Cambridge Alumni MagazineIssue 70 Michaelmas 2013

In this issue:

Insect huntersHow China works

The borrowers Cambridge soundtrack

A sporting life

Features

How China works 14Labour relations in China have been transformed over the last twenty years. Professor William Brownexplains why power is with the people.

Insect hunters 20All collectors are obsessive; but some entomologists areprepared to go to greater lengths, as Lucy Jolin discovers.

Lest we forget 24Britain’s war memorials, at home and abroad, have significantly shaped the way we remember the Great War says Professor David Reynolds.

Diffuse interests 28Dr Geoff Moggridge says that understanding how substances mix together can be life-changing.

The borrowers 32In 1946, ex-RAF officer and fresher Bill Howell had an idea: a student lending library for contemporary art.Penelope Rance takes up the story.

CAM 70 01

CAM is published three timesa year, in the Lent, Easter andMichaelmas terms and is sent free to Cambridge alumni. It is available to non-alumni on subscription. For furtherinformation contact the AlumniRelations Office.

The opinions expressed in CAMare those of the contributors and not necessarily those of theUniversity of Cambridge.

EditorMira Katbamnayellowbutton.co.uk

Managing EditorMorven Knowles

Design and art directionPaul Oldmansmithltd.co.uk

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PublisherThe University of CambridgeDevelopment and AlumniRelations1 QuaysideBridge StreetCambridge CB5 8ABTel +44 (0)1223 332288

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Cover photograph by Alun Callender

Copyright © 2013The University of Cambridge.

Regulars

Letters 02Don’s diary 03Update 04Diary 08My room, your room 10

The best... 11Secret Cambridge 12

University matters 41My Cambridge 42Reading list 44Cambridgesoundtrack 45

A sporting life 47Prize crossword 48

CAM/70CAMCambridge Alumni MagazineIssue 70 Michaelmas Term2013

Contents

Extracurricular

This publication containspaper manufactured by Chain-of-Custody certifiedsuppliers operating withininternationally recognisedenvironmental standards in order to ensure sustainablesourcing and production.

2014

10

Edward Burtynsky

Christoffer Rudquist

Jonathan Gregson

Award Winner 2013

02 CAM 70

Welcome to the Michaelmas edition of CAM.It is often said that, at its heart, Cambridge is

a self-governing community of scholars – a universityfree to determine its own future, with a structure thatunderpins academic intellectual freedom. For theVice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz,this has profound implications for the way in which Cambridge considers the challenges of the21st century. Read an extract from his annualOctober speech on page 41.

For me, intellectual freedom at Cambridge isabout the freedom to follow your nose, to see wherea line of enquiry takes you – an approach reflected in this issue of CAM. On page 20, we find out what it is about beetles that drives entomologists to the furthest reaches of the jungle; and on page 14,economist Professor William Brown examines therise of Chinese labour and what it means for workerrelations.

Elsewhere, on page 28, Dr Geoff Moggridgediscusses the chemical power of diffusion. And onthe eve of the 100th anniversary of the start of thefirst world war, Professor David Reynolds examineshow Britain’s memorials have shaped the way we remember the Great War. Read his fascinatingaccount on page 24.

Mira Katbamna(Caius 1995)

Line of enquiry

EDITOR’S LETTER Your letters

CrushFor many years, in his lectures oncrowd psychology, a Universitycolleague showed news footage ofteenage girls screaming as theBeatles arrived at the local airport.One year, for the first time, some students were suppressing giggles. When he asked why, theyexplained that they had recognisedtheir mothers.Roger Robinson (Queens’ 1958)

When Beatlemania was at itsheight, my mother (born 1919)remarked how she and her friendhad gone to see Frank Sinatra, justbefore the war I think. They werevery disappointed that they had not fainted with all the other girls, as they had been led tobelieve [they would]! John Gowland (Trinity 1964)

Papers, onlineI was delighted to read in CAM 69that alumni now have onlineaccess to a large range ofpublished research through theJSTOR archive. For those of uswho do not have a currentacademic or corporate affiliation,and who live away fromCambridge, the lack of access tocurrent research can be

enormously frustrating – not leastbecause we pay for much ofit through our taxes! The conceptthat research results should befreely available to all has takenroot in recent years, and this is an important milestone in thejourney to that goal. I would liketo offer my heartfelt thanks to all those who have worked tomake this possible – by far themost stimulating and potentiallyproductive of all the alumnibenefits.Peter Lapinskas (Caius 1971)

Matters of substanceI read with interest (CAM 69) thatthe universe is composed of matter5%, dark matter 26% and darkenergy 68%. The “universe”cereal box states that it is “suitablefor dogs” and “may containnuts”. Does this mean that not allthe holes in the theory are black?Kenneth Barnsley (Trinity 1970)

I feel I must thank you for the best and most spontaneous roar of laughter I have enjoyed formany years.

At my advanced age, the most I can usually hope for is a wrysmirk or the occasional giggle.However, the illustrations by Rian Hughes to KatherineSanderson’s “Matters ofsubstance” – a pleasure to read in itself – brought me up shortwith the magnificent joke aboutthe BEST BEFORE date.

I cannot work out how pleased Bishop Ussher would have been to be to have hislaboriously-calculated date for the beginning of the world sowittily commemorated, butpersonally I loved it. Pleaseconvey my thanks to the artist.Bridget Rees Hains (Newnham1954)

CAM 70 03

Don’sdiary

Most graduates have pretty vivid memories ofexam term in Cambridge. In fact, many graduateshave pretty vivid nightmares about exam term. It’s an intense time.

For me, it’s a time when I’m forced to put asidemuch of what I enjoy most about teaching in this place. With exams just around the corner, there’s little appetite for intellectual exploration.Supervisions no longer have the spontaneity ofprevious terms. There are no random digressionsbuilt on random digressions, no curveballquestions from smart students that I struggle toanswer. In short, there’s no fun. It’s all replaced byhard work and rigour. It’s probably for the best,but I miss the fun.

In College, I’ve taken a group of first yearmathematicians under my wing. Most of themnailed the basics weeks ago. Now it’s all abouthoning, polishing, perfecting. It’s about repetition.Serious repetition. I feel like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid: I’ve got them all waxing on andwaxing off. I’m training an army of calculus-basedninja warriors.

Meanwhile, there’s little fun to be had back in thedepartment either. Sitting on the other side of thefence, I’m part of a team writing the final examsfor the third years. It’s a gruelling process. Oneperson comes up with a question and two otherssolve it before we enter a hellish round of checkingthat lasts for months. Long after we’re sure thereare no actual mistakes, we fret about possibleambiguities. We rephrase questions and squabbleover commas before rewriting them yet again. In our desperate search for typos, we resort toreading the questions out loud: equations, Greekletters and all. It’s a comic scene: me standing inthe middle of the room, half Euclid, half HomerSimpson, intoning: “Arr-mu-nu minus one-halfarr gee-mu-nu equals eight pi tee-mu-nu.” In frontof me, a row of distinguished professors followalong, their fingers tracing the symbols on thepage like five-year-olds learning to read.

By the end we have a maths exam to be proud of.In terms of its breadth, depth and difficulty, it’sprobably unrivalled in the world. A set of about120 questions, each designed to take a smartstudent 30 minutes to solve. On a good day, I could probably get through about 20% of them. If you’re ever feeling nostalgic, you can download

our masterpiece from the internet and relive thosecold sweats you felt when you heard the words:“You may now turn the page.”

The exams themselves go by in a flash, for studentsand faculty alike. Within two weeks the markingis done and the team of examiners is sitting in anairless room, drinking stale coffee and making ourfinal decisions. What level is needed for a First?What about a Third? Only after everything isfinalised are the anonymous candidate numbersreplaced with names and we pore over the list to see how the chips have fallen. Then it becomesreal. Among the names are students that I inter-viewed as nervous 17-year-olds and many morethat I’ve since supervised, lectured and mentored.Among the names are people I care about.

There’s one thing that surprises me afresh eachyear when I see the exam results: how very fairthey are. The idea that students should spend threeyears studying, only to be tested on a single weekof exams is surely medieval (OK, it’s actuallyGeorgian). Yet I’ve never seen an egregious mis-carriage of justice. The students nearly always getwhat they deserve. The high fliers are sitting thereat the top as expected; those who had better thingsto do than study are further down the list.

Having checked that there are no shocks, my eyesgo to the borderlines where the outcome is lesscertain. I’m looking for the names of two of myfavourite students (of course we have favourites).After two years of near misses, I’m willing them tobe among the Firsts. When I see their names, I givea little fist pump of joy. I don’t know if any bloodwent into their results, but I’m pretty sure therewas a whole lot of sweat and tears. And I couldn’tbe more thrilled for them. There may not be muchfun in exam term in Cambridge, but it still carriesits own rewards.

My room your roomWith reference to the interview withMichael Portillo (CAM 69), I believethat Noah’s Ark was so calledbecause all the sets were shared (the animals went in two by two).Richard Fleet (Peterhouse 1972)

Sporting timesIn your article on ultimate frisbee(CAM 69), a current member of the University team, Strange Blue,confessed to being unsure of theorigin of the team name. I suspect it isprobably a pun on Strange Brew, asong by 1960s heavy rockers Cream.

Strange Brew still gets a certainamount of radio play to this day, but I suppose it just goes to show thattoday’s amusing cultural reference istomorrow’s source of bewilderment. James Mobbs (Christ's 1994)

Pleasing puzzlesPlease congratulate Schadenfreudeon a wonderful instruction – thesymmetrical placing of the Jewishmonth was especially impressive –and a crossword that was great fun to solve. Recognising ‘Tammuz’was the key to understanding howthe grid worked, the mysterious titleconfirming. Excellent stuff.Teyrnon Powell (Caius 1968)

This was a very tough puzzle, thehardest ever in CAM, I think.Thanks to Schadenfruede for, onceagain, devising something as elegantand enjoyable!Robert Eastwood (Trinity 1967)

We are always delighted to receive your emails and letters.

Email your letters to:cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk

Write to us at: CAM, 1 Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB.

Please mark your letter ‘for publication’. You can read more CAM letters atalumni.cam.ac.uk/cam.Letters may be edited for length. David Tong is Professor of Theoretical Physics

and a Fellow of Trinity.

Professor Tong is a 2013 Pilkington Prize winner.damtp.cam.ac.uk

04 CAM 70

UPDATEMICHAELMASTERM

In his annual address on 1 October, the Vice-Chancellor celebrated the University’s capacityto determine its own future and spelled out some

of the choices that will be crucial to Cambridge’scontinued prosperity and pre-eminence.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said that as a “self-governing community of scholars”Cambridge enjoyed more freedom than almost anyother university, but that exercising such choiceinvolved great responsibility “to society, to eachother, and to the University that supports us”.

He identified three key questions to be addressedin the coming years. “How we grow without losingour distinctiveness, how we educate increasingnumbers of students, especially graduate students,and how we engage with those who choose tosupport us, will shape what the University looks and feels like in 20 years’ time,” he explained.

The Vice-Chancellor closed his speech with a challenge to the University community tocontribute to the debate. “Maintaining our freedomis hard and needs watchfulness,” he said. “The rightto choose has been hard earned – let us embrace it.”

To read the speech in full, visitcam.ac.uk/annualaddress2013

CUER1 OCTOBER SPEECH

Vice-Chancellor addressesthe University

Cambridge student solar teamcrash out of competition

SOCIETIES

The Cambridge student eco racing team,the UK’s leading team, has crashed out of the 2013 World Solar Challenge, a gruelling 3,000 km solar car marathonacross the Australian desert.

The Cambridge University EcoRacing (CUER) team was test-drivingResolution, a car the team believed to begame-changing and able to manage anaverage of 80 km/h in one of the world’sharshest environments.

The bullet-shaped car weighed only120kg, and carried the world’s mostefficient terrestrial solar array embeddedwithin a unique aft facing sun-trackingplate – an innovation that provides a 20per cent gain in power.

The racing team, led by Keno Mario-Ghae, represents a 60-strong studentsociety that has been leading the UK’ssolar vehicle development since 2007.The team had been predicted to do

exceptionally well this year but an acci-dent in pre-race testing put Resolutionoff the road (the team escapedunharmed).

“Our car had an accident duringwhich it rolled onto its side. Over thefollowing days, repairs were made to itsstructure to restore the safety cagearound the driver,” Mario-Ghaeexplained. “Further tests revealed newdynamic instabilities, which we were notable to fix in the time we had left beforethe race.”

Despite these setbacks, however, theteam remain upbeat. Mario-Ghae said:“The team will continue investigatingthe performance of Resolution in the UKand use what we’ve learnt [in Australia]to build a race-winning vehicle in twoyears’ time.

cuer.co.uk

CAM 70 05

It was the conundrum that baffled someof the greatest and most eccentric expertsof the 18th century and captivated theBritish public. The “longitudeproblem” – or how to establish a ship’sposition east and west from a fixedmeridian line – and the many attempts to solve it are contained in the archive of the Board of Longitude, which is nowavailable online via the CambridgeDigital Library.

In July 1714, an act of parliamentestablished prizes of up to £20,000each (worth about £1.5 million today)for determining longitude at sea. “Think The X Factor, only much moremoney and much more important,” said Professor Simon Schaffer of theDepartment of History and Philosophy

of Science. “It is a spectacular example of expert disagreement and publicparticipation. As well as attracting thegreatest scientific minds of the day, the Board enticed people who belong to one of the most important traditions inBritish society: the extreme eccentric.”

The archive preserves detailedminutes, ranging from the first recordedmeeting to the Board’s dissolution in1828. It also contains Captain Cook’slogbooks, accounts of the naming of Australia, and a letter from CaptainBligh of HMS Bounty, writing toapologise for the loss of a timekeeperafter his ship was “pirated from mycommand”.

cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude

FACULTY

Shark named after museumdirector

The director of the Sedgwick Museum of EarthSciences, Ken McNamara, has had a newly-discovered genus of shark named after him.

The Kenolamna, a possible ancestor of the greatwhite, is thought to have prowled the Earth’s oceans100 million year ago. The new genus wasdiscovered through the study of fossilised sharkteeth that date back to between 80 and 100 millionyears ago.

The fossil material, from Western Australia,reveals that the otodontid sharks were one of themost diverse and successful groups of sharks during the later stages of the Cretaceous period 65 to 100 million years ago, unravelling previousassumptions that they were only ever representedby one species of shark at any given time.

The finds, which have revolutionised the earlyhistory of megatooth sharks, were named afterMcNamara to honour his 30 years as palaeon-tology curator at the Western Australian Museum.

Dr McNamara, who has been director of theMuseum for two years, said he was “thrilled” that the genus would boast his name. “A load ofancient fossils have been named after me … is that a compliment? But in all seriousness, it is quite coolto have a fossil shark named after me!”

sedgwickmuseum.org

Alumni Festival big hitGraduates from around the world returned toCambridge in September to take part in theannual Alumni Festival. The human conditionwas a key theme, with huge numbers turningup to hear Professor Simon Baron-Cohenspeak on empathy, Professor BarbaraSahakian on smart drugs and ProfessorNicola Clayton on captured thought. Theannual Festival forms the ‘at home’ leg of theGlobal Cambridge lecture series. The 2014Festival will take place 26-28 September.alumni.cam.ac.uk/festival13

CAM roams freeGo digital and enjoy CAM on the movewith free apps for iOS and Android devices. To download visit: alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam

Anna B

etts

National M

aritime Museum

DIGITISATION

Board of Longitude online

Letter sent by Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty

UPDATEMICHAELMAS

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Open access to journals for alumni

Alumni now have access to a huge range ofacademic work online and free of charge.Access is via JSTOR, a high-quality,interdisciplinary archive of scholarship thatincludes leading academic journals across thehumanities, social sciences and sciences, aswell as primary sources. There are currently over 1,000 e-journals

available, with collections including Arts &Sciences I-VIII, Life Sciences, the IrelandCollection and 19th Century British Pamphlets,as well as a number of individual journal titles.Over the coming months more academic workswill be added.alumni.cam.ac.uk/jstor

Global network

Cambridge has a wider network of alumnigroups than any other university in the world.If you are one of the more than 55,000 alumniliving outside the UK, you can find out moreabout activities near you in the latest edition ofthe Alumni Groups Directory, enclosed with thisissue of CAM, or available to download online. alumni.cam.ac.uk/groups

E: contact@alumni.cam.ac.ukT: +44 (0)1223 332288W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

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CollectionCollectionIreland Ire

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Alumni meet-upsWherever you are in the world, local alumnigroups offer the chance to network,socialise and make new friends. Amongthe newest additions are the CambridgeSociety of Ukraine – contact AlinaSviderska (St Edmund’s 2011) atas2218@cantab.net – and the Oxford andCambridge Society of Flanders – contactPeter Anthonissen (Magdalene 1982) atpeter@anthonissen.be.

New interest groupA new shared-interest group has also beencreated: the Cambridge Real Estate FinanceAlumni Society in Asia. Contact Liqiang(Austin) Xu (Hughes Hall 2011) atliqiang.xu@cantab.net for more information.For a full list of groups please visit ourwebsite.

A Cambridge Christmas

We are delighted to be able to offer anexclusive range of gifts and merchandisethis Christmas. From embossed rings andcufflinks from Eva London to engravedpens from Onoto and alumni ties, there is something to tickle the fancy of everygraduate. For something extra special,

The Cambridge Satchel Company hascreated a unique University range – theperfect gift for a new graduate or for a fellow alumnus or alumna. Alumni canreceive a 10% discount on this range byentering CAMALUM at the checkout.

Orders must be placed by 3 December toensure delivery before Christmas.Overseas deadlines and prices may vary.

alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/merchandise 10%

DISCOUNT

UPDATEMICHAELMASTERM

The CambridgeSatchel Company

Images courtesy Studio Daniel Liebskind/Elliot Lewis Photography/Sam Ravanrouh/Royal Ontario Museum/Tony Tremblay/Dave Yoder/iStock

DIARYMICHAELMASTERM

08 CAM 70

Global Cambridge

7 December 2013, Royal OntarioMuseum, Toronto, Canada

Our Global Cambridgeseries brings a slice ofCambridge academic lifeto alumni around the world,giving those living abroadthe chance to take part in big-picture discussionswith the leading experts in their field and networkwith other alumni. This December, Global

Cambridge will take placein Toronto. Held at theRoyal Ontario Museum, the events will include a lunch with Alison Traub,the recently appointedexecutive director of

development and alumnirelations, a thought-provoking programme oflectures, and an eveningdrinks reception. Amongthe speakers will beProfessor AndrewWallace-Hadrill, director of the HerculaneumConservation Project, Bill Harris, Professor ofAnatomy (and head coachof the University’s IceHockey Club), and JanetCarding (King’s 1983),director of the museum. Whether you are from

Toronto or across the

border, or just visiting, we hope you will join us. Booking closes on 2 December.

Tickets cost C$125/£75.

alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

Toronto

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Edmund de Waal:On White Porcelain stories fromthe Fitzwilliam29 November 2013 – 23 February 2014

Edmund de Waal takes over three galleries of the Museum to present objects from hisresidency in China last summer,pieces from the Museum’spermanent collection, poetry,photographs and letters. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

How to network:Lessons from themovies28 January, Cambridge29 January, London

Making small talk with strangersis not everyone’s favouritepastime, but being able tonetwork is an increasinglyimportant skill. Nathalie Walker,Director of External Affairs atCambridge Judge BusinessSchool, provides practical skillsto improve your effectiveness.alumni.cam.ac.uk/howtonetwork

Cambridge ScienceFestival10-23 March 2014

Explore and discuss issues ofscientific interest and concernwith leading Cambridgescientists and fellow alumni at the Cambridge Science Festival. cam.ac.uk/science-festival

Kettle’s Yard ConcertSeasonWinter 2014, Cambridge

30 January: Fauré Piano Quartet – Bridge,Strauss and Brahms6 February: Kathryn Stott, Piano – Bach,Grieg, Rachmaninov,Shoshtakovich and Ravel13 February: Heath String Quartet – Mozart,Tippett and MendelssohnTickets from £15kettlesyard.co.uk

Save the date!Hay Festival22 May – 1 June 2014

Alumni events:E: events@alumni.cam.ac.ukT: +44 (0)1223 332288W: alumni.cam.ac.uk

Other events

In brief

DIARYMICHAELMAS

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Bo Lund

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Lara Harw

ood/Heart

Varsity Rugby12 December, TwickenhamThe Varsity Match in December has been the focus ofOxford and Cambridge rivalry since 1872. With 61 wins to 56 overall, the Light Blues hold the bragging rights, but with three wins in a row, do Oxford have the momentumright now? Take your place in the stands for the 132ndedition of this epic annual battle on Thursday, 12 Decemberat Twickenham Stadium.thevarsitymatch.com

Festive alumni networkingdrinks12 December, National Gallery, LondonNetwork at this festive drinks and canapés reception at theNational Café. Hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, and open to all alumni, studentsand their guests, this event offers a fabulous opportunity to mingle with up to 250 other alumni and senior Universitystaff. Tickets cost £39 (£35 for students, postdocs andVarsity Rugby match attendees).alumni.cam.ac.uk/events

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Edmund de Waal (Trinity Hall 1983) is a renownedpotter and also the author of The Hare With AmberEyes, which has sold over a million copies. He saysthat access to a stove and cook books at Cambridgeallowed him to make “cheap and terrible meals”,including rabbit stew of “unparalleled horribleness”.

Emily Evans is a second-year economist who saysthat one of the best things about not having a cookeris that it challenges you to find other ways to cook ascheaply as you can. Emily says she gets by with just a microwave, kettle and toaster. “We’ve managed tobake cakes and have dinner parties!”

Words Becky AllenPhotographChristoffer Rudquist

Ithink it’s the best view in Cambridge – incom-parable,” says Edmund de Waal as he looks over the College gardens and the Backs from the window

of N13. It’s a view unchanged in the 30 years since hearrived at Cambridge and one which the room’s currentoccupant, Emily Evans, loves too. “I woke up onemorning last winter to find it had snowed really heavily overnight. I looked out and there was snow oneverything. It was so beautiful.”

A good view usually demands a stiff climb, and whileboth appreciate the vista, neither De Waal nor Evansenjoy the stairs. “It was getting the books in on the first day,” says De Waal. “I remember carrying boxes up here. Up and down.” Evans agrees: “That’s the badthing. The first time I got here I genuinely couldn’t make it up the stairs without an uurrrggh!” she gaspstheatrically.

But while the view and the stairs are the same in N13, De Waal says the room itself is very different. “It could have been the 1950s,” he recalls. “It was

MYROOM,YOUR ROOMROOM N13, TRINITY HALL

“

CAM 70 11

“Art meets life,” proclaims thestrapline on the website ofCambridge Junction, one of the city’smost modern performance spaces.Art meets much else here too,including the Clifton Road IndustrialEstate, Nando’s and Cineworld.It’s not, like the Corpus Playroom,

a simple dash down a narrowpassage opposite King’s. Nor is it,like the ADC, adjacent to the loftyrhetoric of the Cambridge Union orthe warmth of the Friends MeetingHouse. On the contrary, coming fromtown will probably involve anextensive cycle or a trek up theinterminable Hills Road. So far, so not very Cambridge.

But this is the main appeal of theJunction: it is one of the few placesoutside the bubble where a studentwould typically venture. Whether for a spoken word night or to seeAmerican indie band Passion Pit, a diverse audience greets everyJunction act. Students at a gig maywell sit bemused as hecklersdemand to know a comic’s opinion of Arbury. The quaint intimacy of

student shows in town is nowhere to be found — dark and functional isthe order of the day.A spacious bar and waiting area

leads to three flexible performancespaces that host theatre, music,comedy and dance. A recent one-man show at the venue sawcomedian Mark Steel observe: “It’s a bit like a prison, this place, isn’t it?I feel a bit Johnny Cash here.” Yetblocks of concrete and drab interiorshave done wonders for the NationalTheatre and the Barbican Centre.Postmodern minimalism in anauditorium allows the performer tomake the space their own, at theperformance spaces at the Junctionand at the English Faculty alike.In many cities a building that could

be anywhere is not exactly some-thing to die for. Yet in Cambridge,where so many are plunged into atown centre that seems unreal in itsbeauty, perhaps it’s exactly what weneed. A trip to the Junction is like anacceptance letter all over again –when you’re told you can live, as wellas study, in the city.

a lot colder, but there was a gas fire, which was really nice for toasting crumpets. It was very spartan, peelingwalls, and I loved that very austere quality.”

He was saved from complete blandness by Kettle’sYard, which used to loan out pictures from its store at the start of term. “I borrowed some Alfred Wallispictures and a Ben Nicholson print, so I had a littlegrouping of pictures up here. You used to pay £1a term. It was really lovely.”

Arriving in Cambridge after an apprenticeship inJapan, De Waal also brought his pots: “I was full of mytravels and my apprenticeship. I was reading Englishbut I used to teach pottery in Cambridge – there used tobe a kiln in the basement of the Cambridge Union – soI used to make pots there and teach people. I had a littlerow of bowls from Japan on my windowsill … it wasstaggeringly pretentious.”

The china Evans keeps in N13 is more colourful and utilitarian – floral crockery and her favourite mug(a present from her brother) with Brains fromThunderbirds on it. “When I was little my dream jobwas to be a Thunderbird, until my Mum told me theydidn’t exist!” she says. She admits her plates aren’t veryinteresting either, but De Waal is less judgemental: “If people aren’t eating off plastic plates, I’m thrilled.China is china.”

Comparing notes on favourite places to study, theyfind a shared passion for the nooks and crannies of theUniversity Library. “Economics is right at the top in theSouth Wing. I gather up all the books I need and spendall day up there,” Evans explains. “I like the feelingthat no one is going to stumble across me.”

De Waal attributes his passion for archives – whichhave inspired both his writing and his pottery – to thelibrary: “The lovely thing I found was just the seren-dipity, the open shelving. It’s incredible and no one whohasn’t experienced it will ever know how wonderful it is. My obsession, my archive-loving life, really beganthere I think, where you just simply get lost by findingone thing and then leading to another.”

Asked what she’d bequeath N13’s next occupant,Evans is clear. “I’d leave my food hamper – it’s wonder-ful. All my friends keep their food in cupboards, but I insist on keeping everything in my hamper. My mumfills it up. So I’d leave them my hamper and tell them toget their mum to fill it up.”

De Waal would leave a book. “I had a book with a red cover, which I’d leave leaning against the windowpane when going out, because people got so fed up ofgetting all the way up here and discovering there was no one in.” But, he admits, he also used it to shutout the world every now and then. “I’d leave this book leaning against the window to say there was noone here, and then I could be completely by myself.”

I  had a little row of bowls from Japan on my windowsill. It was staggeringlypretentious

Conrad Landin is reading English at Christ’s

The best...venueinCambridge

Marcus G

inns

The solution to the twin problems of sewage andrubbish was a shining example of Victorian ingenuity,explains Cambridge Blue Badge guide Allan Brigham.“The great thing about the pumping station is that youhad to fuel it with the first refuse service,” says Brigham,also a former Cambridge street sweeper. “It burned therubbish to pump the sewage and that ended up in thesewage works at Milton, and then on local fields thatgrew the city’s food.”

Built in 1894, the buff brick pumping station housedtwo pillar-box red Hathorn Davey steam engines.Working one week on, one week off, 24 hours a day, the engines were kept in steam by a trio of boilers and six furnaces or “destructors”, which between themconsumed 22 tons of rubbish a day.

With some modifications – the addition of two gasengines in 1909 and an electric pump in 1937 to boostcapacity – the Cheddars Lane pumping station keptCambridge clean until 1968, when a new all-electricstation opened just downstream.

For those who love machines that clank, news of the council’s decision to demolish the old pumpingstation was horrifying. But thanks to engineers from the Cambridge Instrument Company and three research students from the University’s Department ofEngineering, the pumping station was saved and rebornas the Cambridge Museum of Technology.

Today, it’s a place of bliss not only for connoisseurs of smells, but for lovers of Victorian civic splendour.From its octagonal chimney and ornate red-brickdecoration to its blue, cream and olive-green tiling, theengine shed is a thing of beauty. Wheels, pistons, pipes,gauges, taps and tubes; brass, copper, cast iron andwood – the place is gleaming, burnished, and treasuredby its part-time curatorial adviser Pam Halls and herteam of 70 volunteers.

“They come because they love the collection, theengines, the history,” she says. “And I love the people. I love that raw enthusiasm, that people are here becausethey want to be here. That carries me when we’ve had a funding bid rejected.”

Currently fundraising for a new boiler, a backupsource of steam and new museum space, success wouldallow the museum to run in steam more often, and sharemore of its collection of Cambridge’s industrial heritagewith visitors. “We believe things at technology museumsshould work,” says Halls. “You only understand a machine when it’s moving. We hope to attract morevisitors and make it more family friendly. Lots of peoplefind science and technology frightening, we want toprove to them it’s not – and that it’s relevant.”

“Cambridge’s industrial history and technologyinspires me. Sadly it’s often overlooked, but it’s thehistory of ordinary people, dirty and hard,” she says.“Cambridge is full of people working in technologyindustries and we can show them they are part of a continuing link stretching back hundreds of years here, it gives them a place in the history of Cambridge.”

museumoftechnology.com

Working oneweek on, one week off, 24 hours a day, the engineswere kept in steam by a trio ofboilers and sixfurnaces

Beside the River Cam, off Newmarket Road, theVictorian pumping station served Cambridge formore than 70 years and had a profound impact on

the city’s residents. Before the pumping station, the citywas far from blissful. William Ranger’s 1849 report on public health in Cambridge painted a grim picture of the poorest parts of town. He wrote of bone yards and boiling houses, slaughter houses and scavengers, ofdecomposing animals littering Jesus Ditch, and a RiverCam that was little more than an open sewer.

With filth came disease: cholera, typhus, smallpox andmalaria. “The sanitary condition of numerous courts and places is so wretched as to be a disgrace to humanity,and still more to civilisation; and I believe it next to animpossibility for their inhabitants to be healthy, cleanly,or even moral,” Ranger wrote.

FULL STEAMAHEAD

SECRET CAMBRIDGE

Words Becky AllenPhotographs Marcus Ginns

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Photographs Edward Burtynsky

Labour relations in China have beentransformed over the last twenty years.Professor William Brown explains howpower is shifting to the people.

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Right:Manufacturing #18Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, FujianProvince, 2005.© Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers, London.

HowChinaworks

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In just a couple of decades, China has moved froma centrally planned system to a booming marketeconomy. The average real earnings of its 700

million workers have increased around five-fold. Howcan the accompanying surge in aspirations be managedin a country where power remains highly centralised?The outside world may be vaguely aware of the growingnumber of industrial disputes associated with thisunprecedented change. But of much greater significancefor the future of all of us will be China’s success inbuilding new institutions to accommodate the needs of its increasingly self-confident workers. It is only inthe past five years that the shape of these institutionshas started to emerge.

To understand how working people’s lives arechanging, we need to go back to the 1990s, as thesystem of total state ownership was being dismantled.The dislocation of workers’ lives was massive. Tenmillion people a year flooded into the cities from thecountryside, yet social security provision was minimal.

Rapid-growth capitalism often proved as ruthlesstowards Chinese workers as it had been to their 19th-century European predecessors, yet the only legallypermitted channel for worker discontent was amonolithic state-controlled trade union – an organis-ation designed for top-down communication anddefined by a race for growth.

By the start of the new millennium, government was beginning to become seriously concerned about growing discontent among both an older generation of displaced state employees and a younger generationof rural immigrants. And alongside these practicalconcerns was something more profound: an uncertaintyabout how unconstrained growth might impact onincome distribution. Inequality was increasing rapidly,posing a growing threat for social stability. Unlessworkers could somehow obtain a share of the profitsbeing reaped by their employers, inequalities woulddeepen.

As a result, tentative steps were taken to give workersa greater voice. Unions were encouraged to form localbranches, able to work with employers and governmentat whatever level was appropriate. Union recruitment in the new private sector was encouraged, as was thedevelopment of what was described as “collectivebargaining” between these union organisations andemployers.

Initial responses were largely token. Many workersdid not know they had been made union members, andmany collective agreements were top-down packagesadopted by the employers. The big change came in2008. First, experience of the financial crisis warnedChina off undue reliance on export-led growth,resulting in a radical effort to rebalance the economy by raising domestic consumption, primarily throughraising incomes. Second, the government was readywith a raft of labour legislation to provide workers with unprecedented rights. Most significant of these –because so much can be built on it – was the right tohave a written contract of employment. With an accom-panying system of mediation and courts, employmentcontracts gave workers sanctions against employerswho, for example, failed to pay them. They gave rightsto rural migrant workers. They gave employees theright to be consulted by employers on matters of mutualconcern. This provoked substantial public debate.

Those raised aspirations may have contributed to thestrike wave that occurred in 2010, mainly focused on western companies. Strikes are not illegal in China, but the law provides none of the protections for strikeorganisers that western workers take for granted. Mass use of mobile phones has made the covertorganisation of strikes relatively simple. But theresolution of a grievance needs more than this: it needssomeone to be put forward whom the workers trust to negotiate a settlement. A feature of the 2010 strikewave was the pragmatic way in which union andgovernment officials enabled representatives of thestriking workers to emerge to argue their case in theknowledge that they would not be victimised. Indeed,for all its hierarchical nature, in some parts of China the governmental and union structure has demon-strated considerable mediatory skills, all the moreimpressive for the absence of a culture of compromise in the brash new market economy.

And that is why I believe that it is the pragmatism of the Chinese that deserves our attention. This vast and varied country has at least six distinct layers of government, and considerable discretion is allowedto lower levels to experiment, so long as they do not transgress broad guidelines from Beijing. Indeed,officials in Beijing pay great attention to such experi-ments, monitoring them diligently to see what worksand what does not. As a result, central policy can evolveremarkably rapidly, as indeed it has and continues to do with regard to labour.

For example, one consequence of the law protectingemployment contracts has been a rapid growth in theuse of employment agencies by firms trying to procurecheaper labour. As a result, a year ago restrictions on the ratio of agency to regular workers who could be employed were introduced. Now the government isconcerned that the same cheap labour objective is beingpursued by firms outsourcing to less than reputable sub-contract firms. Policy-makers elsewhere will smile wryly, because the same problem and similar legal action, and similar reaction, have been issues inboth the European Union and Japan in the past fiveyears. Where markets rule, legislators seeking to protectworkers’ rights always face a moving target.

Another aspect of the efforts of the Beijinggovernment to reduce income inequalities is its use ofstatutory minimum wages. First introduced in 1994,and at different levels in different provinces and cities,these have been raised annually, apart from during theeconomic crisis year of 2008. But so rapid has been thegrowth of the economy that until recently minimumwage rates were still falling relative to average earnings.Now, a strategic policy change means that they havestarted to improve in relative terms, and while statutoryminimum wages in the developing world are often moreignored than observed, it is notable that in China theirpercentage spread between provinces has been narrow-ing. Doubtless, despite intensive lobbying from lower-paying western provinces seeking to attract foreigninvestment, central government seems determined tocombat increasing inequality.

Meanwhile, experimentation with collectivebargaining continues, within annual guidelines for payrises set by the central planners. Included in theexperimentation are different forms of workerrepresentation, often partial, often with management

A feature of the2010 strikewave was thepragmatic way inwhich union andgovernmentofficials enabledrepresentatives of the strikingworkers to arguetheir case

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Above:Manufacturing #2Shift Change, Yuyuan Shoe Factory,Gaobu Town, Guangdong Province,China, 2004

Right:Manufacturing #17Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005

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centrally involved, but with serious votes and stories ofelected representatives pressured to stand-down bydissatisfied constituents. Perhaps most interesting is the evidence that these processes are modifying manage-ment actions. For example, worker representatives arereported on occasion to have achieved better pay risesfor their less skilled colleagues than the employersinitially proposed. What is significant is not so muchwhether such behaviour is typical – it is probably not – but that it is permitted and, indeed, that union officials are increasingly acting as mediators to achieveagreement.

As one interested in the history as well as the eco-nomics of labour, I find the echoes of past industrial-isation fascinating. When nineteenth century westernEuropean employers in the same region and industrialsector – say manufacturing garments, or ceramics –found themselves competing for scarce labour, they triedto bring order to chaotic and unsettling bidding andcounter-bidding by forming employer associations and agreeing a scale of pay rates among themselves.From there it was a short step, and one often guided bygovernment, to negotiate with a trade union committeerepresenting workers at the companies affected.

Faced with similar circumstances, in a seminal policystatement in 2009, the Chinese trade union organisationdecreed that local sectoral wage bargaining was centralto its strategy. In terms of pay bargaining institutions,this is of fundamental importance. Developedeconomies in the west generally started collectivebargaining in this way, but met a fork in the road. Some – for example the United States and Britain – haveincreasingly let individual firms go their own way,closing down their employers’ associations and eitherdealing with unions separately or, ignoring themaltogether. But other countries – including most inwestern Europe – maintained sectoral bargaining, partlyas a way of sustaining robust training arrangements and sectoral minimum wages, and they did so withsubstantial legislative support. This is not to suggestthat China is heading towards some version ofScandinavian industrial social partnership. But theChinese government does seem to be committed to a legally-backed form of local, sector-based industrialgovernance with representative worker involvement.The implications are fascinating.

China’s workers have some interesting challengesahead. Partly as a result of the single-child policy, theworking age population of China will peak in 2015.Migration from the countryside is dwindling. Labour is going to become more scarce. On the other hand,Chinese entrepreneurs are beginning to respond to rising wages at home by outsourcing work toCambodia, Laos, Indonesia and elsewhere. A workforcewhich, in international terms, will be both highlyeducated and increasingly well-paid will want to beinvolved in the government of its working life. Remark-ably rapidly, and in a spirit of experimentation andconsensus, China is working out how this might be done. The only certainty? That the solution will beuniquely Chinese.

Professor William Brown lectured at the 2013Alumni Festival.He is Emeritus Master of Darwin College and HonoraryProfessor at Renmin University of China.

Above:Manufacturing #11Youngor Textiles, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005

Below:Urban Renewal #6Apartment Complex, JiangjunAo, Hong Kong, 2004

China’s workers have someinteresting challenges ahead.Chinese entrepreneurs areresponding to rising wages byoutsourcing work to Cambodia,Laos and Indonesia

The photographs shown are from the book China by Edward Burtynsky in which he documents the remnant and newlyestablished zones of Chinese industrialization.

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Entomologist Dr Henry Disney was collecting insects in theBritish Honduras (now Belize) rainforest when the jumping fer-de-lance snake reared up. “It just missed me,” he remembers.

“I knew that I mustn’t take my eyes off it, otherwise it would vanish.So I stood there swearing and gazing at it. I said to my assistant: ‘I want the mid-rib of a cohune palm, stripped of its leaflets, please’.It’s very long and very flexible, you see. So with that I whacked thesnake, cut off its head with a machete and skinned it.”

Disney was attempting to find the insect carrier for Leishmaniamexicana, a parasite that causes leishmaniasis, an unpleasant diseasecharacterised by skin sores and fever. It took several years and anencounter with a puma, but he eventually found his vector – a speciesof tiny sandfly. Entomologists, may, as Disney says, need nine lives,but they are rarely bored.

The rainforest seems a long way from the University Museum of Zoology, where Dr Disney is senior research associate and where more than a thousand of his specimens – gathered over a career spanning more than 50 years – are stored. A faint smell ofnaphthalene (mothballs, now consigned to history by health andsafety regulations) still hangs around the neat racks of mahoganycabinets, each containing hundreds of specimens, dried, pinned andneatly labelled. The place is a testament to the zeal of those who scourtropical swamps, rainforests and marshes in search of their prey –from the giant stick insects of South America to the tiny ruby-tailedwasps of southern Britain.

Left:Grasshopper

Right:Praying mantis

Photographs Jonathan Gregson

Insecthunters

All collectors are obsessive; but someentomologists are prepared to go to greater lengths than most, as Lucy Jolindiscovers.

Insect collecting was once merely a fashionable pursuit for Victoriangentleman. But there has always been a gulf between those who simply collected, and those who sought out – and continue to seek out – new species of insects for scientific purposes. Renowned biologist EO Wilson calls insects “the little things that run the world”. It’s true, says Dr Ed Turner, affiliated researcher in the Insect Ecology Group at the Museum. “Insects play an important role in many of the world’smajor ecosystem functions, such as pollination, which in turn isresponsible for more than 30 per cent of the world’s food production.They break up and help to decompose natural organic matter. They are food for a lot of bigger animals – swallow chicks have to eat tens of thousands of insects before they fledge. They carry malaria and a whole host of other human and animal diseases.” In other words,they underpin everything.

Charles Darwin began as a collector and ended up as a scientist. But he found that even in Cambridgeshire, beetle hunting was notwithout its challenges. In a letter to his friend Leonard Jenyns in 1846,he related how a beetle defended itself against his marauding collector’shand. “Under a piece of bark I found two carabi (I forget which) &caught one in each hand, when lo & behold I saw a sacred Panagæuscrux major; I could not bear to give up either of my Carabi, & to losePanagæus was out of the question, so that in despair I gently seized oneof the carabi between my teeth, when to my unspeakable disgust &pain the little inconsiderate beast squirted his acid down my throat &I lost both Carabi & Panagus!”

Nonetheless, Darwin remembered this time fondly. “But when helooked back, he didn’t think that highly of it as a scientific activity,”says Dr Alison Pearn, associate director of the Darwin CorrespondenceProject. “He thought collecting was box ticking, without any sense oftrying to understand the material.” Context, as well as observation andarrangement, should be vital.

“In what’s called an autobiographical fragment – written primarilyfor his family, though opinions differ as to whether he thought it wouldbe published – he actually said: ‘But no procedure at Cambridge hasever given me so much pleasure as collecting beetles ... it was the mere

passion for collecting. I did not dissect them and rarely compared theirexternal characters and published descriptions’,” Pearn explains. “So he saw collecting for the sake of collecting as a dead end. It wasn’t a truly scientific activity. As a mature scientist, it is observation andarrangement that’s really important.”

Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace lost four years’ worthof insects carefully collected in the Amazonian rainforest when the brig Helen, carrying him home in July 1852, caught fire. Wallace spent 10 days adrift in a boat before finally being picked up by another shipbound for Cuba. (He made up for it, going on to collect more than80,000 beetles in the Malay Archipelago. Some of his specimens, withtheir characteristic round labels, are also in the Museum.)

Today’s entomologists have better transport, and consequentlyworry less about starving, or shark attacks. But in many respects, insectcollectors of the modern age face the same challenges as Wallace –primarily, how do you find and catch the things? “You have to think a bit differently,” says Disney. “Go off down different avenues.”

First, choose your bait. On his Beagle voyage, Darwin tookadvantage of natural baits including dung, carrion, fungi and thecontents of spiders’ webs. Disney used humans. Previous work seekingthe leishmaniasis vector had used humans sitting still as bait, but had failed to demonstrate that the main man-biting species was transmitting the parasite. However, Disney recorded the number of the species biting people engaged in activity in the forest. One species,caught in small numbers on static humans, was more frequently caughton active humans. Further experiments by Disney’s colleague, PaulWilliams, involved human bait walking around while an assistant with a stick stirred the leaves on the forest floor. The sandfly lived under those leaves; when disturbed, it bit. And that in turn is whyleishmaniasis is a disease of forest workers such as mahogany huntersand chicleros, workers who collect the chicle sap from sapodilla treesused to make chewing gum.

Turner, who has collected in both the rainforests of Malaysia (wherehe discovered a new species of stick insect, Orthomeria turnerii) and the chalk grasslands of Bedfordshire, says that collecting in the UK is,

Left:Dragonfly

Far right:Digger wasp

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The Museum of Zoology will reopen, after extensiverefurbishment, in 2016.

museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk

Right:Stag beetle

unsurprisingly, easier – and that methods have barely changed since the heyday of the Victorian gentleman collector. “It’s like a holiday,” he says. “You rarely have to collect butterflies on grasslands at all, or use bait. You just net them. I worked on a project looking at how insects respond to changes in temperature. I just had to take theirtemperature with a tiny thermometer that you touch on their thoraxesand measure them. We didn’t have to hurt or kill them, because they are so easy to identify.”

But in general, once you have trapped your specimens, they must bekilled. “It seems a bit harsh,” says Dr William Foster, curator of insectsat the Museum. “But you need specimens. Insects are not like birds.You can’t always rely on observation of the living animal to identifythem. You may have to look at them in more detail – and for this it issometimes necessary to kill them.”

Hard-bodied insects are put in the “killing jar”, a glass jar with a seal. A killing agent is added – such as ethyl acetate – the lid is placedon, and then it’s just a matter of waiting. Soft-bodied insects are kept injars of alcohol. The Museum keeps several fine specimens of termites,still in their original jars from 1897.

The biggest problem an insect collector is likely to encounter,however, is other insects. Particularly in the rainforest, any dead insectwill instantly attract other hungry predators. Foster recalls a colleaguewho left his dragonfly specimens out on a table in the Sumatranrainforest and lost them all to foraging ants. Tick larvae, says Disney,are extremely irritating. “I’d get home, strip off my clothes, then mywife would extract them from my skin with forceps and dump them insome kerosene. The locals used to swab themselves with kerosene allover. I preferred the first method.”

But the hazards from fellow insects do not stop there. Most hard-bodied specimens are dried, pinned, and then placed in displaycabinets. Very small insects are kept between glass slides. But the tinymuseum beetle Anthrenus museorum attacks dried materials, includinginsects, stuffed birds and mammals. Beetles like it are endemic in museums. Using pesticide to kill the beetle is now banned, socollections must instead be frozen for three days at -28 degrees in order

to kill any larvae. (“I was a great fan of these yellow chemical oblongswe used to hang up, Vapona, they were called,” Foster says wistfully.“Sadly, they weren’t very good for people.”)

Sometimes it is necessary to study live insects. These are as good at escaping, as the museum beetle is at getting into places. Fosterremembers a particularly tortuous process securing the permitsnecessary to bring a species of bamboo-dwelling aphid over from West Malaysia. An official visited his office to check that all was well. “She noticed that my desk was crawling with tiny baby aphids.That didn’t go down very well.”

Insects are, by their very nature, ephemeral. Not for them thehundred-year lifespan of Darwin’s tortoises. The mayfly, famously, isborn, mates and dies within the space of a day. Entomologists seek tocapture these most fleeting of lives, these billions of births and deathsthat are going on around us every day, untold, unseen.

It’s perhaps telling that one of the most valuable collections at theMuseum, says Foster, does not contain the flashy butterflies beloved ofso many Victorian collectors, nor enormous wasps nests, but distinctlyunspectacular ladybirds. They are tiny things, perfectly preserved.Look closely and you will see miniscule differences – fewer spots or variations in colour. But most of them look exactly the same to the untrained eye. These are primary type specimens, all collected in the mid-19th century by entomologist George Robert Crotch who died of tuberculosis aged just 32. Any proposed new species must be compared against these types. Some are rare, some are easily found,but all are important.

“For a museum insect collection, the common things – somewhatparadoxically – can be more interesting than a lot of rare butterfliesfrom the same site,” says Foster. “Common things often tell you moreabout the world. If it’s something incredibly rare, you tend to get the same kind of beetles from the one place they are known to occur. You don’t really find much out. Whereas because the common thingsare everywhere, when their patterns change it tells you a lot about theecology or climate change. Eighty to 90 per cent of animals are insects.You’re always going to come across them. It’s what zoology is.”

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Imperial W

ar Museum

LEST WE FORGET

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Britain’s war memorials, at home and abroad, have significantly shaped the way we remember the Great War,says Professor David Reynolds.

Lest we forget: three little words murmured every RemembranceSunday. A century on from the outbreak of the Great War, thereseems little danger of forgetting. The government is planning

a large programme of commemorative events and a veritable barrageof books and films will target every possible centenary between now and 2018. We have no chance of forgetting, but what chance weunderstand?

Away from the rhetoric of remembrance, the Great War is beingreinterpreted in challenging new ways. As part of a modern thirtyyears’ war that redrew the map of Europe. As the trigger for a succession of anti-colonial revolts, from Egypt to China, that beganthe rollback of centuries of Europe’s global hegemony. As the start of a process of women’s empowerment that was one of the greathistorical novelties of the 20th century. And so on.

Yet British remembrance of the Great War seems stuck in thetrenches – literally and metaphorically. The period between 1914-18evokes images of mud and blood, of young men sent to their deathsfor no purpose by boneheaded, upper-class generals: the interpretersof this war experience are not historians but a few soldier poets,supremely Wilfred Owen.

There are, of course, many ways to interpret a war, and none isintrinsically right. What’s interesting is why the gulf between popularstereotypes and academic perceptions of 1914-18 has become so vast.

A simple answer to the question of why the British image of thewar remains stuck in the trenches might be the death toll. More than720,000 British soldiers were killed in 1914-18 –making it the mostdevastating war in British military history. But around 250,000British people died from influenza in 1918-19; the global death toll of that pandemic was somewhere between 50 and 100 million – farmore than the estimated 10 million war deaths.

A better explanation may be the names of dead soldiers that areinscribed for posterity on war memorials in towns and villages acrossBritain and along the old Western Front in France and Belgium. This naming was novel. Most of the soldiers who died at Waterloo in1815, like those at Agincourt in 1415, were dumped anonymously in mass graves. Only a few officers were brought home by wealthyfamilies for decorous, personalised burial. To borrow a phrase fromShakespeare, corpses were treated “as beseems their worth”.

This changed in the Great War. From almost the start of theconflict, bodies were collected, identified and recorded. The noveltyof identity discs made this possible for the first time, but the projectwould not have been undertaken without the vision and drive of a now little-known journalist and educator called Fabian Ware. Too old to serve, Ware volunteered as an ambulance driver in France,where he was appalled at the random carnage and began a one-mancrusade to register and tend the soldiers’ graves. His legacy was theImperial War Graves Commission, established in 1917.

All of the belligerent countries faced unprecedented challenges indealing with mass death in the age of industrialised warfare, but the philosophy of Ware and his Commission was distinctive. They insisted that the bodies should not be brought home, mainly ongrounds of cost, and they stuck to this policy even if families couldafford to pay because they realised such special treatment would bedeeply resented. Interestingly, the French government took a similarline but popular outcry forced it to relent and eventually nearly athird of France’s identified war dead were reinterred in family graves.Most of the remainder, who had died defending their homeland, were buried on French soil.

By contrast, British Tommies were laid to rest in foreign fields,despite vociferous protest from relatives. “Many thousands of

Left:To the Unknown BritishSoldier in France by Sir William Orpen

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Mothers and Wives are slowly dying for want of the Grave of their loved ones to visit and tend them-selves,” one petition informed the Queen, “and we feel deeply hurt that the right granted to othercountries is denied us.”

Although statist, Ware’s approach was alsofundamentally democratic. Each soldier was to havehis own grave, designed in a standardised way evenif the family could afford something grander, and no distinction was made between a general and a private. The Commission insisted on a plain anduniform headstone rather than a Christian cross.This suited the Empire’s religious diversity andwould be more durable against the elements, whilealso allowing extra room for name, rank, regimentand date of death. Next of kin were allowed to supply a short inscription but the wording was checked to avoid allowing “free scope for theeffusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimentalversifier, or the crank”.

The apparent “tyranny” of the War Graves Commission aroused a storm of protest. The sculptor Eric Gill called standardisedheadstones a “Prussian imposition”. In parliament, Lord RobertCecil observed that during peacetime those “closest to the deceased”were left to decide on the form of memorialisation, so why should it be any different in wartime? “Right through the GravesCommission,” Cecil fumed, “is the conception of a nationalmonument” adding that this was an “entirely novel idea”. Neverbefore had the state claimed “a right to turn the individual memorialsto individual persons into a national memorial against the will andagainst the desire of their relatives”.

But Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, supported theCommission in seeking to give the dead soldiers “memorials which will last for hundreds of years”. It would console relatives, he declared, to know that even “the humblest soldier” would beremembered by name “through periods so remote that probably allthe other memorials of this time will have faded and vanished away”.This was an enduring memory of a sort previously possible only formonarchs and aristocrats.

Even where the body parts could not be identified, the remainswere given dignity. Anonymous French graves bore crosses with thestark word “Inconnu”, whereas the British headstones included what details could be gleaned about rank, regiment and date of death,plus the words “Known unto God”. This phrase was proposed by Rudyard Kipling, who also suggested the quotation “Their NameLiveth for Evermore”, from Ecclesiasticus, for the Stone ofRemembrance in each cemetery.

Kipling worked indefatigably for the Commission, perhaps inexpiation for his conduct during the patriotic fervour of 1914 whenhe pulled strings to get a commission for his acutely short-sighted son.Jack Kipling was last seen, half his face blown off, stumbling in agonyon the battlefield of Loos. Like Fabian Ware, Rudyard Kipling was an old man chastened by what war had done to a younger generation,many of whom were volunteer soldiers. The continental statesoperated from the start with conscript armies, but Britain did notimpose conscription until 1916. Some 2.5 million British menvolunteered to fight, 43 per cent of those who served in the BritishArmy in 1914-18.

The fact that millions had freely chosen to fight – including manyof those who died on the Somme – left a profound impression. It certainly changed the terms of political debate, making it almostimpossible by 1918 to resist demands for universal male suffrage,even for property-less workers. “What property would any man have in this country if it were not for the soldiers and sailors who arefighting our battles,” declared Sir Edward Carson. “If a man is goodenough to fight for you, he is good enough to vote for you.”

Ware’s project of war commemoration was, I think,an extension of these new wartime attitudes to democ-racy. Equality in death, as in life, required having a name. Hence the immense efforts undertaken to recordeven the names of the missing, as on the great Sommememorial at Thiepval designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens,architect of the Cenotaph.

This massive state project to give nobility andmeaning to industrialised carnage resulted in nearly a thousand architect-designed cemeteries and memorials, running like a ribbon through Belgium andFrance. The total bill was £8.15m, about twice the costof a single day’s shelling in the last weeks of the war –burying was much cheaper than killing. But, measuredagainst the different fiscal arithmetic of peacetime, the work of the Imperial War Graves Commissionconstituted one of the biggest government construction projects of the 1920s, eclipsing the modern stations of the London Underground or the programme of newtelephone exchanges.

And so, on the graves in Belgium and France and on war me-morials all across Britain, not to mention the walls of College chapels,these names stand out. But who were these men? What kind of people were they? Sometimes clues can be gleaned from letters home,still preserved in a family attic, or among army personnel records in the National Archives at Kew, but much is left tantalisingly to the imagination. Hence the popular appeal of war novels such asSebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,which try to bring the dead to life. It is perhaps the enduring presenceof the names, combined with their fundamental anonymity, thatmakes them so arresting. So near, yet so far, and so many.

Despite all the hopes, the war of 1914-18 did not prove the war to end war. After 1945, new graves were constructed in the old wayon new battlefields, at home more names were added to local warmemorials, almost as a postscript. But this time victory was clear-cutand gained at roughly half the cost in British lives. This cast a differentlight on the conflict that had previously been known as the GreatWar: it became the first world war, an inconclusive precursor to thesecond, which was celebrated as Britain’s “finest hour”.

Perhaps it is natural that problematic wars are memorialised interms of cost rather than achievement. For instance, Americanmonuments to the second world war – which transformed the UnitedStates into a superpower — are generally heroic: a classic example is the memorial outside Washington DC, with US marines raising the stars and stripes on top of hard-won Iwo Jima. But the officialmemorial to the Vietnam war – which ripped cold war America apartand remains hard to justify or even explain – is simply a list of some58,000 American dead, etched into highly reflective black stone, so that the visitor sees his or her face when tracing the name of a buddy or relative. The memorial is at once intensely abstract and yet deeply personal, the encounter of the living with the dead through the mystery of names. It is, I think, no accident that the inspiration for Maya Lin, its young Chinese-American architect, was Lutyens’Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval.

Vietnam is still a recent scar for Americans, fifty years young,whereas all the wartime Tommies have now passed away. The soldiersof 1914 are, in fact, now as remote in time to us as they were to the Redcoats who fought Napoleon at Waterloo. The centenary of theGreat War in 2014-18 is a chance to move out of the long shadowscast by those names and see the conflict in broader terms. It is timenot only to remember, but also to understand.

Each soldier wasto have his owngrave, designed in a standardisedway, and nodistinction wasmade between a general and a private

David Reynolds is Professor of International History and a Fellow of Christ’s.His new book, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century,is published by Simon & Schuster on 7 November.

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It’s like being five years old again, as my questions spillout: “Why is the sky blue?” “What happens whenRibena goes into water?” “Doesn’t all chocolate melt

in your mouth?”The answers are: (i) Because the sky contains

fluctuating pockets of different densities of gas – thedenser pockets, which best scatter the light, tend to be small and so scatter shorter-wavelength light, which is blue; (ii) Clumps of water molecules will sit alongsideclumps of Ribena molecules down to a scale of 50micrometres, and then on a much tinier scale the twoliquids diffuse into each other; and (iii) No. Cocoa butter possesses six crystalline forms and only one ofthem, Form V, is optimal for melting in a human mouth.

Good-humouredly fielding these questions is Dr GeoffMoggridge, Reader in the Department of ChemicalEngineering and Biotechnology. Tying all his answerstogether, and running like a thread through Moggridge’swork, is his fascination with understanding how – at a molecular level – substances mix.

The result is a remarkably diverse career,encompassing analysis of the flow properties of Marmite(the spread is “complex and non-Newtonian”) and the x-raying of chocolate bars, as well as the development of artificial heart valves potentially superior to any nowon the market. But currently occupying Moggridge’sattention, when he’s not engaged with such hands-onprojects, is his attempt to solve a puzzle that has intrigued

Diffuse interests

CV

1988 BA in NaturalSciences, King’s

1992 PhD in Chemistry,King's

1992 ResearchFellowship, King's

1993 European HumanCapital andMobilityFellowship, held at ILL, Grenoble andLURE, Paris

1995 Lectureship,Department ofChemicalEngineering;Fellow of King's

1997Secondment to ICIplc

2001/2 George T. PiercyDistinguishedVisiting Professor,University ofMinnesota

2011 Readership,Department ofChemicalEngineering &Biotechnology

Words Victoria JamesPhotograph Marcus Ginns

Dr Geoff Moggridge is using his fascination with how substances mix together in diverse and potentiallylife-changing ways.

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researchers since Victorian times and whichEinstein himself explored a century ago: themysteries of the process of diffusion.

Quite apart from its pedigree – otherscientists to have studied diffusion includeRobert Boyle and James Clerk Maxwell – thephenomenon lies at the very heart ofMoggridge’s discipline. “If you were to askwhat defines chemical engineering,” he says,“I’d say heat transfer, mass transfer andthermodynamics. Mass transfer is such a fundamental part of chemical engineering that it must be valuable to fully understanddiffusion, which is part of it.”

Diffusion can be characterised in two ways:bulk diffusion, which is the overall movementof molecules of two substances into oneanother; and self diffusion, which is the movement of any given individual molecule.Moggridge is interested in relating these pro-cesses, as they occur in so-called “non-ideal”liquids. In an “ideal” liquid – say a mixture of A and B – the bonds between the molecules ofeach component liquid (A+A and B+B) are of equal strength to those between molecules of the mixed liquid (A+B). Diffusion in thesecircumstances has been explored and robustlytheorised. But in non-ideal liquids – either thosein which A and B will barely bond at all, ormuch rarer substances in which A and B bondto each other more strongly than to their ownkind – the process remains enigmatic.

Moggridge’s interest was piqued when – ashe disarmingly puts it – “I realised that what I’dbeen teaching my students was wrong.” Moreaccurately, he realised that various conceptscore to chemical engineering are really onlyapproximations for the particular process hewas interested in. You don’t need to understandthe chemical terminology to recognise thispursuit of the specific hidden behind the generalas he explains it: “I’d been teaching my studentsabout concentration gradients, but [in thediffusion of non-ideal liquids], the concen-tration gradient is just an approximation for thechemical potential gradient. Then you suddenlyrealise even that is only an approximation of what’s happening near the critical point – and that seemed very interesting indeed.”

The puzzle of how non-ideal liquids diffuseis so interesting, in fact, that Moggridge admitsit occupies his thoughts “even when gardeningor in the shower. Sometimes I’m drawingpictures, other times writing, doing spread-sheets, or collecting ancient data”.

Much of the primary data used for hiscalculations comes from the lab of ProfessorLynn Gladden, the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and, he says enthusi-astically, “the top person using nuclear magnetic resonance in chemical engineering in Britain, probably the world”.

But another rich source of the very precisedatasets his investigations need are experi-ments performed decades ago. “There was a rash of enthusiasm for looking at this in the 1950s and 1960s, so I do a lot of trawlingthrough libraries, really obscure ones.” Draw-

ing pictures, and poring over dusty texts inhidden libraries like some Dan Brown hero –it’s all a long way from how most of us imaginechemical engineers work.

If he cracks the puzzle of how non-idealliquids diffuse, Moggridge says he’ll be deeplysatisfied to have solved a mystery that lies at the heart of his discipline. And yet he cheer-fully admits that should he succeed, “thenumber of people in the world who’ll care willbe tiny. You won’t switch on the TV and hearabout it”.

But Moggridge has another project onthe go that you may well hear about onthe TV, perhaps within the next couple

of years. He heads a team aiming to develop an artificial heart valve that promises to drastically improve patient quality of life. Thisproject is also driven by a fascination with howsubstances mix, and how they can be made tomix more effectively.

At present, two types of artificial valves areavailable. There are rigid, inorganic ones madefrom pyrolytic carbon, which are very durablebut also tough on the blood, which leads to arisk of clotting and means patients are requiredto take blood-thinning drugs. Or there aremore natural and effective organic valvesfashioned from the pericardium of pigs orcows and shaped on a metal stent – but theseare dead tissue, chemically preserved, and havea limited lifespan necessitating replacementafter 15 years.

Could there, wondered Moggridge, be a way of creating a valve with the best qualitiesof both? It took him back to non-idealmixtures – in this case, mixtures of polymers(any molecule formed of monomer subunits,examples being synthetic plastics and DNA)– to produce “block copolymers”. “You stickmolecules together with chemical bonds so they can’t separate, so you get chains of molecules that sit in structures: little chains,tubes or lamelli [flat plane shapes]. If youchoose the right polymers you can have onethat is hard and long and thin, and one that is

springy and rubbery in a matrix, and put themtogether.” Such a combination would deliverboth the flexible efficiency of an organic valveand the durability of an inorganic one.

It’s an idea that has attracted mediaattention, brought about a collaboration with a lab in Milan that has modelled the stress distribution in the valves, and secured a three-year grant from the British HeartFoundation. The second half of 2014 shouldsee the first live trials of the team’s blockcopolymeric valves in a test group of pigs.

Moggridge is plainly fascinated by theintricacies of design, fetching his laptop toshow me the stress analysis modelling. The 3Dimage of a valve rotates on the computerscreen; the aorta is circular in cross section, but the valve has three lobes, like some exoticcarnivorous plant. As a result, there are areasof pressure near the corners of the lobe-flaps,where the blood must push hardest to getthrough. “You see,” he says eagerly, pointing atthe screen, “you need an anisotropic physicalproperty. That’s something that’s more stretchyin one direction than the other,” he adds, seeingmy bewilderment.

After the pigs, the next stage is humanpatients. “That’s not close enough yet to bescary,” he says, “but if the pig trials go reallywell then I’ll probably be thinking: ‘Oh mygod, they’re actually going to be putting thisinto somebody.’”

“I really like having the two projects,” says Moggridge, explaining that these very different investigations have a shared root inhis fascination with how things mix. “There’sone where I can read papers from 1912 aboutdiffusion and that’s fun, and it’s pure, but if I did only that I’d sit there wondering what on earth is my point in life. So it’s great to have a balancing project that is completely the opposite, which is entirely driven by thechallenge to make a product that’s better thanall the existing ones and which if it workedwould really make a difference to people’slives.”

There’s another project of Moggridge’s that also reveals his interest in structure anddesign – a new-build house that is theculmination of a decade of planning by itsproud owner. It stands tall next to the bridgeacross from Midsummer Common, deep incollege boathouse territory. It’s a strikingbuilding that, while occupying a relativelymodest footprint, opens up room after room of airy space. “I’d lived in the Gibbs Building in[King’s] College before,” he explains. “[It has]very high ceilings, so you become accustomedto a sense of space.”

The house was created by Cambridgearchitects Freeland Rees Roberts, withMoggridge closely involved in the designprocess. The use of split levels means it looksalmost like two towers, bonded together. It’s beautifully proportioned –which is morethan a little ironic for the home of a scholardedicated to understanding non-idealstructures.

Drawing pictures andporing over dusty texts inhidden libraries – it’s all a long way from how mostof us imagine chemicalengineers work

Opposite page:Professor Martin Daunton,Master of Trinity Hall,and Dr Claire DauntonChestnut Forestby Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)

This painting was acquired fromthe artist in 1952 and waspresented to the FitzwilliamMuseum when the Trust ended.Professor Daunton says: “Justbefore we moved into the Lodgewe were at an exhibition ofHitchens’ paintings in Sussex. We also went to the Pallant Housegallery in Chichester, where therewere many on display. We bothsaid it would be excellent to haveone in the Lodge – and when wewent to the store at the Fitzwilliam,there it was! I like his ‘romanticmodern’ representation of theEnglish countryside, which bringsback memories of walks in thecountry in the autumn.”

Theborrowers

Search the internet for the Cambridge Contemporary Art Trust(CCAT) and your screen will quickly fill with links to Kettle’sYard and the many smaller galleries and local artists specialising

in contemporary art in Cambridge. Although somewhat buried in the online record, the CCAT laid the foundation for them all, and without it, the history of modern art in the city would be verydifferent.

Late-1940s Cambridge was a place of change in a world ofausterity. A flood of ex-servicemen made for a worldly student body,keen to get on with their lives after the hiatus of the second worldwar, and term dates were staggered to accommodate them. In 1947the Ministry of Education expanded the number of scholarships andlocal authority awards became more generous, making universityeducation accessible to a generation eager to embrace it.

University societies were revived, and interest in the arts –particularly literary and theatrical – blossomed. The Fine ArtsSociety was well established, but the preference there was for oldmasters; there was no place at Cambridge for contemporary art.

Then in 1946, ex-RAF officer Bill (WG) Howell arrived at Caiusto read architecture, bringing with him a passion for modern British art. He conceived a lending scheme, the first of its kind in Cambridge, in which subscribers would be entitled to borrow an original artwork for a term. At the end of this period, they wouldreturn the piece and select another.

Throughout 1947, Howell and his colleagues established a collection for the CCAT. Howell himself contributed half a dozenworks, which remain in his family, including pictures by CharlesGinner and William Scott. Other pieces were borrowed or boughtfrom artists. Howell wrote to the painter John Piper and said:

In 1946, ex-RAF officer and fresherBill Howell had an idea: a studentlending library for contemporary art.

William Howell pictured in 1961.

Henk Snoek / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

Words Penelope RancePhotographs Alun Callender

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Top left:Simon HiltonStill Lifeby Tony Bartl (1912-1998)

Czech Tony Bartl’s workwas exhibited by The Hilton Gallery, an early championof contemporary art inCambridge and a supporterof the CCAT. This is one of two of Bartl paintings the Hilton Gallery lent to the Trust. They appear in the exhibition catalogue for January 1948. “It’s apainting I grew up with andwhich was always part of a relaxing environmentand hopefully still is,” saysHilton.

Left:James Howell (Fitzwilliam 1979) Deputy Director ofDevelopment at Caius Cranmer Hall, Croydonby Barbara Jones (1912-1978)

“Barbara Jones was mygodmother and a greatfamily friend. One of thethings I love about thispicture is the idea ofBarbara discovering thehall, and her excitement topaint it before it fell down.I’m now at Caius where my father studied and it¹samusing to think that in1948 he eyed up a picturefor the collection that isnow on my wall.”

Above:Professor Koen Steemers(Darwin 1987) Head of the Departmentof ArchitectureHead in Hand by Henry Moore 1898-1986)

The CCAT ended in 1962with a selling exhibition.With the proceeds from this sale, the Trust’s lastPresident, Robin Spence(Queens’ 1959), went tovisit Henry Moore toacquire something by which the Trust could be remembered. Mooresuggested this bronzemaquette called Head inHand. Spence designed a small tubular stand, madeby McKays of Cambridge,so that the piece could bedisplayed in the School ofArchitecture.

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Phillips, Howell’s daughter-in-law. About 80 pictures were crammedin, among them work by Lucian Freud, John Craxton, Ronald Searle,Kenneth Rowntree and Mary Kessell.

In December 1948, Howell wrote to Clark again, and this timesaid: “The Trust is flourishing. We now have over 70 pictures, 35 ofwhich have been lent, like your own, by collectors and friends of theTrust. We have bought 30, and the rest have been presented by artistsor friends … we have sold three pictures so far, and will now buy newpictures from the same artists.”

Howell related his experience of visiting Oxford, where PembrokeCollege had set up its own lending scheme: “Lucky Oxford to be ableto get official sanction and even support for such a scheme. I ampersuading the Cambridge boys to keep at their college authorities totry and emulate Pembroke’s example.” He finished with: “Withoutyour advice and support we probably never would have had the nerveto think we could succeed.”

Their nerve was matched only by their determination. SerbanCantacuzino, 1948/9 president, recalls how “Bill Howell did wondersgetting hold of pictures. I remember going to the Tate with EddieMarsh to choose some paintings. I don’t think we thought of it interms of hard work. It was just a sort of enthusiasm, a love of art and a feeling that contemporary art was very important.”

Sir Alan Bowness, 1952/3 president and later director of the TateGallery, expanded the collection: “I wanted to run CCAT because it gave me the opportunity to meet with artists I admired and buy or borrow their work. I bought half a dozen more ‘popular’ pictures.

“In 1952 I went to see Ivon Hitchens with Martin Richardson[president 1951/2]. He was painting landscapes, so we chose Chestnut Forest, and he let us have it for, I think, £30, half the price he would have got from a dealer. He let us have it because it was goingto Cambridge for undergraduates.”

By 1958, the Trust owned 48 original works, having recently added Wyn Casbolt’s Quayside and a lithograph of Clare by MichaelRothenstein, part of a number commissioned by the CCAT. Bowness

says: “There was a scheme to have a set of Cambridge lithographs,started by Serban Cantacuzino. John Piper, Kenneth Rowntree andRothenstein had been asked – I suggested John Minton and PrunellaClough.”

In 1959, the Trust hosted an exhibition by Magda Cordell, EduardoPaolozzi and John McHale. It was organised by president RobertFreeman, who would become famous for shooting Beatles album covers,including Help and Rubber Soul. “He must have had great contacts in the art world,” says Phillips. “The exhibition was very ‘of the moment’,and considered controversial at the time.”

But by 1962, the CCAT had become unwieldy. Administration wasdifficult, with membership across the University and the need to findexhibition space each term. “I designed posters, got them printed,arranged the exhibition,” says 1961/2 president, Robin Spence. “It didn’tseem like that much work at the time, but thinking back, it was a lot.” Senior Treasurer Michael Jaffé, Cambridge’s first History of Art lecturerand later Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, decided to wind up theTrust. A Varsity article reported that: “The Trust preceded the pictureloan schemes which most colleges now run themselves. And it now feelsits function has been taken on by these. Mr A M Jaffé, the SeniorTreasurer, said: ‘The time has come to hand over the task.’ One of itsfinest possessions, an oil by Ivon Hitchens, will go to the FitzwilliamMuseum in commemoration of the work of the Trust during the past 15years.”

Howell’s ambition for college schemes was realised – Christ’s andJesus still run theirs. His broader legacy is that contemporary art hasbecome ingrained in the culture of the University. “Post-war, as far as art,music, culture was concerned, it was tremendously philistine,” saysCantacuzino. “There was no appreciation of modern art. You could saythe Trust helped stop England being a philistine nation. I rememberpeople saying how wonderful it was to have a Graham Sutherlandhanging on their walls. They came back to exchange and said they weresorry to lose it.”

“There’s nothing like the direct contact between the work of art andthe owner or borrower,” says Bowness. “It gave people the opportunityto own something, or at least look at it. The culture in Cambridge in the early fifties was very literary, not very visual. We were a lone voice.”By the 1960s, attitudes had changed, in part due to Jim Ede opening upKettle’s Yard as a gallery in 1958. Robin Spence says of that time:“Modern art was part of the culture at Cambridge. The CCAT madegood modern art accessible to anybody at a reasonable price.”

But what of the pictures? Hitchens’s Chestnut Forest remains in theFitzwilliam’s collection; Spence has a Georges Braque lithograph; and theHowell family still owns Bill’s collection. An internet search throws up a sole example – Keith Vaughan’s Still Life with Greengages and YellowCup was auctioned by Bonham’s in 2011 for £42,000.

Those pieces owned by the CCAT were sold, realising £750. Spencerecalls: “Michael Jaffé asked me to [use that money to] commission a work of art as a record of the CCAT, a lasting piece the University couldbenefit from. I approached Henry Moore and explained my mission. He came up with a bronze maquette of a face and hands, and said he’d letme have it for £750, although it was worth more.

“I was delighted. I arranged for it to be displayed in the School ofArchitecture, because I was a student there. I designed a bracket whichcantilevered from the wall under the roof lights by the Head of School’sroom. It looked brilliant, but it’s in storage now.”

As an architect, Bill Howell is best remembered for the Young Vic, theCambridge Graduate Centre and St Anne’s in Oxford. He returned toCambridge in 1973 as professor of architecture, but died in a car accidentin 1974. While at the Architecture School, he would have walked past the Moore maquette on a regular basis – perhaps unaware that it was a permanent reminder of a revolution he had sparked almost threedecades before.

“I want to see this scheme as an outright effort at group patronage ... at first we will buy modestly, always direct from artists … youngstersof talent who can produce pictures which will effect some responsefrom their contemporaries … I feel our crying need is to get somedecent modern pictures in Cambridge where they will be seen.”

Howell arranged loans from renowned collectors, including thedirector of the National Gallery Sir Kenneth Clark and WinstonChurchill’s private secretary Sir Edward Marsh. He sent Clark a leafletoutlining the scheme. In it, he noted: “The undergraduates haveresponded with great interest and enthusiasm.” The leaflet stated that:“In return for a modest subscription, any person living in Cambridge,whether in the town or University, will be able to have an originalpiece on his own wall; and thus will have an ideal opportunity to enjoy and appreciate works by our contemporary artists.” The cost ofa subscription was £2.

The ambition of the CCAT for acquiring quality art wasremarkable. “It was a whole generation of sparky undergraduateswho’d been through the war, survived, and wanted to build a bravenew world,” says Charles Howell, Bill’s eldest son. “They contactedthe great and the good, and upcoming artists, brazenly asking toborrow their paintings. In that period the art world was smaller – youcould just ask people to help.”

Initial patrons included Anthony Blunt, famed as an art historianbefore being outed as a spy, Henry Moore, and Professor ofArchaeology AW Lawrence, brother of TE Lawrence and an expert on classical sculpture. In November 1947, Varsity reported that “theCCAT now has 50 pictures”, along with the news an exhibition was to taken place the following term. The trust had built a membershipamong students and younger dons, and had subscriptions from the University Press, School of Agriculture and several junior combi-nation rooms. In January 1948, the first exhibition was held in TrinityJunior Parlour, the “least likely place for an exhibition”, says Sam

Charles Howell and Sam Phillips plan to tell the story of the CCAT through an exhibition and a publication. If you have recollections or pictures, pleasecontact Ms Phillips at phillips.sam@btconnect.com

Extracurricular CAM 70 39

University matters 41My Cambridge 42Reading list 44Cambridge soundtrack 45A sporting life 47Prize crossword 48

JillC

alder

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Andrew Perne served as Vice-Chancellorof the University five times between

1551 and 1580, a lively period in England’shistory. To be an academic leader atCambridge in those days was to be areligious leader too, and it was a hazardoustime. Perne thrived, though his strategyearned him some ridicule. Protestant underEdward VI, Catholic under Queen Mary and Anglican under Elizabeth, he has been wryly described by modern writers as having demonstrated “ambidexterity” and“ecumenical latitude”. Some contem-poraries more pointedly dubbed him “OldAndrew Turncoat”, but he was also one ofthe fiercest promoters and defenders of thisUniversity. We are fortunate to live in more stable

times than Perne: times that separate thefunction of academia from the functions ofreligion and national politics. Our choicesare no longer about life and death, or aboutsaving our own necks. But we still need tomake choices, both as individuals and as aninstitution. In this University we enjoy more power

over our own choices than almost any otheruniversity in the world. We are, it is oftensaid, a self-governing community ofscholars. And our institutional autonomyunderpins our intellectual freedom, which isthe real prize. When we make our ownchoices, the education and research weproduce are at their best. So to what purpose do we put our valued

freedoms of organisation and thought? Theanswer is simple: they allow us to take thelong view. Universities are almost the onlyinstitutions with a purpose that requires along-term perspective. Very few companieshave the will and the ability to look decadesinto the future. Governments may take a longview as stewards of the nation’s interest, but this is tempered by shorter-term politicalcycles. We take the long view too in the decisions

we make about our own organisation. So what now are the choices before us?What do we want our University to look like

in 10 or 20 years’ time? Here, I offer threequestions that we must address in thecoming years.The first set of decisions before us

concerns our physical growth. The decisionto proceed with the construction of NorthWest Cambridge has already been taken,but there will be plenty more choices to make as we develop those plans. TheBiomedical Campus around Addenbrooke’sHospital will soon house the global head-quarters of AstraZeneca, and PapworthHospital is planning a move to the same site. These developments are a tremendous

validation of the global importance of theCambridge cluster of high-tech industries.They are complemented by growth moredirectly initiated by the University. Wecontinue to develop West Cambridge, with a new Sports Centre and a £41 million homefor the Department of Materials Science and

Metallurgy. The central sites continue to be developed, notably the CambridgeConservation Campus.This growth is good, and is a vote of

confidence in Cambridge. And yet we rightlyprize Cambridge’s human scale – theunplanned conversations, the comingtogether of a rich diversity of knowledge and experience, the spark that comes from a collision of ideas from different sorts of minds. The first choice facing us, then, isthis: how can we preserve thatdistinctiveness as we grow?The second question relates to growth in

the Cambridge community. We have madethe choice to increase numbers – particularlygraduate student numbers – and with thatchoice comes responsibility. We should takestock of what it implies for teaching qualityand assure ourselves that we can providethe same quality of teaching that is thehallmark of our undergraduate provision. The third question I invite you to consider

is how we build our partnership with ourbenefactors. Without philanthropy, ourresources are insufficient; research fundingmust be complemented by benefaction.When it comes to creating long-lastinginfrastructure, the partnership betweenacademic leaders, donors and the Develop-ment Office will create an exceptionalopportunity.Our answers to these three questions –

how we grow without losing our distinctive-ness, how we educate increasing numbersof students and how we engage with thosewho choose to support us – will shape what the University looks and feels like in the future. These choices are critical and ourresponsibility is great. Alumni areencouraged to contribute to these debates.The wider community trusts us to

choose how best we contribute to the world. Such trust requires a measure of courage,but our record in making good decisions isevidence of our reliability. Our libraries showhow Cambridge contributed to national life through the turbulent reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth and emerged strong and with the nation’s confidence. Cambridgeshows leadership in national and inter-national society by the active, bold andconstant exercise of choice. It is a respon-sibility we welcome.

Extracurricular

UniversitymattersTaking the long view

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewiczis the Vice-Chancellor

What do we want ourUniversity to look like in 10 or 20 years’ time? There are three questions we must address in thecoming years

Jim Spencer

The Vice-Chancellor addresses the University everyyear on 1 October. To read his speech in full please visitwww.cam.ac.uk/annualaddress2013.

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Extracurricular

My Cambridge

Interviews Becky AllenPortraits Paddy Mills

This year marks the 25th anniversary of STIMULUS, the Science, Technology,Informatics and Mathematics UndergraduateLinks between University and Schoolsprogramme. Three volunteers tell their story.

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My Director of Studiesrecommended STIMULUS to me. I thought it sounded fun and I reallyenjoyed it, so I just kept going. I starting volunteering during mysecond term at Cambridge, taking a break during my finals, first atNewnham Croft Primary and then at Sancton Wood, a secondaryschool.You can do more interesting,

advanced maths at secondaryschool, but I enjoyed primary more.Younger children are so much moreexcited about everything they learn.And I was impressed by how manydifficult mathematical conceptseven small children can understandwhen they’re taught in an enjoyable

and accessible way.Usually I was able to choose the topics myself. We worked on

Maths Olympiad puzzles and fun bits of maths that aren’t part of the curriculum, like Pascal’s triangle and graph theory, which areparticularly visual and flexible.Being a STIMULUS volunteer has taught me to think carefully

about even simple maths problems, as well as how kids think about

I volunteered for STIMULUS in my second and third years atCambridge, working at NetherhallSchool. I was pretty sure I wantedto teach as I had experienceworking with kids in SouthAmerica, so I wanted to find outwhat teaching was like in the UK.You take a lot of things for

granted at Cambridge, which is fullof very bright people. STIMULUSrequires you to shift yourexpectations – I hadn’t thoughthow difficult it might be to look at things from the point of view of a year 10 student who isn’t thatkeen on maths.But it was very rewarding too.

The kids were always polite, and having a young adult in the class intrigued them. They wereinterested in what the University was like and it gave them adifferent perspective, meeting someone who enjoyed studyingmaths. I don’t know if I changed anyone’s life, but I felt like I wasdoing something useful.I've taught maths at Perse Girls for 10 years, and for the past

two years I’ve also been the STIMULUS co-ordinator. It’s my type of job – I get to meet lots of young, keen, interesting people, and I can use my IT skills for the admin. I want to attract volunteers from beyond maths and science. We get some history and Englishstudents volunteering, but I'd like more. Your average Cambridgehistorian is good enough to explain maths to a year 7 student.The best thing for the STIMULUS volunteers is the opportunity

to get out of the Cambridge bubble. You can spend three years here without speaking to people outside the University, so goinginto local schools and helping kids who are struggling with maths isa great opportunity to give something back.

Rob Percival read Mathematics. He now teaches at the Stephen Perse SeniorSchool and is the STIMULUS co-ordinator.

Rob Percival (Trinity Hall 1999)

Philipp Legner (St John’s 2009)

When I was at school, I liked mathsfrom the beginning, but I saw really gifted people drop outbecause they weren’t stimulated.Convincing people that maths isn’t as hard as it seems is reallychallenging, and I like that. That’swhy STIMULUS works so well,because volunteers explain thingsto students who don’t get it as fastas the rest of the class.I’ve volunteered at Perse Girls

and the Manor School. In privateschools it’s more a matter ofshowing them some of the maths Ido at university, things that stretchthem. In community schools, it’s more about spotting goodstudents and giving them a push.

One of the students I worked with was clearly extremely bright but not focused. We worked together for several weeks,doing questions in different ways, and maths started to becomeinteresting. GCSEs weren’t a problem anymore and going touniversity became an option.I’d like to go into teaching, so STIMULUS is good for me too.

It helps refresh my memory on maths I haven’t used for five years.I’m doing applied maths, so doing more pure maths throughSTIMULUS is useful.STIMULUS has so many good volunteers, really dedicated

people who do it year after year. But volunteering has to be aboutmore than your CV. You really have to want to make a difference, it makes me feel like I’m giving something back.

Carina Negreanu is reading Astrophysics, is on the STIMULUS steeringcommittee and has plans to do a PhD.

For more information visit stimulus.maths.org

maths. And it gave me lots of new ideas. It’s very rewarding too,seeing kids not understand something in the morning and thengetting it in the afternoon, and being really proud and happy as a result.My most memorable experience was with a year 8 group.

We did some combinatorics, rolling dice and working out theprobability of winning the lottery. I was worried that they didn'tunderstand it, but when I returned the following week the grouphad produced a huge poster of the work we’d done, with examplesfrom the internet. It was really impressive and I was really pleased.

Philipp Legner read Mathematics. He is doing an MA in MathematicsEducation and runs Mathigon – an online collection of educational resources.www.mathigon.org

Carina Negreanu(Queens’ 2010)

In 1971 Marie Herbert, her husbandexplorer Wally Herbert, and their 15-month-old daughter Kari, went to live

with the Inugguit, a sub-group of the Inuit,in north-west Greenland. There were no luxuries. The family ate what the Inugguitate and slept in one of their houses. It was a tough life. Yet out of this harshenvironment came Marie’s book, The SnowPeople, a gentle, wonderfully observantmemoir of an exceptional community – andan exceptional family.Unlike standard polar exploration yarns,

it’s not about personal achievement orgrandstanding. Rather, the book focuses on celebrating the Inugguit culture,traditions and community. That’s whyanthropological linguist and ResearchFellow at Trinity Hall, Dr Stephen PaxLeonard, likes it so much – and why, almost40 years after the book was written, he wasinspired to follow in Herbert’s footsteps.“My father gave me a book about Scott

when I was 11 and I became interested inpolar exploration throughout my teens,” he says. “Eight years later I was browsing inBaggins, a secondhand bookshop inRochester. I came upon The Snow Peoplethere. It had a huge impact on me.“It was about an area of the world that I

was already interested in. I always preferredthe Arctic to Antarctica. I liked the fact thatpeople lived up there in this very hostileclimate and the fact that they had their own indigenous culture and way of living.But it wasn’t like the other books I’d read on polar exploration. It wasn’t macho. On thecontrary, it was very much about thecommunity and their interaction with it. And it was beautifully written.”From August 2010 to September 2011,

Leonard lived in the same settlement that Herbert had written about, evenencountering some of the peoplementioned in the book. His mission was todocument as many of the fast-disappearingcustoms as possible, such as the drumdances and the storytelling that make up

the oral history of the community.Herbert’s book painted a picture of

a people still wedded to the old ways.Hunters still killed narwhals from kayakswith harpoons, travelled by dog sledge and spoke a language of sighs and groans,with words up to 50 letters long.But when Leonard arrived at the

settlement, he found a conflict betweentradition and modernity. The Inugguit stillhunted with harpoons. But now theirchildren wandered around the settlement

Extracurricular

ReadinglistStephen Pax Leonard

Interview Lucy Jolin

Stephen Pax Leonard Research Fellow, Trinity Hall

People had very fond memoriesof the Herbert family – not true of the average polarexplorer, who tends to turn upunexpectedly, hunt inefficientlyand then depart, taking the oddsacred artefact with him

44 CAM 70

Steve Bond

CAM 70 45

Extracurricular

CambridgesoundtrackKimberley Rew

InterviewCaroline Roberts

Kimberley Rew(Jesus 1974)

Charlie Troman

The Velvet Underground: Beginning to See the Light This was the band’s third album, from 1969. I borrowed it from the Jesus library of LP records – some enlightened soul hadstarted stocking pop records, which wasunheard of at the time. It’s a nice introductionto an outfit that kept pop alive into the heavyrock era. A typical teenager of the time, I followed

the murky trail of the heavy bands, then I heard this and thought “I don't have to be a guitar virtuoso, tall and handsome withflowing locks – I can just be myself, writesongs and mumble.”

Neil Young: Out on the Weekend This is the opening track from Harvest, whichfollowed the acclaimed After the Gold Rush.The album slightly disappointed me at thetime. With hindsight, I’d say it was by a manstarting to find his way in life and music withsome adventurous exploration, whereas I wanted more of what he had done before. It was the early days of hi-fi and I had aturntable plugged into an ancient guitaramplifier, which must have sounded terrible.The habit was to invite your friends back forcoffee and put your latest purchase on theturntable. When I put Harvest on, they’dusually wander off during the doldrums ofside two – somewhere near the introspective A Man Needs a Maid.

Slade: Cum on Feel the Noize Jesus had a TV room that was always full forTop of the Pops, even though we wereterrible snobs and sneered at theperformers. Most of them sported glamfashions with glittery clothes and blue eyeshadow for men, while College style wasregulation hippie. Slade’s drummer DonPowell habitually wore a vacant expressionand when it was time for his close-upeveryone chortled and snickered. But weekafter week we turned up to watch. Pop wasabout to collapse into the desperatemiddlebrow sludge of the mid-1970s butSlade have stood the test of time.

Global Village Trucking Company: Smiling Revolution My girlfriend and I “adopted” the Globs, as we called them, after paying our 10pentrance fee to hear them at Fisher Hall. Wewere in awe as this was a “proper” band –they had a van, proper equipment and livedin a commune. We would follow the Globsaround free festivals in East Anglia in aCommer van, bought for £80, with a deer’sskull attached to its radiator. They had somesplendidly memorable songs but I don'tthink they got as far as achieving the covetedrecording contract, so good luck trackingthem down.

Kimberley Rew is a singer-songwriter and composer of the song Walking on Sunshine and theEurovision Song Contest-winning Love Shine a Light.He currently plays with Cambridge band Jack.

CAMCard discount at HeffersThe Heffers’ Cambridge alumni discountis 15%. Shop in person with yourCAMCard at Trinity Street or online at:alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/camcard/bookshops.

with mobile phones, and DVDs ofHollywood films had taken the place oftraditional storytelling.“I felt a sense of guilt of the western

mind, because that was often the onlyaspect that they had of western civilisation,and it isn’t the best thing that we couldexport,” he says. “You go into people’shomes with no running water and they’resitting there eating a bowl of seal soupwatching Terminator 3. That was jarring. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expectingmore of the traditional life to still be present.I felt like I was desperately trying to eke itout myself.”Yet the old traditions still endured among

the older generation, particularly those who appeared in Herbert’s book, such asPaulina Christiansen – “a great storyteller”,says Leonard. She is the granddaughter of Robert Peary, who is believed by some to have been the first person to make it to the North Pole in 1909. He lived in thatcommunity and would never have made it to the North Pole without the help of theInugguit.The people had, he says, very fond

memories of the Herbert family. This is oftennot true of the average polar explorer, who tends to turn up unexpectedly, huntinefficiently, then depart, taking the oddsacred artefact with him. “Nobody had a bad word to say about the

Herberts,” he recalls. “I found just havingread The Snow People and knowingsomething about the Herbert family endedup opening some doors for me becausethey were so highly regarded. This is notnormally the case. There is a lot of negativeprejudice against the white man – theoutsider.”“I worked with one man, Aijakko Miteq,

a lot. He was a very good storyteller and webecame friends. He very sadly passed awayabout three months ago. I had no idea hehad cancer – nobody ever told me and I’mnot even sure whether he shared it withother people. I documented as many of hisstories as I could. But I reckon he had far,far more to tell.”

Dr Pax Leonard recently read: “I have a volume of TS Eliot’s poetry by my bed. I also have a stack of NationalGeographics, of course.”

CAM 70 47

Britain might be the birthplace of thebeautiful game, and Cambridge whereits modern rules were codified, but it’s

in the US that women like Marielle Brownhave really taken the idea of playing footballto their hearts.“In the US, it’s rare to meet a girl who

hasn’t played soccer at some point in herlife,” says Brown, now in the second year of her PhD in Biological Anthropology.“Although I have to be careful to call itfootball and not soccer, here.”

A lifelong football fan – she supportsManchester United and Grimsby Town, herfather’s home town – she started playing inher local Pee Wee league when she was justfive. “They’re full of all these five- and six-year-old girls running around in T-shirts thatare down to their knees!”Today, she says it is the framework

football brings to her academic life at Corpusthat keeps her playing. “It’s a huge timecommitment, but a PhD is inherentlyunstructured and playing football fives givesstructure to my days. I get more done in the football season than out of it, because if I have training at night to look forward tothen I work harder during the day.”This season sees Brown take over as

women’s football captain at Cambridge, andshe hopes her captaincy will be marked by greater recognition for the women’s gameat Cambridge – as well as better weather.Last season the team went into the

Christmas break as joint leaders of theirdivision, but the long, hard winter took itstoll. “The fields were covered in snow forweeks at the beginning of Lent Term, so wehad a hard time finding places to train,” sherecalls. “It also meant we had games everyfew days at the end of the season, so we hada lot of injuries and we ended up gettingrelegated.”Despite the atrocious conditions, Brown’s

team overcame both Oxford and the snow towin the 2013 Varsity Match 4-2 on penalties.“It was an epic game. It was freezing cold, itwas snowing, and it lasted over three hoursfrom start to finish. It was probably the moststressful game I’ve ever played. We had a couple of hundred people at Fenner’swatching us and there’s so much hype goinginto it, so you’re just praying you don’t makea mistake or miss a penalty,” she says.“It was nice to be on the winning side of

penalties for once, because it always seemslike the team I’m supporting loses. I did feelbad for Oxford, it’s an awful way to lose – butdon’t tell them that.”As well as performing well on the pitch

this season, Brown wants to try and bring abit of America’s passion for women’s footballto Cambridge. “The men’s sport gets muchmore press and recognition, and althoughthings are getting better, it’s slow,” she says.“One of the things that bothers me is that for the Varsity game the men play at premierleague stadiums. This year they played atCrystal Palace so I’m going to try and see ifwe can play on the same day [next time].”A more personal goal is to play at Parker’s

Piece, where the first games under themodern rules were played in 1848. “I didn’trealise about Parker’s Piece until halfwaythrough last year so it was nice to know that.I haven’t actually played football there but I should probably do that before I leave as a symbolic thing.”

Mar

cus G

inns

www.cuafc.org

AsportinglifeWomen’s football

Extracurricular

InterviewBecky Allen

The 2013Varsity Match was anepic game: freezing cold,snowing and lasting over threehours from start to finish. It wasprobably the most stressfulgame I’ve ever played

48 CAM 70

�Extracurricular

INSTRUCTIONS

Solvers must complete the gridto reveal 10 family members,each comprising two words,one such word being shared byeach member, but appearingonly once in the grid. To achievethis nine letters in cluedanswers must be altered,creating eight new words.Single letters to be omitted fromeach clue before solving (never

leaving a non-word) give fourmore members, only one of which shares the commonword. The Chambers Dictionary(2011) is the primary reference.OED confirms two thematicassociations.

ACROSS

1 Sailor leading barmy memberof ruling party on boarddeclines to vote (8)

6 Peel left by son in this localgutter (5)

10 A new hanging fruit like amelon (6)

13 American clam followingretreating fish (4)

15 I seek acceptablerepresentation (4)

17 Did cutter once advancebefore engineers deserted? (4)

18 Palate penetrated by back ofshark fin (4)

19 A religion mother and I foundamongst exotic palms (7)

21 Sweat is spoiling a daytimeshut-eye (6)

22 Pipe missing from boat on hireworried Edna perhaps (6)

23 Space laid outside churchcovered with a network (7)

26 An oven as installed in fortfacing west (4)

27 Court is outside so fear turn offortune (4)

29 Very ugly person, thereforeturning overt (4)

33 Henry angry when chopped (4)35 Ed's solvers waste seconds

absorbing nothing (6)36 "Hello" introduces final gig (6)37 A feeble person from Dumfries

alas wintered badly (11)38 The old lock assets up (5)

DOWN1 Loose piece of skin starting to

grow inside can trouble (6)2 Book that game (4)

3 A natural swimmer finallyascends a lot of stairs (5)

4 Spasmodically face waggingtails (6, 2 words)

5 Prying person in speechrecognises fright (5)

6 Impostor gets Clough for hardold game (4)

7 Her grammar school providessome work (4)

8 Brood once accompanied byneat bird overturned a hole-maker (9)

9 See round anterior canineflake (6)

11 Fixed safe loans available onlyin spring perhaps (8)

12 Pale green section in sort ofgrassy area (6)

14 One told to go by leadingjournalist showed ill feeling (8)

16 Drivel from McGonagall:"Doctor a French novelist'scheese" (9)

20 Big dogs, a young cat and oldColin (6)

22 Scots owe Germany and theFrench a great deal (6)

24 Most humble for a monarch I win bewildered (6)

25 Shakespeare's bowingbaronet's bolstering act (6)

28 Jewish girl, square dancer (5)30 Kind senior officer with good

following (5)31 Wren’s first to leave black

bird’s bunches of twigs in Skye (4)

32 Second pair of riders noteancient valley (4)

34 Drip drop (4)

All entries to be received by 10 January 2014Send completed crosswords:• by post to CAM 70 Prize Crossword, University of Cambridge,

1Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB5 8AB• by email to cameditor@alumni.cam.ac.uk• or enter online at alumni.cam.ac.uk/cam

The first correct entry drawn will receive a copy ofCambridge Computing: The First 75 Years(Third Milliennium, £40) by Professor Haroon Ahmed (King’s 1959). This volume celebrates the achievements of the Cambridge Computer Lab over the past 75 years. Two runners up will also receive £35 to spend on CUP publications.

Solutions and winners will be printed in CAM 71 and posted online at alumni.cam/.ac.uk/camon 17 January 2014.

Solution to CAM 69 CrosswordEccles by Schadenfreude

Winner:Piers Ruff (St John’s 1966)Runners up: Roger Cohen (Peterhouse 1970) and Reverend David Thomson (Selwyn 1978)Special mention: Paul Stanyon (Downing 2009) for being the newest alumni solver (with a bit of help from his father).

Clashes in symmetricallydisposed cells give the months of the Jewish year.These were to be replacedby numbers corresponding to the Eccles(iastical) (not Civil) system:STAMMERS/UZBEG (4),SPIRITIST/RILED (7),STEVEN/SOCIETAL (10),WATERSHED/DINGBAT (11),PAGANISM/ANGERLY(1),TAEL/OBSIGN (5),FRESHEST/LEVANT (8),CADENCE/ALCAZAR (12),BIYEARLY/YARDMEN (2),SCELERAT/EXULS (6),ARACHIS/ELEVENSES (9),EMESIS/ATIVAN (3).

Family by Schadenfreude

CAM 70 Prize Crossword