Michaelmas 2010 Issue 13

Michaelmas 2010 Issue 13

The largest ever reunion of Hughesians took place at the College on Saturday, 25 September to mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of the College in 1885. The hugely successful evening began with the commemorative lecture by Professor Ged Martin. Professor Martin, like a good storyteller, presented scholarly content with wit and humour.

Hughes Reunited – Alumni Toast the Future

News from HughesNewsletter for Hughes Hall members

Professor Ged Martin giving the commemorative lecture

Snapshots of the evening

Celebrating 125 years

Dinner was served in an elegant marquee on Fenner’s cricket ground, and the food, as always, was excellent. After dinner, alumni and guests met informally in the Pavilion Room. One of the hallmarks of the evening was the multi-generational and international nature of the gathering, with alumni from 1950 right up to 2009, and from the United States to Hong Kong, and places in between.

In her address at dinner, the President, Mrs Sarah Squire, saluted ‘the community of Hughes Hall, our Founders, our Benefactors and the generations of students who have passed through our gates, and not forgetting the hopes and success of the new generation.’

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Dream Voices: Siegfried Sassoon, Memory and WarSiegfried Sassoon’s boyhood diary, donated to Hughes Hall by Professor Masatsugu Ohtake (Honorary Fellow), forms part of the excellent exhibition currently on at the University Library.

Professor Ohtake’s extensive donation of finely printed and bound books, including his Ted Hughes collection, is shortly to be housed in the specially designed room of the new College library.

A woodcut of Ted Hughes by Leonard Baskin from Professor Ohtake’s donated collection

125th Anniversary Round Up

Charity and the City: Medieval to Early Modern

E-HugHEsTo receive News from Hughes by email, to submit articles for the newsletter, and to sign up to the Hughes alumni e-bulletin (which lists all news and forthcoming events in a termly email), contact the Development Office at development@hughes.cam.ac.uk

Dr Hilary Burton, new Director of the PHG Foundation and Senior Member of Hughes Hall, with former US President, Bill Clinton, at the recent Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, at which she formally presented the PHG Foundation’s commitment to provide governments in low and middle-income countries with tools and data to tackle birth defects in their populations. A public health physician, Hilary has been a lead player in the development of public health genomics in the UK and was a founding member of the PHG Foundation’s predecessor body. She is a firm believer in the potential of genomics to improve the health of populations and individuals.

The new library has been open for just over a year. It is well used and all 65 study spaces were occupied during the examination period. It is open 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Students value the light and space, the wireless network, the group study room and the facility for borrowing books at any time, particularly useful for those out on placements or in their departments during the day.

Staff appreciate the special room for rare books and archives, and the extra shelf space which means that there is room to expand the book stock.

‘The new library is amazing and a huge asset to Hughes.’

‘I’ve been an avid user of the College library since starting at Hughes … and have always been met with great enthusiasm and helpfulness by the librarians. The general study space in the library is light, spacious and airy, and usually has lots of space for books and materials. It’s helpful to have the computing facilities just upstairs as well as a photocopier next door.

‘Lovely library!’

‘I was in the library all weekend and it was really great – lots of people working very harmoniously together.’

The LibraryStudents give their verdicts on the new facilities

Hughes Hall hosted a workshop in September organised by Dr Elma Brenner, Research Fellow in Medieval History. The day was introduced by the President, and six papers were presented by postgraduate students and early career researchers from the UK, France and Portugal. Professor John Henderson (Birkbeck, University of London, and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) led a roundtable discussion to conclude the day.

The workshop was greatly enjoyed by all, as an opportunity to exchange ideas, learn about new research, and make contact with other scholars.

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There were a number of 125th anniversary events throughout the year, including the inaugural Charnley Law Dinner, the Commemoration Dinner, the May Ball – featuring real owls from the World Owl Trust, and a wonderful concert by the acclaimed tenor, and Hughes alumnus, Anando Mukerjee.

The President was also delighted to attend the

125th anniversary dinner in Hong Kong on

6 November, organised by a loyal group

of alumni, and very much appreciates the

considerable sum they raised for the

Scholarships and Bursaries appeal.

125th Anniversary Round Up

Anando Mukerjee in the Pavilion Room after the recital

The Hughes Hall owl came to life for the May Ball!

Commemorative LectureProfessor Ged Martin gave the commemorative lecture at the reunion on the founding of the Cambridge Training College for Women Teachers (CTC) by its first Principal, Elizabeth Hughes. This extract tells us a bit about the most exotic member of the founding group of students.

Cambridge Training College for Women, 1880s – an early group of students

The College was initially based in two small houses in Newnham Croft, home to a disparate collection of fourteen women, ranging in age from 18 to 38. The oldest was also the most remarkable character of them all, Lillie Eisenschmidt, believed by her fellow students to be a Russian aristocrat.

In 1881 she was working in Knightsbridge as governess to an aristocratic family: she was 34 years of age, born in Livonia, a Tsarist province later partitioned between Estonia and Latvia. Her family were probably Baltic Germans, an elite minority whose privileges were under challenge from Russian nationalists. This may explain why she came to England to work in the genteel but dead-end occupation of governessing. In 1885, she was in her late thirties and working at Lutterworth in Leicestershire… she seems to have been the second student to sign up for CTC. At a time when vegetarianism was considered eccentric, she was doggedly principled in her repudiation of everything to do with meat, even crossing the road rather than pass a butcher’s shop. She encountered some difficulty walking into town, as two such emporia faced one another on Silver Street, forcing her to walk down the middle of the carriageway, inconvenient but markedly less dangerous then than it would be now.

Thanks to Lillie Eisenschmidt, CTC / Hughes Hall can claim to have been an international community from the very start.

Extract from Professor Martin’s research

Celebrating 125 years

Hughes Hall

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Student newsCongratulations to Beenish Ahmed (MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies, 2009) for winning the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize, awarded by Churchill College and the Faculty of English. ‘Ambitious in scope and construction… a sustained rumination around a female re-interpretation of the Icarus myth…the overall effect is one of richness of detail and emotional and imaginative range.’

Champions of 2010 MCR Cricket LeagueMany congratulations to the Hughes Hall cricket team for winning the 2010 Cricket League. This was the first time the College had got to the final, and the team performed magnificently to get there, and then to win. Naveed thanked everyone for their support throughout the season, especially the President, the Senior Tutor and the Hughes MCR.

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Wollaston Lodge and Edward Schroeder PriorWollaston Lodge was built in 1886–1887. The architect was Edward Schroeder Prior, a founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild, and instrumental in founding the Arts and Crafts movement.

Naveed Ahmad, the team captain, and the President, with the trophy

RowingCongratulations to the men’s second boat who won Blades at the May Bumps.

Beenish with Prof Sir David Wallace, Master of Churchill, and Dr Philip Johnston

Congratulations also to Stefan Palzer (PhD in Natural Sciences, Physics, 2007) for winning two awards: the Abdus Salam prize for best research paper in physics, and the Hamilton prize for best research on electromagnetic radiation. And not forgetting his half blue in Water Polo!

Christos Tsirogiannis (PhD in Archaeology, 2009) is to be congratulated for being instrumental in causing four illicitly obtained roman sculptures to be withdrawn from auction. Since 2003, it has been a criminal offence to deal in ‘tainted cultural objects’, and Christos’s PhD research – part of the International Illicit Antiquities Network – revealed the provenance of the sculptures.

Wollaston lodge refurbished

One of the modernised kitchens

Extract from an article by Jon Harris, local architectural historian

Prior was a master of building materials and domestic planning, as is clear from the careful restoration of Wollaston Lodge. The main rooms have twin windows in oriel bays, but Prior’s novelty is the broad windows under engineering arches that make his semi-basements lighter and airier than any seen in Cambridge till then. He used tile rather than slate for the roof and, for the walls, smoky-buff bricks. The elevations have arch-headed sash windows, generously skirted with white, and special engineering bricks in a contrasting colour to the walls – apricot and diminutive, like fine stitching. Even when exposed, as in the shaped gables to the garden elevation, Prior’s brickwork has never failed, nor even required pointing in over 120 years. Used for arches, plinth, corbels and chimney stripes, these special bricks provide a flicker of colour interest from top to toe of the building; otherwise ornament is confined to the shaping of the ends of the roof – joists and the panel treatment of the front doors and their fanlights.

Inside, mouldings are kept to a minimum. It’s only toward the heads of the staircases that the arts and crafts spirit emerges in the exposed roof slopes and the simply chamfered balustrades: the little dog gate into the former tank space of number 2 is a gem of carpentry.

Prior would marvel at the total survival of what he built on Wollaston Road. A shy and courteous man, he should have been pushier and built more, but he built well, sometimes with inspiration, and Wollaston Lodge, which Hughes Hall possesses, and is carefully maintaining, is a near complete work from the early career of a great English architect.

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Events DiaryTHE MARGARET WILEMAN MUSIC SOCIETy – in the Pavilion RoomContact events@hughes.cam.ac.uk for the programme

HAT CLUB RESEARCH SEMINARSContact Alexis Papazoglou (ajp83@cam.ac.uk) for details.

CHARNLEy LAW DINNERFriday, 4 February, 2011

Law alumni who are interested in attending should contact events@hughes.cam.ac.uk

LENT BUMPSTuesday, 1 March to Saturday, 5 March, 2011

BOAT CLUB BLACk TIE DINNERFriday, 11 March, 2011

Boat Club alumni who are interested in attending should contact events@hughes.cam.ac.uk

THE BOAT RACESaturday, 26 March, 2011 Thames, London

THE 10TH ANNUAL kATHLEEN HUGHES MEMORIAL LECTUREMonday, 9 May, 2011

THE 12TH ANNUAL CITy LECTUREMonday, 16 May, 2011

MAy BUMPSWednesday, 15 June to Saturday, 18 June, 2011

If you are interested in any of these events please contact events@hughes.cam.ac.uk

Dr UlriCh PohlmAnn (Social & Political Sciences, 1982) became head of department in the Policy Planning Staff of the Federal Ministry of Defence in Berlin in November 2009. Before that he headed the office of the former Federal Chancellor Dr Helmut Kohl.

Dr ShAmUS hUSheer (PhD in Chemistry, 2002) and Dr oriAne ChAUSiAUx (PhD in Pathology, 2003) presented their DuoFertility device at the World Association of Reproductive Medicine Congress in Moscow. They developed the device – which has proved to be highly effective in overcoming certain causes of infertility – through their company Cambridge Temperature Concepts.

News from Hughesians

Andrew George Ripley OBE, 1947–2010 MPhil in Management Studies, 1997–1998

An AppreciationThe Independent described Andy Ripley as ‘renowned as a rampaging No 8 for the England rugby union side, but… also one of those rare sports stars who transcended his youthful glory days. This gregarious, funny and self-deprecating polymath was a man of immense energy and imagination, and he kept on popping up in new guises – runner, rower, businessman, banker, academic, linguist.’ He was also a member of Hughes, famed as the man of 50 who sought to row in the Blue Boat. Like the Lions Test team he didn’t quite make it, but in the trying (he was cut from Goldie shortly before Trial Eights) he established a formidable reputation. His rowing-style was too ‘agricultural’ for CUBC, but that did not stop him from later holding world records on the erg and being President of the Tideway Scullers.

Though I did meet him as a student, my main memories of ‘Rippers’ are from years later – dining with him, our Life Fellow, CURUFC coach Tony Rodgers, and Phil Keith-Roach (to most of you the renowned England scrummaging coach, but to me still ‘Sir’, as one of my schoolmasters) in the Old College Dining Hall. His ready wit later entertained me at the Steele-Bodgers’ lunch, even though he was already stricken with the cancer which eventually killed him. More recently he helped the College in the

early years of the Development Office with sage counsel gleaned from his years of fund raising experience. It is a matter of regret that we never had time to take up his offer to make one of his renowned after-dinner

speeches at a fund raising dinner on the College’s behalf. That would have been a night to remember!

Tony Rodgers, pall-bearer at his funeral, tells me the order of service bore as his epitaph this most-telling extract from the foreword of his book Ripley’s World : ‘Dare we hope? We dare. Can we hope? We can. Should we hope? We must, because to do otherwise is to waste the most precious of gifts, given so freely by God to all of us. So when we do die, it will be with hope and it will be easy and our hearts will not be broken.’

A memorial service was held in Southwark Cathedral on 1 December, with Tony Rodgers representing the College.

Dr Michael Franklin, Fellow and Praelector

Help Hughes when you use AmazonHelp support Hughes by doing your Amazon shopping through the Hughes Hall website. Just click on the Amazon link on the library web page. A percentage of the purchase price goes to the College, at no cost to you. Hughes Hall is an associate of amazon.co.uk

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A Bumper yearEveryone in Cambridge was predicting a bumper year of new graduate students, and so it has turned out. At the start of term Hughes Hall welcomed 356 new students and, with the few more awaiting visas, we now have one for every day of the year! Of these, 80% are here for one-year courses – their experience of Cambridge will be brief as well as intense, but many are already getting involved in College activities. While there are fewer new BAs than usual, we have strong groups in our usual clusters of Medicine, Business, Law and Education, with particular surges in the latter two. And alongside these we have the whole range of disciplines at Masters and Doctorate level, from Assyrian Archaeology to Translational Medicine and Therapeutics.

Between them our new students represent 60 different nationalities – a real United Nations! Our themed Formal Halls already celebrate various British and other traditions, for example Burns Night and Diwali, and this year we will add Eid and Chinese New Year to the festivities. And our students are already busy organising a plethora of social and cultural events themselves.

The administrative offices face extra workload not just from growing student numbers, but also from additional tasks relating to immigration (scanning passports, organising contact points, etc) and to new funding arrangements. However, the staff have risen to the challenge with energy and creativity. Accommodation has also been problematic with increased demand throughout the city, though many of our new students have shown great resourcefulness in finding rooms.

So there are many challenges to the new academic year, but also many opportunities for both new and continuing students. We hope it will be a bumper year in all respects.

Dr Philip Johnston, senior Tutor

Scholarships and Bursaries for 2010–2011HUGHES HALL SCHOLARSHIPS Nicola Mingotti PhD, ArchitectureJianyang Hu MPhil, Economic Research

HUGHES HALL BURSARIES Yining Chen PhD, Pure Mathematics & Mathematical StatisticsFilip Saranovic PhD, Legal Studies

ELIzABETH CHERRy BURSARyNicola Wilkes PhD, Religious Studies

OGDEN TRUST PHySICS AWARD

Tim Daines MEd, Physics

WILLIAM CHARNLEy LAW SCHOLARSHIPSMairead Corcoran LLMAlexander White LLM

EDWIN S H LEONG SCHOLARSHIPTing Fung Mak MPhil, Education

DORIS zIMMERN–HkU SCHOLARSHIPTerence Hui Yu Wang MPhil, Education

ElectionsNEW FELLOWDr Ajith Parlikad – Department of Engineering

NEW SENIOR MEMBERSDr Agnieszka Iwasiewicz-Wabnig – Department of PhysicsDr Andreas Stylianides – Faculty of Education

NEW POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATEDr Deborah Hayden – Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic

We are gradually revamping our alumni and development websites. Do have a look at www.hughes.cam.ac.uk and,

if you have any feedback, contact us on alumni@hughes.cam.ac.uk

Students matriculating 2010

Telephone Campaign During the College’s 125th Anniversary year, we have been increasing our contacts with alumni through invitations to events, providing information about developments and facilitating engagement with current students. In early December we will be launching our first ever telephone campaign – with the help of current students – to seek financial support for the ongoing work of the College, primarily the 125th Anniversary Scholarships and Bursaries Appeal.

Naturally we can’t call everyone, but those whom we plan to call will have received a letter from the President during November. If you haven’t received the letter but are interested in the project, please do get in touch with the Development Office.

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Prizes for 2009–2010 E M BURNETT PRIzES FOR FIRST CLASS OR DISTINCTIONPierre Caquet History, starred First

Hon Kin Ng Natural Sciences

Christopher Gedge Economics

Hannah Klein Law

Siming Ma Natural Sciences

Girish Bahal Economics

Mohamed Faliq Mohamed Ismail Law

Philippe Charmoy Mathematics

Christoph Straeter Mathematics

Paul Meredith MedicineDeborah Banks Medicine

E M BURNETT PRIzES FOR MERITJulio Brau Mathematics Jan Natolski Mathematics Bati Sengul Mathematics

E M BURNETT PRIzE FOLLOWING A UNIVERSITy PRIzEHannah Sassoon PGCE, Charles Fox Memorial Prize

Supporting our StudentsThe importance of providing well-targeted financial support to students is certainly in the headlines at present. With all the current news about student fees, education sector cut-backs, and the need, nevertheless, to ensure access to education for all, it’s certainly a hot topic. But it is not a new topic for Hughes Hall. The College has always sought to provide assistance to those excellent students needing support to fund their studies. Indeed, during our 125th Anniversary year, this has been and will continue to be the major focus of our fundraising efforts.

At present, thanks to the great generosity of a number of donors, careful husbandry of finances, and valuable partnerships with the Cambridge Trusts, the College is able to offer a small but significant number of scholarships, bursaries and other awards to students.

As a very international College it is wonderful to be able to offer, for example, several full scholarships to new applicants from Hong Kong. In specialist subject areas such as law we are able to offer specifically targeted support. For those students who have excelled in their MPhil courses and wish to continue on to PhD studies we are able to augment a student’s funding from other sources, where this falls short of their full needs.

Sometimes the support required is significant, as in the case of being able to offer full scholarships covering all tuition and maintenance costs or bursaries to cover College fees. In many cases more focused support can be especially valuable. Making available anatomical models for medical students, provision of specific IT support, travel bursaries to assist fieldwork … all these can ensure that our students can focus on their studies with less worry about the pennies and the pounds.

We would dearly love to be able to do even more. With the present situation regarding student fees in the UK and the ever-increasing cost to overseas students wishing to come to Cambridge, the College will be looking to enhance its range of financial support to students – to increase our international coverage, to reward excellence, to support a greater range of courses and to increase access for mature undergraduates.

Our 125th Anniversary Scholarships and Bursaries Appeal therefore continues. The next stage in helping to get to our £1m goal is our telephone campaign this December.

Jonathan Taylor, Fellow and Development Director

AlexiS PAPAzogloU is one of the fifteen Hughes students who will be speaking to alumni during the campaign. He studied Physics at Imperial College before he came to Cambridge to study for a second BA, in Philosophy. He is currently in the third year of his PhD in Philosophy, working on the topic of Reason and Nature. Alexis is president of the Hat Club, Hughes Hall’s society for talks and debate, where graduate students of Hughes and senior members from around the University present their research. He is also the manager of the MCR bar, and a member of the Cambridge Union and the Cambridge wine-tasting society. Alexis also organised the conference on ‘Aspects of Philosophy at Cambridge’ at Hughes 19 – 20 November, mentioned in the last issue of the newsletter.

BriAn DOLAn was a student at Hughes from 1992 –1995, when he received his PhD from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). Having researched scientific expeditions in the Age of Enlightenment, his career for the next seven years seemed just as mobile. His first lectureship was at Umea University in northern Sweden, followed by positions at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, University of Cambridge, University of East Anglia, and Birkbeck, University of London. In 2002 he and his wife moved to San Francisco where they are now both professors in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Michaelmas 2010 Issue 13

News from Hughes: Editor Annemarie Young (annemarie.young@ntlworld.com) Design by Andy Wilson (andy@andywilson.biz)Contact us with your news, by post at: Hughes Hall, Cambridge CB1 2EW; or by email at development@hughes.cam.ac.uk

Photographs courtesy of Concept2, Ken Turner, Phil Mynott, Brian Dolan, Jonathan Taylor and contributorsPrinted in England

I was introduced to the history and philosophy of science during a University of Florida study programme based at Cambridge. The faculty advisor was a professor in the subject and passionate about archives. Having spent my first years as an undergraduate working in a biology lab, I was impressed to learn about Cambridge’s rich contributions to the life sciences and genetics, my personal interest. I discovered that examining the historical impact that scientific theories and practices have had on society was actually more interesting than putting drosophila (fruit fly) to sleep for experiments. I was thrilled when I was accepted on the HPS PhD programme – where my mind was first exposed to the subject and where so much history had been made.

At Hughes, I was with the first cohort at Chancellor’s Court. I love the location of Hughes Hall, and often remember cycling through Parker’s Piece en route to the department. Like most PhD students, my dissertation topic changed a few times, and I ended up telling the story of Edward Daniel Clarke, an 18th century polymath, Cambridge’s first professor of mineralogy, a world traveller, and collector of curiosities. Much of his loot is in the Fitzwilliam. No-one wanted to publish a biography of an unknown figure, but I managed to recast the account of his travels as an exemplar of scientific expeditions and it was in print a few years later. I learned a lot

about the business of publishing in those years. This encouraged me to write more ‘popular’ books, and I found commercial publishers for my next two books, Ladies of the Grand Tour and Josiah Wedgwood: Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment.

All the while I was gaining experience teaching the history of biology and medicine to medical students (at UCL) and history students. I married in 2000 and had my most memorable Hughes Hall experience when we held our reception in the Pavilion Room and garden. Ten years later – this past September – we reunited with much of the original party and held our tenth anniversary back at Hughes.

Our return visit was especially nostalgic since we moved to San Francisco in 2002. The move presented a unique opportunity for me to professionally retrain. Writing books about British history just didn’t seem the same not living in Cambridge, and I was hired more for my abilities to teach medical students about the impact of science on society than to write social history. I spent a couple of years in a clinical research training programme, digging through cadavers with med students and updating my basic science knowledge, and now teach bioethics and principles of differential diagnosis. A rather long walk away from Edward Daniel Clarke, but I feel that Hughes will always welcome us back to Cambridge, which occupies a special place in my life.

A Journey from Drosophila to History to Bioethics…

Lost AlumniIt is all too easy to lose touch with old friends and colleagues. And as part of our 125th Anniversary, Hughes Hall is working to re-establish contact with former students who have lost touch with the College.

If you know of fellow Hughesians who are not in touch

with us, but might enjoy receiving invitations to alumni events, using their dining rights in College and reading the newsletter, then please do encourage them to get in contact with us via email: alumni@hughes.cam.ac.uk or by telephone: +44 (0)1223 334895.

Brian addressing the guests

Brian and his wife Dorothy at their tenth anniversary celebration in the garden at Hughes Hall

Two of Brian's books, Josiah Wedgwood: Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment and Ladies of the Grand Tour