrum. It had
a collective feel about it – anyone could turn up to the
lunch and offer stories, arts reviews, photographs or
whatever took their fancy.”
Reconciling left-wing politics with the realities of
running at a profit could prove difficult. It became
obvious during their tenure that revenue from a few
local advertisers (the most stalwart of which was Andy’s
Records) would not secure Stop Press’s continued
existence. Gowers, a future editor of the Financial
Times, found he could swell the coffers by selling titbits
of gossip about well-connected students to Nigel
Dempster at the Daily Mail; but a more radical solution
was needed.
Enlisting the stockbroker father of one student
journalist as a middleman, Stop Press set up a careers
section to attract blue-chip companies with an interest
in recruiting graduates. “For £10,000 per head,
they would get sponsored editorial in this section of
the paper. We thought it was suitably ring-fenced, and
clearly identified so as not to compromise the newspaper’s independence,” says Gowers.
There were other ideological compromises to be
made, too. Sheridan says: “Though Stop Press was
frightfully left-wing, it regularly broke all the tradeunion closed-shop agreements in East Anglia. At that
time, printers would refuse to print copy unless it had
been typeset by members of the NGA [National
Graphical Association]. So in order for the printers in
Bicester to accept Stop Press’s made-up pages, they
would have to be adorned with a sticker from the NGA.
“Anyway, by a series of processes which we did not
ask too much about, the typesetting was farmed out to a
little local entrepreneur at student rates, mysteriously
came back with NGA stickers, and would be cut up and
stuck by us onto paste-up sheets, with the headlines
added in Letraset. Somehow, this was accepted by the
printing plant; we learned never to ask questions, and in
my time there was never a crisis.”
Such wrangling may seem utterly alien to today’s
student editors, hunched over flatscreen monitors in
clean, serviced offices. But the tools, technology and
culture of publishing are continuing to change, and at an
accelerating pace. It is likely that the freshers who flock
to put their name down for Varsity or its competitors at
this year’s Societies Fair will be one of the last generations to work with the printed word. Many student
publications have already taken the decision to publish
online exclusively.
To Suzy Menkes, whose journalistic career stretches
back more than 45 years, reading the fruits of one’s
labour on screen is a poor substitute for “the sense of
achievement with that paper in hand, at the end of it
all”; but she is able to point out a nice little corollary.
“My son, Gideon Spanier, was also editor of Varsity and
now works at the London Evening Standard,” she says.
“I believe we are the only mother-and-son Varsity power
couple. I think printing ink must run in our veins – even
in this digital world.”
CAM 67 25
DEBATE
MARCHING
TOA BRITISH
TUNE
Professor Brendan Simms
argues that to resolve the current
crisis, the eurozone would do
well to look to the Anglo-American
example.
Illustration Celyn
26 CAM 67
E
urope – what to do about it, and
whether Britain should be ‘at the heart
of it’ or even part of it – is now back at
the top of the political agenda. Calls for a
referendum on membership of the EU threaten
to split the coalition, and even the Conservative Party. This is not surprising, given the
state of a European project still struggling to
deal with the sovereign debt crisis. The
collapse of the common currency cannot be
ruled out.
But the resulting debate on this side of the
Channel tells us not only a lot about what
Europhobes and Europhiles alike wish for in
Europe – unity or diversity – but also much
about they way in which they regard Britain.
It has always been thus. Europe was central
to British policy and politics throughout the
18th century, and the same is true of much of
the period before and after as well. Should
Britain be engaged in continental alliances,
or remain aloof, focusing on commercial and
colonial destiny overseas?
Broadly speaking, the Whigs are the
Europhiles and the Tories the Eurosceptics of
this story. At the more robust end of the
spectrum, the rhetoric often became highly
xenophobic, with not only French and Spanish
enemies, but also Britain’s German and Dutch
allies in the firing line. The content of the
debates has changed over the past 200 years,
of course, but it is striking how familiar their
general outline seems to us in the early 21st
century.
Today, Eurosceptics feel vindicated by the
failure of the eurozone and look to the chance
to cut political links to the continent. By no
means all or even most of those who hold
this view are simply xenophobes. One of the
founders of the UK Independence Party
(though now estranged) was Alan Sked, a
noted historian of the Habsburg Empire, who
is as much at home in Vienna as in London.
Nor does the charge of insularity fit the
distinguished Cambridge historian of France,
Robert Tombs, who spoke against further
European integration at the Hay Festival.
Their argument that the EU threatens the
valuable cultural and political diversity of the
continent is a perfectly plausible one. The
trouble with the Eurosceptic argument more
generally, however, is that it does not recognise
the catastrophic effect of an EU collapse for
Britain – not merely economically, but in terms
of the creation of a disordered geopolitical
space on her door-step, at a time when NATO
bonds are beginning to fray.
Europhiles, on the other hand, fear Britain’s
isolation and want to keep her ‘committed’
and ‘engaged’ in Europe. They have a strong
case, both historically and politically, given
that the prosperity and security of this island
has always been intimately bound up with that
of the rest of the continent. The trouble with
many Europhiles, however, is that they want
to ‘stay in Europe’ because they think there is
something fundamentally wrong with Britain
– socially, economically or culturally – or
because they fear that she would not survive
outside Europe.
In fact, the European Union was designed
to fix something that was never broken in
Britain. This happy ‘sceptred isle’ was spared
the traumatic experience of occupation in the
second world war by the Nazis and their local
helpers. A separate, free-standing sovereign
democracy is possible here in ways which the
size of Germany, the pressures of the
international economy and the strength of left
and right-wing radicalism made impossible in
20th century continental Europe (outside
Switzerland). It is therefore not surprising that
as the Union seeks ever closer political cooperation – in effect creating a single eurozone
state – the British government, while wishing
the enterprise well, does not wish to be of the
party.
Indeed, one of the arguments in my
forthcoming book, Battle for Europe, is that
what is needed is not so much a European
Britain as a British Europe, or at least an
Anglo-American one. This is because the
challenges facing the eurozone today have
been mastered in the past by the United
Kingdom and the United States.
In 1707, for example, the English and the
Scots confronted escalating debts, their own
historic rivalry and the threat of Louis XIV’s
France by concluding the Act of Union.
This created a parliamentary and fiscal
structure which endures to this day. Likewise,
representatives of the 13 newly independent
American states met at Philadelphia in 1787
to decide how to deal with the debts of the
War of Independence, growing external
threats, and the danger of falling out among
themselves.
Explicitly rejecting looser confederal
models, such as the German Holy Roman
Empire, they followed the example of the
Anglo-Scottish Union. Once again, the
resulting constitution created an enduring
synthesis between political participation and
viable sovereign debt that ultimately
underpinned a US rise to greatness on the
world stage.
It therefore stands to reason that the
eurozone needs to take a leaf out of the
Anglo-American book: to federalise debts, to
establish proper common representative
institutions through an elected presidency,
a senate to represent the formerly sovereign
constituent states, and a house of citizens to
represent the population.
It would have a single army within NATO,
and English would be the language of the
union for political purposes. Britain would not
necessarily need to be a member of this new
democratic union, any more than the United
States or Canada. Nor should Britain fear such
an entity, because the risks of a disordered
space in Europe are far greater than the risks
of a strong European Union.
Britain should look with favour on the
creation of yet another great English-speaking
democracy. There would be nothing to stop
Britain from joining later, by mutual consent,
if the experiment proved a success. Far from
being a threat, therefore, eurozone political
union would be the best compliment that the
continent could pay Britain.
What is needed is not so much
a European Britain as
a British Europe – or at least an
Anglo-American one.
Professor Simms (Department of Politics and
International Studies) is the Newton-Sheehy Teaching
Fellow. His forthcoming book, Battle for Europe,
is published by Allen Lane. He took part in a debate on
Europe as part of the Cambridge Series at this year’s
Hay Festival. For more information about the University
at Hay, please visit www.hayfestival.org.
CAM 67 27
Illustration Peter Quinnell
I
t is a commonly held assumption that tragedy is an
elite theatrical form: noble, dignified, profound and
with little relevance to our modern concerns. But in
fact, the public still tends to respond to tragic events
in ways that echo the age-old traditions that go back to
Greek tragedy.
When disaster happens, people want to know about
the individual victims. What were the nationalities of
the people involved? How old were they, and what
were they like as people, as precious parents, children,
partners? Newspaper reporters are sent out to investigate the ‘story’, to transform the brief announcement of
death or injury into narrative. With the event set into the
context of a sequential narrative, the report becomes an
investigation into causes and consequences, decisions
taken and fatal steps made. Journalists attempt to glean
some sort of explanation for the disaster. In a way, they
transform the merely accidental into something fateful,
predestined, and inevitable.
Dr Jennifer Wallace says that far from being
an elite theatrical form, the classical
conventions of tragedy still influence the way
we interpret personal and public events.
A tragedy for
today
28 CAM 67
The media
often focuses
on the deaths
of individual
journalists
in war and this
perspective
used to puzzle
and annoy me
These standard methods of reporting a tragic event
actually conform to the techniques of Greek tragedy,
identified by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. Tragic plays
should have a hero, Aristotle wrote, who is neither
wholly good nor wholly bad but with whom we can
identify sufficiently to feel pity and fear at his plight, since
“pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the
misfortune of a man like ourselves”. The plays should
have a coherent plot with a beginning, a middle and an
end, revolving around a moment of reversal of fortune
and recognition of that fact.
So just as Euripides chose to depict the aftermath of
the Trojan War by focusing on the individual suffering of
several women, like Hecuba and Cassandra, Time
magazine drew attention to the plight of Afghan women
by focusing on 18-year old Aisha, whose nose and ears
were cut off by her husband’s family when she attempted
to flee their home. And rather as Sophocles depicted the
dilemmas of female self-sacrifice in the figure of Antigone, who preferred public duty to her private safety, so
the Sunday Times and other newspapers devoted many
pages to the death of journalist Marie Colvin in Syria
last February. The siege of Homs in Syria had been
widely reported, but Colvin’s death promoted it to the
front page.
Indeed, the media often focuses on the deaths of
individual journalists in war, treating those deaths as
worthy of more tragic attention than the many local
civilian casualties. One might think, for example, also of
the treatment of photographer Tim Hetherington’s death
in Libya last year.
This skewed perspective used to puzzle and annoy me.
After all, these journalists chose to travel to these war
zones; the civilians had no choice. Are the newspapers
guilty of treating journalists as more important than
ordinary people so that their deaths matter more? Are
these journalists more ‘like ourselves’ than the actual
victims, and therefore it is supposedly easier for us to feel
sympathy for their deaths? Maybe there is something
insidiously true in this analysis.
But it does also seem to me now that it is precisely
because these journalists chose to go to these war zones
that, according to Aristotle, their deaths may be
interpreted as particularly tragic. Theirs was a fateful
decision, based upon the aspects in their characters that
both made them courageous journalists and also led to
their deaths. According to an article in Vanity Fair, for
example, Marie Colvin was driven repeatedly back to
war zones by her own private demons, drinking problem and post-traumatic stress disorder, her competitive
quest for scoops and her sense of excitement when in
danger. “There is always a story at the end of a rocket.
On the positive side, this is like a health reservation
without the counselling. No booze, no bread. Off to the
front in my Toyota pickup”, she wrote to a friend from
the fighting in Libya.
The ‘hamartia’ or fateful decision, sometimes
translated as fatal flaw, is traditionally central to
tragedy, and there are many examples of it in the ‘fall’
of celebrities and politicians, as presented in the media,
in modern life. Tragedy in these cases is often close to
farce. The ‘characters’ lose their dignity until they
become objects of our ridicule. In Sophocles’ play,
Athene invites Odysseus to laugh at Ajax when he is
killing sheep under the delusion that he is murdering his
fellow Greeks. Odysseus chooses to pity Ajax rather
than to laugh at him, but the two responses are very
closely aligned in that play, and similarly our sympathy
towards and mockery of our leaders are ambivalently
intertwined. Let no one tell you that tragedy is dignified
and noble. It’s cruel and funny, and watching the
grotesque unmasking of a hero’s pretensions is central to
its business.
It is a well-known fact that all the deaths in Greek
tragedy (actually, except Ajax’s) took place off-stage.
But what is more rarely acknowledged is that the bodies
of the dead were then brought onto the stage afterwards. So important was it considered for the audience
to witness the aftermath of the reported killing that
a special piece of theatrical equipment, known as the
ekkyklema, was designed to allow the bodies to be
wheeled into view.
The Greeks recognised what we now commonly
believe, that in mourning the dead it is very helpful to
have the actual bodies over which to pour our lament.
So in wars today, families weep publicly over the bodies
of their relatives, drawing the world’s attention to the
atrocity wreaked upon their family. Or, after a disaster,
the police and rescue workers will make strenuous
efforts to find the bodies of the dead, even if they are
already buried under a landslide or lost at sea, so that
they can be given a proper funeral and mourned before
being buried once more.
However, one central element of Greek tragedy – the
notion of catharsis – is much more problematic now,
and can be hard to justify. Aristotle stated that through
witnessing tragedy, we purge ourselves or ‘gain relief’.
The Greek of his treatise is a little ambivalent here.
It can be translated that through feeling ‘pity and fear’
during a tragic performance, we purge ourselves of these
emotions, so that we are no longer troubled by them.
Or it can mean that through feeling pity and fear
we clean these emotions themselves; in other words,
we refine our capacity to feel. But however this phrase is
translated, Aristotle is suggesting tragedy has some
moral or therapeutic function in society.
Is it still possible to consider witnessing others’
suffering morally improving or enriching? “It seems a
good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s
sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others”,
CAM 67 29
34 CAM 65
However, one
central element
of Greek tragedy
– the notion of
catharsis – is
much more
problematic now
and can be hard
to justify
observed the great liberal commentator, Susan Sontag,
in her book on war photography, entitled Regarding the
Pain of Others. But why is that knowledge, or acknowledgment, a ‘good’ thing? Does it make any difference to
the situation? Does it alleviate the suffering or prevent
further harm in the future?
It is not clear that the assumptions lying behind
Sontag’s remark command universal assent. Other
cultures can deal with suffering differently. The Chinese,
for example, traditionally believed that misfortune
carries with it bad luck, so that a community might shun
a widow who has lost two husbands and her children
(as witnessed in a short story by early 20th-century
writer Lu Xun) in case she infects them with her sadness.
To dwell on the pain of others is the self-indulgent
malaise of the decadent West. It is better to focus on
“biting unhappiness” now with the hope of bringing
about punitive revenge on the perpetrators later.
In general, Aristotle’s catharsis might work better
when the community is smaller and more coherent, and
not globalised as it is today. Ibsen, after all, explored the
muted, ambivalent response to the demise of his heroes
shown by the fractured, repressed communities of late
19th-century Norway. The general public is much more
dispersed and divided today. In an era of 24/7 news and
constant potential exposure to tragedies around the
globe via the internet, it may be paradoxically difficult to
focus the kind of active, sympathetic attention on
suffering which dramatists could do in the past. When
there is no “end”, in Aristotle’s terms, when we cannot
turn the tragedy off (or conversely, when we can turn it
off at the push of a button), it might be possible to fall
prey to what is known as compassion fatigue and lose
our capacity to feel. Does that matter? Is the readiness to
make what might be termed a ‘good tragedy’ the hallmark of human civilisation, or an indication of a humane
society? Can one speak, as Karl Jaspers once wrote,
of “tragic knowledge” as a form of “achievement”?
And should one?
All these questions were undoubtedly rightly far from
the minds of the residents of Wootton Bassett as they
gathered to pay their respects each time the bodies of
soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were driven
through their town. These questions were surely equally
far from the thoughts of New Yorkers after 9/11, or
indeed the family of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber,
or Rachel Corrie as she knelt fatally in front of the bulldozer in Rafah refugee camp in Gaza. For one of the
other major insights the Greeks gave us is that emotional
response always precedes and exceeds any amount of
thinking and theorising on the subject.
Aristotle’s rules only get us so far; watching a performance of Oedipus or the Bacchae provokes reactions
unaccounted for in his Poetics. So although we can
dissect intellectually the sentimentalised emotions
sometimes whipped up by media frenzy, or balk at the
subsequent political manipulation of public feeling, there
is no gainsaying the anger at the fall of a dictator or grief
following the death of a child. Those feelings are usually
followed by the desire to seek an explanation, even if
that explanation differs wildly from culture to culture,
and age to age. That is what it is to live through tragedy.
And when one is experiencing it, let others worry
whether or not it is a ’good’ thing.
Dr Jennifer Wallace is the Harris Fellow and Director of Studies
in English at Peterhouse. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy,
by Jennifer Wallace, is published by CUP.
CAM 67 31
Concrete
Cambridge
In between the medieval arches and
soaring spires you can spy the city’s
alternative history – one built in concrete.
Words Fred Lewsey
Photographs Marcus Ginns
and RIBA British Architectural Library
Photographs Collection
Right: Churchill, 1966
Architect: Richard Sheppard
Robson & Partners
E
The important
heritage and
rebellious attitude
these buildings
represent
has undergone
a damnatio
memoriae in the
public mind
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection
very year, thousands of tourists flock to Cambridge
to marvel at the stunning architecture of University
and College buildings. Many of these buildings are
studied by students and scholars of architecture the world
over – but it may come as a surprise to hear that the ones
that attract the most attention are not medieval, adorned
with spires or built in distinctive yellow limestone.
In fact, some of Cambridge’s most fascinating buildings are to be found in dingy corners of the city. Many
people even consider them ugly. But they were built
at a time when post-war architecture peaked in a wave
of euphoric gusto, as maverick architects experimented
with shape and materials to create their visions of the
University of the Future. And for the most part, they are
concrete.
In a period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s,
Cambridge experienced a boom in brutalism. The
University Centre, Churchill College and the then new
Faculty of History building were attempts to mirror
the innovation and hope of that era through dramatic,
expressive shapes and exposed use of raw material.
“This style embodies the laboratory of the future:
a deliberate attempt to reflect the revolutionary ideas
generated at the University by creating a rupture with the
past,” says Dr Marco Iuliano of the Department of
Architecture. With Professor François Penz, he has
curated an exhibition of architectural photographs shot
in the 50s and 60s, featuring many of Cambridge’s
brutalist buildings, which will be shown at the Royal
Institute of British Architects (RIBA) early next year.
According to Dr Iuliano, the important heritage and
rebellious attitude these buildings represent has undergone what he describes as a damnatio memoriae in the
public consciousness, because they don’t fit the picturepostcard version of Cambridge.
“The use of shape and materials – the raw concrete,
as well as steel and brick – was a real punch in the face.
You had a public that was used to Georgian terraces,
and this style arrives as if alien buildings have descended
from space and landed in Cambridge,” he says.
Opposite page:
Fitzwilliam, 1963
Architect: Denys Lasdun
& Partners
Above & right:
George Thomson Building,
Corpus, 1964
Architect: Philip Dowson,
Arup Associates
Left:
The Keynes Building,
King’s, 1967
Architect: Fello Atkinson
CAM 67 33
CAM 67 39
Eric de Maré/RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Andrew Drummond/RH Partnership
Henry Snoek/RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Top:
University Centre, Granta Place, 1967
Architect: Howell Killick Partridge & Amis
Opposite page:
New Court, Christ’s, 1970
Architect: Denys Lasdun
Left:
New Hall, 1966
Architect: Chamberlin, Powell & Bon
Right:
Cripps Building, St. John’s, 1967
Architect: Powell & Moya
For Dr Iuliano, there are no buildings that better
symbolise the challenging spirit of one of the world’s
leading academic communities; although the utopian
aim and experimental nature of these building’s stark
and angular appearance – something he considers vital
to the story of the city and University – is in danger of
being lost.
“These fantastic buildings have been banished from
the narrative of the University in the course of promoting
a reassuring model of English tradition,” he says.
“The classic view of the Backs forms a noble depiction
of the stereotype of the Arcadian and scholarly – but the
innovation, freedom of thought and experimentation,
which is the beating heart of any leading educational
institution, can be seen clearly in the architecture of
buildings such as Churchill and the History Faculty.”
Dr Iuliano and Professor Penz set out to revise some
of the negative views of these buildings by displaying
photos of them taken by some of the best architectural
photographers of the day, which are now held in the
archives of RIBA.
The catalyst for the flourishing of radical architecture
in Cambridge was the arrival at the University of Sir
Leslie Martin, who became head of the Architecture
Department in 1956. Sir Leslie was an influential British
architect who had already led the design team behind the
Royal Festival Hall. “He had the capacity to get
excellent minds to invest in a vision, and he became the
driving force behind up-and-coming architects receiving
commissions in Cambridge,” says Dr Iuliano.
The first major building of the Martin era was the
1959 extension to Scroope Terrace at the Architecture
Department. Over the next decade, Cambridge
experienced a surge in avant-garde building.
Among the most recognisable of Cambridge’s
concrete treasures are the Cripps Building at St John’s,
the University Centre and Churchill College. However,
perhaps the jewel in Cambridge’s modern crown is the
Faculty of History building, designed by James Stirling,
which fills pages of architecture textbooks studied in the
UK and beyond.
“The History Faculty was ground-breaking, a
complete schism from traditional construction,” says
Dr Iuliano. “Every piece has an exact role in the fabric of
the building’s composition, with the stunning glass roof
creating a waterfall of light.”
There is a growing awareness of the importance of
this architecture, but its legacy is controversial. “Many
of the buildings are now Grade II listed, but one suspects
that not everybody in the Colleges and University is
enamoured with their modernist heritage,” says
Professor Penz. “In fact, in 1985 the University
considered demolishing the Faculty of History.”
The ambition and invention of post-war British
architecture that these buildings embody has arguably
faded; but for many architects, it remains a golden
period. “At the time, modern architecture exemplified
the adventurous, forward-looking qualities of
universities,” says Dr Nick Bullock, architect and
Fellow of King’s College. “Today, there isn’t such a
clear idea of direction in architecture – these buildings
stand as testament to the strength of the vision these
architects had.”
Cambridge in Concrete, edited by Marco Iuliano and François Penz, is
available from the Architecture Department and at the RIBA bookshop
in Portland Place. www.arct.cam.ac.uk
36 CAM 67
CAM 67 37
Jill Calder
University Matters
My Cambridge
Reading List
Cambridge Soundtrack
A Sporting Life
Prize crossword
41
42
44
45
47
48
Extracurricular
CAM 67 39
Extracurricular
University Matters
Lyndon Hayes
Professor Patrick Maxwell
Regius Professor of Physic
I am very much looking forward to taking up
the post of Regius Professor of Physic this
term. Indeed, I think it is the most exciting job
in medicine today. This is partly based on
existing strengths in Cambridge.
First, there is an extraordinary concentration of world-leading biomedical research.
Second, there is very effective strategic
alignment between the local NHS healthcare
organisations and the University.
One example of this alignment is
Cambridge University Health Partners
(CUHP). CUHP includes the University and
three substantial healthcare organisations:
Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation
Trust (CUHFT) which runs Addenbrooke’s and
the Rosie Maternity Hospital; Papworth
Foundation Trust, which runs the specialist
cardiothoracic hospital; and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust
which is responsible for mental health.
CUHP is one of only five designated
Academic Health Science Centres in England.
Another example of successful alignment is
the Comprehensive Biomedical Research
Centre funding awarded to the partnership of
CUHFT and the University in 2007, and
renewed with a very substantial uplift to
£110m for 2012-17.
This means there is enormous potential.
This can be easily appreciated by driving from
the M11 on the new road into the Biomedical
Campus. My previous post was Dean of
Medical Sciences at UCL in central London,
where there were a lot of practical constraints
related to buildings. But in Cambridge,
‘2020 Vision’ has enabled the comprehensive
development of a very large site with
improved transport infrastructure around
Addenbrooke’s hospital.
Especially impressive is the striking new
building which will rehouse the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology – an extraordinarily
successful research institute, which has made
many important discoveries. Work there led
directly to the use of monoclonal antibodies,
which represent a real breakthrough in the
treatment of many different serious illnesses.
Over the next few years, a number of further
Breakthroughs commonly
involve a major element of
serendipity and often occur
when people trained in
different disciplines come
together
new buildings are planned on the campus.
For example, Papworth will be relocated to
a new cardiothoracic hospital, and there will
be a new Heart and Lung Research Institute.
This is a challenging time for healthcare
and biomedical research. Many people think
that meeting these challenges will require
universities, hospitals, biotechnology
companies and the pharmaceutical industry
to find new ways of working together. As yet,
the best ways to do this are unknown.
My personal view is that there are at least two
areas where we can make dramatic
improvements.
First, the way we do things in hospitals
tends to be very conservative. I would like
many more people involved in healthcare to
be thinking of new ways of tackling a very
wide range of day-to-day problems. I am quite
sure that with a will to improve, we can provide
better and more effective care, and that this
need not necessarily be more expensive.
Second, I think it should be much simpler
to test new treatments that might have a big
effect in patients. We have become so
concerned about protecting humans from
potential harm that we have made it extremely
expensive and difficult to test whether a new
treatment actually works.
Particularly sobering is that some of
today’s best treatments were developed for
a completely different purpose from the ones
for which we use them now. It was only after
they were tried out in humans that it was
discovered that they had other effects, which
were often completely unexpected. Good
examples are aspirin for heart disease and
Viagra for male sexual dysfunction. I firmly
believe that the only way to work out what
a medicine will really do in people is to test it in
people.
Breakthroughs commonly involve a major
element of serendipity and often occur when
people trained in different disciplines come
together. My own work in Oxford on how cells
sense oxygen was transformed by making
an unexpected connection with a chemist
who was a world expert on a particular family
of enzymes.
I had not worked in Cambridge before, and
did not study here. But my impression from
outside is that the number of really bright
people is unusually high. I also think that the
‘activation energy’ needed for crossdisciplinary interactions in Cambridge is
unusually low. One of my main aims is to find
new ways to lower it even further, and I would
welcome suggestions!
Rounding off, I believe that right now,
Cambridge is probably the best place in the
world to develop solutions to the big
challenges we face, both as clinicians and as
a society.
Professor Maxwell is the new Regius Professor of Physic
and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine. He is also
Director of Cambridge University Health Partners,
the Academic Health Sciences Centre for Cambridge.
His predecessor was Sir Patrick Sissons.
CAM 67 41
Extracurricular
ANDREW LAMB EWB-UK started while I was a student
at Cambridge. I got involved in 2002, when they held
an event to recruit committee members to the new
society. Listening to a presentation by someone who’d
worked on water projects in Thailand during his gap
year, I thought, that’s what I want to be part of – so I
volunteered immediately to help with fundraising.
The most memorable moment was during a recent
visit to Nigeria, to a project that began as a suggestion
by Professor Peter Guthrie in the Engineering
Department. I went with a former volunteer who’d
worked on it to look at the impact we’d had. There was
lots of new infrastructure to reduce the impact of
flooding, and social improvements; but the most
amazing thing was meeting people who told us their kids
wouldn’t be alive without EWB-UK.
I’ve been chief executive of EWB-UK for the past four
years, and every day I have an opportunity to make
people in the UK aware of the power of engineering and
the difference it can make. Its cause has made me stay
involved with EWB-UK and grow it.
My Cambridge
Engineers
without borders
In 2001, a small group of engineering students
decided to form a new student society called
Engineers Without Borders. Since then, EWB-UK
has grown into a national organisation with 35
university branches, seven regional professional
networks and 4,500 members.
Andrew Lamb
(Pembroke 2001)
read Engineering.
He is chief executive
of Engineers
Without Borders
UK (EWB-UK).
Joanne Beale
(Selwyn 2005)
read Engineering.
She is a programme
support officer
with the international
NGO WaterAid.
Interviews Becky Allen
Illustration Alex Green
42 CAM 67
Mo Ali
(Christ's 2001)
read Manufacturing
Engineering,
followed by an MPhil
on Supply Chain
Manufacturing.
He now works in
emergency relief.
For a long time at Cambridge I was frustrated with
wanting to apply what I was learning to something that
mattered to me. When it came to my fourth-year project
I was determined to do something that had an impact on
people. Thanks to Professor Peter Guthrie and an EWBUK bursary, I worked in Bhutan on a rural householdwaste management project.
My fieldwork was in remote areas where until recently
people had consumed only what was produced locally.
With the advent of packaged food, they had to work out
what to do with the non-biodegradable waste. Mine was
an early scoping study to find out what people were doing
by instinct, and what solutions they’d accept and would
fit in with their way of life.
During my final year I was heavily involved with
EWB-UK. I took on management of the bursary panel in
Cambridge because I wanted to enable others to have the
opportunities I’d had.
There’s something special about being part of a
community of people passionate about the same issues,
so finding EWB-UK in my fourth year was pivotal for me.
Development is a difficult career to aim at; there are few
jobs and they demand a specific set of skills, engineering
as well as social. Being involved with EWB-UK gave me
those skills, and the engineers I met inspired me.
For me, it has been transformative. I went to
university wanting to be a rock-concert designer, but I
quickly realised that was pretty ephemeral and the
opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives was
right in front of me with EWB-UK.
It’s a learning and leadership factory for engineering:
the engineering rigour comes from degree courses, and
the transferable skills come from EWB-UK. You become
an engineer without borders, and you go on throughout
your engineering career to change the world for the
better.
JOANNE BEALE At school I didn’t know anything
about development work. I travelled for the first time
between school and university. It was just for a month,
but I went to Venezuela and stayed in a village where
collecting water involved a half-hour walk with a bucket
to a hole in the ground. It got me thinking about how the
rest of the world lives.
It’s easy to think
you have all
the answers.
Lots of the time,
problems can
be solved by
local people and
realising that
at a young age is
really useful
MO ALI The idea that engineers can be sent to
emergencies always fascinated me. My parents are
Pakistani, so I travelled there a lot as a child and saw the
disparities that exist in access to health and education.
EWB-UK was a perfect platform to bring my interests and
skills together.
At my first EWB-UK meeting I was struck by the fact
that rather than telling us what to do, we were working
out how we could be most useful, both to fellow
students and to projects abroad. After that, I did a bit of
everything for EWB-UK.
In 2002/3 I ran two projects in Ecuador sponsored by
Mott MacDonald, and in my final year I was in charge
of research for the EWB-UK national committee. I was
lucky enough to get funding for my own masters project
in Nicaragua and Ecuador. Contaminated water is
a major issue, and the project looked at low-cost ways of
manufacturing ceramic water filters.
EWB-UK exposed me to all the different levels of
development, from working with local communities to
pitching to donors at the UN. It has been the platform for
my career for the eight years since I left Cambridge.
It’s easy to think you have all the answers; EWB-UK
helped me realise you don’t. Lots of the time, problems
can be solved by local people, and realising that at a
young age is really useful.
I’ve worked in six African countries, and all that
stemmed from the experience I gained through EWB-UK.
I did Manufacturing Engineering, so most of my work is
with governments and NGOs in systems and planning.
My last long-term posting – three-and-a-half years –
was in Sudan and South Sudan. The South completely
collapsed after decades of war, so it’s not reconstruction
work because there was nothing there to start with.
I’ve been working on getting a health system developed,
and co-ordinating the huge number of health NGOs, and
emergency preparedness.
For more information on EWB-UK, visit ewb-uk.org.
CAM 67 43
Extracurricular
Reading List
Professor Andy Parker
Interview Lucy Jolin
Steve Bond
Andy Parker is Professor
of High Energy Physics
and a Professorial Fellow
of Peterhouse
he first rule of approaching Douglas
Hofstadter’s wildly original Gödel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is
simple: it’s not really about Gödel, Escher and
Bach. Rather, it’s a journey through complex
concepts sparked by their maths, music and
art, melded with numerous ideas, analogies
and diversions. There are strange loops,
a questioning Tortoise, and Zen. There are
record players with only one record, there is
molecular biology, and there is Aunt Hilary.
She is an ant colony.
It’s not a book that is easily classified. But it
fascinated Professor Andy Parker when he
encountered it during his days as an Oxford
physics student.
“I can’t actually remember where I came
across it,” he says. “But I was reading some
pretty enormous works at the time – Bertrand
Russell and suchlike. It seemed to be an
interesting book that covered all the things
I worried about at the time, being a teenager.
What’s it all about? Is the universe logical?
How does your brain work?”
Parker is now Professor of High Energy
Physics at Cambridge and a founder of the
ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN, which searches for
new discoveries produced when protons
collide at incredibly high speeds. He didn’t
find the answer to life, the universe and
everything in the book. Instead, he discovered
the value of incompleteness.
“The book was the first time I encountered
many concepts such as looking at systems on
different levels, emergent behaviour and selfreferential paradoxes,” he says. “But its main
theme is Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
I found that quite a revelation. It really got
to me.” Gödel’s theorem states that all formal
systems of local thought, including mathematics, are incomplete. “Therefore you can
make statements in them which cannot
be supported by the logical system itself,”
says Parker. “That was just mindblowing.
Particularly when you’re a teenager, because
you tend to think you know everything, and
that if you don’t, you can find out.”
T
44 CAM 67
There’s a lot of clever stuff
in it – some of it might be a bit
too clever or pretentious in
a way. But then it goes into long
sections of very hardcore
logic or number theory
Hofstadter was an obscure graduate student
when he wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, first
published in 1979. In an early example
of desktop publishing, he typeset it himself
electronically. It ended up becoming
a bestseller, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is
regarded as a key text in artificial intelligence
and computer science. Part of the book’s
appeal to non-technical types is the off-kilter
inserts, such as the running dialogue between
Achilles and the Tortoise – characters first
CAMCard discount at Heffers
The Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discount
is going up from 10% to 15% – a perfect
incentive to give books as Christmas
presents this year. Shop in person with
your CAMCard at Trinity Street or online at:
alumni.cam.ac.uk/
benefits/camcard/bookshops.
Extracurricular
Cambridge Soundtrack
Alexis Taylor, Hot Chip
Interview Dorian Lynskey
Recent reads
Map of a Nation
A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by
Rachel Hewitt (Granta Books). “I like maps,
and if we go off on holiday I always buy the
Ordnance Survey for wherever we are.”
The Pirates!
In an Adventure with Scientists
by Gideon Defoe (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
“ I took my children to see the film and we
liked it so much that I read the book.”
Electronics for Dogs
“This doesn’t actually exist but I’d love
a copy – Gromit is reading one in an episode
of Wallace and Gromit. I love anything to do
with them.”
©Tom Oxley /NME/ IPC+ Syndication
used by Greek philosopher Zeno, then
appropriated by Lewis Carroll – which helps
to illustrate complex mathematical ideas.
“I was intrigued by the presentation back
then,” says Parker. “I don’t know whether
I would be now. There’s a lot of clever stuff
in it – some of it might be a bit too clever or
pretentious in a way. But then it goes into
long sections of very hardcore logic or number
theory. And then it will whizz back to a bit of
Achilles and the Tortoise.”
At first glance, it seems a big leap from
theoretical record players to the LHC. But in
Gödel’s world of incompleteness, there can
be no much-vaunted ‘theory of everything’.
“I don’t think many scientists think about
Gödel when they are doing their work,” says
Parker. “We are arch-reductionists. But I am
not a believer in a theory of everything. We will
have better and better theories that describe
more stuff with fewer inputs, sure. Yet the
idea that if you had a complete description
of the lowest level of matter, you could then
build up from that to a description of the
way that complicated systems work, I think
is completely wrong.”
Alexis Taylor
(Jesus 1999)
Alexis Taylor arrived at Jesus to study
English Literature in the autumn of 1999 with
an acoustic guitar and low expectations.
“I think I was set up for it to be horrible and
posh,” he says. “I feared the worst and was
pleasantly surprised.”
Taylor came to Cambridge already a
member of Hot Chip, the electronic pop band
who have since released five acclaimed
albums, worked with artists from Peter Gabriel
to Wiley and picked up nominations for the
Mercury Prize and Grammy awards. At the
time, however, his favourite artist was Prince.
It’s hard to sound like Prince on an acoustic
guitar, so his Cambridge songwriting drew
more on two recent discoveries: the 1969
albums Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon by cult
American singer-songwriter Tim Buckley.
Taylor quickly discovered the city’s
electronic music scene, which was centred on
the Portland Arms on Chesterton Road, and
on a charismatic figure called Pete UM. “It
seems like most people interested in music in
the Mill Road area knew him because he kept
popping up all the time. He’s a great musician
making brilliant records, but he’s only really
known about in Cambridge. It made a big
difference, going to these gigs and meeting
people like Pete.”
He remembers other influences too. “I went
to see Spiritualized at the Corn Exchange but
most of the time the bands I was interested in
didn’t seem to stop off at Cambridge. I
remember I went to see Royal Trux in London,
Brighton and Oxford in the same week
because they didn’t come to Cambridge.”
Taylor also DJed regularly at student house
parties, where his passions were UK garage
and US R&B, especially Mary J Blige’s Family
Affair and early Destiny’s Child singles such as
Bills, Bills, Bills and Say My Name.
In his third year, he met a Sidney Sussex
student, Felix Martin, in the Hot Numbers
record shop on Kingston Street and invited
him to play with Hot Chip. Martin had a radio
show on the University station with Al Doyle,
who also ended up joining the band. Not all of
their early shows ended well, though. When
they played low down the bill one night at
the Boat Race on East Road, all the friends
they had invited along left before the rest
of the bands came on, incurring the wrath
of the promoter. A few years later, when
Hot Chip released their debut album, the same
promoter tried to book them and Taylor
explained why he was turning him down.
“We had to tell him he’d been slagging us off
early on.”
Back at Jesus, Taylor found an unexpected
fellow music buff in the shape of Professor
Stephen Heath, the influential literary theorist.
“He happened to run the library that contained
work by anyone who had been at Jesus.
I talked to him a fair bit about music. He was
interested in the history of the College and
how [singer-songwriter] John Wesley Harding
had been there, so I sent him Hot Chip’s music
for the next few years. There was a nice sense
that he was supporting what I was doing that
wasn’t English Literature.”
Looking back, Taylor is sometimes
surprised by how Cambridge confounded his
expectations; and whenever Hot Chip play at
the Junction or Corn Exchange, he gets to
replay his Cambridge soundtrack. “Each time
we go back, I try and spend as much time
there as possible, just walking around the
town and meeting up with people who might
still be there. I still feel some connection to it.
I met some of my closest friends there and it
was a lot to do with music.”
Hot Chip tour the UK in October. The album, In Our Heads,
is out now on Domino. hotchip.co.uk.
CAM 67 45
Extracurricular
A Sporting Life
IceHockey
Interview Becky Allen
Marcus Ginns
Many thanks to Planet Ice, Peterbrough for their help.
Teale Phelps Bondaroff
For a young man so deeply committed to
politics – he first stood as an MP in his
native Canada at the age of 19 – Teale
Phelps Bondaroff, who is at Clare, has a
keen interest in violence.
The violence inflicted by humans on each
other and on other animals is central to
Bondaroff’s PhD, as his research examines
the tactics and strategies of radical environmental groups such as Sea Shepherd, the
controversial US marine wildlife conservation
group.
Violence is also one of the things he says
attracted him to ice hockey, which he has
played since his childhood in Calgary. “The
controlled aggression is great. It’s one of the
fastest-thinking games in the world. In a lot of
fast sports, like motor racing or skating, you’re
going round in circles and have a bit more
time to formulate strategy and tactics. But in
hockey, you’re going at top speed with knives
on your feet, trying to score, and at the same
time people are trying to knock you down,”
Bondaroff says.
“That speed appeals to some people, and
you can get some beautiful skating. But I like
the rough-and-tumble fights in the corner, the
battles in front of the net. There is a moment in
hockey when you know you’re about to be
absolutely creamed, but it’s imperative that
you take the puck, pass it off and take the hit.”
Formed in 1885, the Cambridge University
Ice Hockey Club is one of the oldest in the
world and has a long-standing rivalry with
Oxford – albeit a rather one-sided one.
Cambridge has won only twice in the past 10
years and a total of 28 times during the 20th
century. “Unfortunately we don’t have a rink
here,” Bondaroff explains. “It’s one of the disadvantages we face against Oxford, because
they have a rink in town so they practice on the
ice twice or more a week. We have to travel to
Peterborough, so we get less time on the ice.”
Nonetheless, Bondaroff is bullish about the
coming season. “We’re going to be playing a
lot harder. And we have a new top-secret
training regime, which I can’t say any more
about; but it’s going to help give us an edge,”
he says.
Despite the violence – and thanks to its
more relaxed rules, the Varsity match is more
violent than most – ice hockey at Cambridge
has its cerebral moments, too. Talking about
hockey kit (and from padded pants and
helmets to shoulder pads and chest protectors, there is a mountain of it) Bondaroff
mentions that the physics of skating is
a popular topic of conversation in the locker
room and team bus.
“The skate blade isn’t flat but curved, so the
pressure is distributed on either edge of the
skate. That liquefies the ice, so there’s actually
a lot of physics behind how much arch you
have between the edges. We have long
discussions about it – this is Cambridge, after
all. It’s one of the most fascinating things
about playing sport here. You can have classic
sport banter, and then someone asks a
question about John Locke and freedom, and
two hours later the bus ride’s over. It’s like
nothing I’ve ever experienced playing hockey
before.”
srcf.ucam.org/cuihc
CAM 67 47
Extracurricular
✄
CAM 67 Prize Crossword
Sacco Mala
by Schadenfreude
All entries to be received by 10 January 2013
Send completed crosswords:
• by post to CAM 67 Prize Crossword, CARO, 1 Quayside,
Bridge Street, Cambridge CB5 8AB
• by email to [email protected]
• or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam
The first correct entrant will receive
a copy of East Anglia: A Different
Perspective, a collection from leading
print-maker Glynn Thomas of scenes
from across the four counties of
East Anglia and beyond (Mascot
Media, £27.50) and £15 to spend on
CUP publications. Two runners-up
will also receive £35 to spend on
CUP publications.
Solutions and winners will be
printed in CAM 68 and posted
online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam
on 18 January 2013.
4
41
21
48 CAM 67
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
18
19
22
23
25
27
29
31
34
36
38
40
A den left warm and dry (4)
Engineers about to enter lido
lower the temperature in
advance (7)
Customary income mostly
reduced (5)
Tart accommodating soldiers
heading for Israel (7)
A prickly shrub, not old, next to
stream (6)
Untidy reckless office worker
(8)
Catty German (4)
An excursion for example
touring remains (6)
Missing a section Latin is
translated into Scottish (5)
Life of a fruit (4)
Cardinal with time and energy
for a response to a thrust (5)
Uncle Sam leaves extremely
funny note (8)
Pressure in modelled aircraft’s
wheel cover (4)
Relating to a Homeric theory
without final changes (7)
Honey lives with retired copper
(7)
Poles are deserted, caught in
a trap (6)
Weighing machines originally
tuned by foreign gent from the
south (6)
Greek character with a litre
bottle (5)
Bird rising over top of elder
came into view (5)
200,000 or more caught in loch
(so far) (4)
Shock treatment finally
rejected by dwarf (4).
Winner: Thomas Ransford (Trinity 1977)
CLOCKWISE PERIMETER
46
1
2
Runners-up: J Chris Hobbs (St Catharine’s 1957)
and Nesta Thomas (Newnham 1965)
Special mentions: Peter Mabey (Selwyn 1943), the entrant with the
earliest matriculation date and Josephine Living (Newnham 2003)
the entrant with the most recent.
Sixteen clues lack definitions.
Their answers with some pairings
form a complete set with one
omission. The answers to these
clues must be encoded such that
the nth letter of the alphabet
becomes the nth letter of a 26letter phrase.
48
47
DOWN
10 Sketch about Republican
community in Scotland (7)
11 Current stopping European
with line for Dutch climber (5)
12 Duke to approach old fellow (4)
13 Old maid to continue without
change perhaps (5)
15 Gaseous element removed
from volatile chlorine dye (6)
16 Scots spoil woman’s special
fruit (7)
17 Remove the colour from earth
(7)
20 Litigation turned over by
independent ruler (4)
21 Nothing put in novel card
holder (4)
22 Sharp point on special needle
(5)
23 Filters gluey substance for the
auditor (4)
24 Popular actor’s part (4)
26 Anterior leg at the front! (4)
28 Too active orchestra (4)
30 Oils over in too much sun (5)
32 Some bidders use this Internet
service provider to save $100
(4)
33 Depth in cover (4)
35 He tells stories about muscle
men (7)
37 Everything in sight is
superficial (7)
39 Fellow to build a fence (6)
42 Younger institute blocking
college lecturer (5)
43 Boundary measure (4)
44 Pouches are emptied into
coloured cases (5)
45 Prince is after French chemist’s
unfinished collage (7)
Solution to CAM 66 Crossword
Capital Letters by Schadenfreude
INSTRUCTIONS
14
ACROSS
Working is cushy around
November time (9)
Cleaning lady is overcome by it
twice (10)
One date in the year (3)
Bobby’s outside entrance to
Scotland Yard, returning what?
(6)
Lake has gallons for hospital
(5)
Look inside Chinese base (5)
I held up the poet’s flaming
torch (10)
Extra letters from wordplay give
the names of five Cambridge
alumni who were Olympic gold
medal winners: ABRAHAMS,
BURGHLEY, BRASHER,
MEADE and LLEWELLYN.
The first and last letters of the
extra words give ATHENS and
LONDON, respectively. Solvers
were required to highlight all the
cells containing the letters of
LONDON, thus revealing 2012.
The red letters in DOOL,
VARDOS and NOTION replaced
CAM, spelling DON.