Issu E 2 5 E a Ste R 2 0 1 3 the Magazine of Corpus Christi College

3 1 0 2 r e t s a E 5 2 e u pelican The magazine of Corpus Christi College Cambridge s s I Baroness Professor The Rt Honourable Lord Hodge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss David Ibbetson Sir Terence Etherton writes about his interviewed by interviewed by interviewed by journey to the Robert McCrum Philip Murray Simon Heffer Supreme Court Page 4 Page 10 Page 14 Page 20 Contents 3 The Master’s Introduction 4 Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss 10 Professor David Ibbetson 14 Sir Terrence Etherton 20 Lord Hodge 24 Joe Farman 28 Dr Pietro Circuta 32 Dr Nicholas Chen 36 A View from the Plodge Editor: Elizabeth Winter Assistant editor: Rowena Bermingham Editorial assistant: Emma Murray Photography: Phil Mynott, Nicholas Sack Produced by Cameron Design 01284 725292 Master’s Introduction I am delighted once more to introduce this issue of the Pelican , brought to you by Liz Winter and the members of our energetic Development team. We try to use the magazine to show the diversity of College life; and this issue is no exception. It has a strong legal flavour, highlighting the lives and achievements of some of Corpus’s lawyers, and demonstrating the strength we have in this subject and in the profession. You will be interested to read the interviews with Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, our newest Honorary Fellow, and also with Sir Terence Etherton and Lord (Patrick) Hodge; Professor David Ibbetson also features – many of you will know him as Regius Professor of Civil Law and Warden of Leckhampton, shortly to leave us to become President of Clare Hall. This year we lost one of our most eminent Honorary Fellows, Joe Farman, renowned for his work on the ozone layer. This Pelican has a feature on his life and work, and pays tribute to a very remarkable scientist. Current Corpus personalities appear in these pages in the shape of the porters, our wonderful team of stalwarts who present the face of the College to visitors and who solve a wide range of practical problems in order to help Fellows, staff and students. The task they do, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, is often thankless; but this article recognizes and appreciates the excellent contribution they make to College life. Each Pelican issue seeks to highlight one or two of our Fellows, and this one has profiles of Nicholas Chen, our Microsoft Research Fellow, and Pietro Cicuta, Fellow in Physics. I am glad also that we are able to report on the opening of the Kho Building at Leckhampton, which is already making a big difference to the lives of those in our post-graduate community. This gives me the opportunity to recognize the wonderful contribution made to the College by a number of donors, including in this instance the family of old member Philip Kwee, especially his parents and his grandmother Mrs Kho, after whom this building is named. Other benefactors, including alumni and the families of alumni, have been particularly generous this year, leading to the highest receipt of benefaction that the College has known for several years. I pay tribute to the imaginative and tireless efforts of the Development Office, and the response from our donors (including of course many Pelican readers), through whom this has been made possible – remarkable in any college, but especially so in one with such a small number of alumni such as Corpus. These donations really make a difference, changing the lives of young people who are thus enabled to benefit from the Corpus experience. With best wishes to you all, Stuart Laing Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss by Dr Robert McCrum (m1972) Caption AS THE VERY FIRST FEMALE LORD JUSTICE OF APPEAL AND PRESIDENT OF THE FAMILY DIVISION OF THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, BARONESS BUTLER-SLOSS WAS, UNTIL 2004, THE HIGHEST-RANKING FEMALE JUDGE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. PROMINENT IN HER ROLES CHAIRING THE CLEVELAND CHILD ABUSE INQUIRY AND THE INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF DIANA PRINCESS OF WALES, SHE WAS ADVANCED TO THE RANK OF GBE IN 2005. ALTHOUGH HER PROGRESSION MIGHT LOOK AS THOUGH IT WAS PLANNED FROM AN EARLY AGE, SHE TELLS ROBERT MCCRUM IT WAS A CIRCUITOUS JOURNEY GOING FROM MISS ANN HAVERS TO BARONESS ELIZABETH BUTLER-SLOSS. The Pelican Easter Term The Right Honourable Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss GBE, vigorous eighty-year-old, a lively mix of Elizabeth I, Miss PC, says she is ‘absolutely thrilled’ to be an Honorary Fellow Marple and Aunt Dahlia - will have been inducted into the of Corpus but, with typical candour, at once remarks that she mysteries of the Corpus Fellowship. is ‘slightly embarrassed’ about it. She drops her voice confidentially. ‘You see, I’m already an Honorary Fellow at The Baroness, as she does not especially like to be known – Peterhouse. I’m wondering: Can I do this? Is it proper to ‘Call me “Elizabeth’’ she says, ‘‘Elizabeth” is such a nice name’ accept a second one?’ (As it happens, the heads of both – is a natural for the College. ‘My father, 2 out of 3 of my houses, having been consulted, discreetly rule that it is, brothers, my nephew Philip and my son, Bobby all went to indeed, ‘proper’). By the time you read this, the pioneer of Corpus,’ she goes on, chatting in a secluded, neo-gothic women’s careers at the British bar – a beady-eyed and corner of the House of Lords. ‘Actually, I’ve only visited a few 04 05 ‘I was a war child. Once the bombs came, we lived largely in the cellar.’ times. The one May Ball I’ve ever been to, when I was sixteen, cellar. I can still see the V1s coming over. We used to stand in was at Corpus. I came with my parents and I remember it was the garden and watch. You see, it was quite safe. We only had huge fun.’ to worry when the engine cut out.’ The Honorary Fellowship, a late honour in a career rich in gongs of all sorts, is especially piquant: Elizabeth herself ‘Occasionally I’d say; never made it to Cambridge. She remembers, ‘I applied to “Look here, chaps, remember Newnham, but they turned me down – could see I wasn’t really interested – so I went to Lausanne, learned a lot of that I’m a woman!”’ French, grew up, came back, took a secretarial course’ (where, needless to say, despite being left-handed, she excelled at shorthand). Once the war was over, life returned to normal, and Elizabeth could begin to fulfil her purposes. Ever since she was about Ann Elizabeth Oldfield Havers was born in 1933, the only eleven, confident Miss Havers had always startled grown- daughter of Sir Cecil Havers, a distinguished judge. Like ups by the clarity of her ambition. ‘I’m going to be a barrister’ many of her generation, her childhood was defined by the she would say. This had the effect that her schools war, and her brisk, no nonsense manner is redolent of (Broomfield House, Kew, followed by Wycombe Abbey) ‘business as usual.’ Here, you say to yourself, on first meeting, would choose her for public-speaking duties, votes of thanks is a woman who will never make a drama out of a crisis and and so on. ‘I learned from an early age to stand up and speak who will, indeed, keep calm and carry on. in front of people’, she says. ‘Oh yes, I’ve always been happier speaking than writing.’ Her wartime memories – the family was living in Kew – are mainly of bombing and aerial combat in the bright blue This precocious career choice was perhaps doubly predictable. skies above the London suburbs. ‘I was a war child,’ she Her father, to whom she was, she says, ‘very close,’ was a High remembers. ‘Once the bombs came, we lived largely in the Court judge, steeped in the law. She grew up surrounded by The Pelican Easter Term brothers, most of whom ate and slept the law, though two of It was another natural elevation. The law had occupied all them went into business. Her brother Michael later became her attention throughout her career. ‘I did try politics in 1959 Lord Chancellor and her nephew Philip is a distinguished QC. for the Conservatives, and was absolutely hopeless.’ Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her mother was ill with MS and Elizabeth and her brother were raised by a nanny. Later, before her legal career took off, Elizabeth came ‘It’s amazing what you can home to run the house for her father. find in Croydon.’ The law, never far away, became an integral part of her youth. Her father was a ‘red judge’ (in red robes for the judging of serious crime). Young Miss Havers would go along to the Old It was also a hopeless seat. She reduced the sitting MP’s Bailey to watch. Sir Cecil often sat in judgment in cases of majority in a safe Labour seat, but she was pregnant with capital murder, most famously in the case of Ruth Ellis, the Frances, her first child, and not cut out for the Commons. last woman in Britain to be hanged. Elizabeth remembers There was a home for pregnant women in the constituency, that as ‘a very sad case – but she was, finally, the author of but the unmarried mums who might have voted for her her own execution. If she’d applied for a reprieve sooner, she failed to turn out, and she went happily back to the twisting might have got off. In the end, it was just too late.’ She says by-ways of English law.

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