King’s College, Cambridge Annual Report 2009 Annual Report 2009 Contents The Provost 2 The Fellowship 7 Undergraduates at King’s 18 Graduates at King’s 24 Tutorial 26 Research 32 Library 35 Chapel 38 Choir 41 Staff 43 Development 46 Members’ Information Form 51 Obituaries 55 Information for Members 259 The first and most obvious to the blinking, exploring, eye is buildings. If The Provost you go to the far side of the Market Place and look back, you now see three tall buildings: Great St Mary’s, King’s Chapel, and a taller Market Hostel. First spiky scaffolding reached above the original roof. Now it has all been shrouded in polythene, like a mystery shop window offering. It’ll stay 2 Things could only get better. You wrapped for a year until the major refit is completed next summer. 3 may remember that when I wrote THE PROVOST these notes last year, I had just Moving back into the main college in my exploratory perambulation, I find discovered that the College had more scaffolding. It’s on the Wilkins Screen. It’s on the Chapel, where through written to the local authorities THE PROVOST the summer we’ve moved down the entire South side, cleaning and treating saying that they were unaware of the glazing bars so that they no longer rust, expand, and prise off bits of the my place of residence. The College stone. Face lifts for the fountain and founder’s statue. So I see much activity, did not know where I was and I expensive activity. The major Market Hostel project exhausts our current therefore lacked a position to saved up money for building, although we are hoping to get help with part of persuade them that I was here. it. The important work on the Chapel has been made possible only through Things were bad. My wife and I in the most generous support of Robin Boyle. Beyond, I see both Gibbs and the Provost’s Lodge thought that Bodley’s in bad need of loving care. But I do not see how we can fund it. we were residing in the College, but really we were only like mice Buildings are important. Without buildings, we could not operate and history Professor Ross Harrison creeping up and down behind the holds us responsible for maintaining our beautiful external face. But as skirting while the real inhabitants everyone who has been in or through the College knows, what most counts in were unaware of our existence. (The philosophers among you will be aware the end are people. Taking my exploratory perambulation inside the buildings, that however furiously you chant the Cartesian mantra to yourself, it doesn’t I see a surge in our intellectual life. We were always an active research college, persuade anyone else that you are there.) with our unique Research Centre and our relatively large numbers of research fellows. Then it withered: we could no longer fund the Research Centre However, to carry the story on from last year, I am pleased to say that I projects and we elected fewer and fewer research fellows. Then, three years escaped the Catch 22 conundrum. The Domus Bursar wrote to the local ago, the momentum changed. We regained confidence, decided that we would authority that the College had made a mistake and that I did indeed reside be again an important research college, and started to build up our research here. I expect he reported that he had broken into a previously overlooked fellowship numbers. In both October 2008 and October 2009, considerably set of buildings and woken up an aged man who said that he was a Provost more research fellows have joined us than left. It’ll be the same next October, sleeping in the college as the statutes required. Anyway, whatever he said, once we have elected into the competitions that we have just announced. I am now not only awake but also officially here. Furthermore, having blinked the statutory sleep from my eyes, I have made an exploratory Research is undertaken at all levels in the College. We have a distinguished perambulation outside the Provost’s Lodge and discovered that lots of group of academics, many of whom work in College. We have a lively things have been happening. seminar programme, attended by both professors and undergraduates. We have an active graduate community, with its own seminars. Final year committee was set up to make a recommendation about his replacement. undergraduates often do some research and we have a studentship It recommended that the job be combined with Provost, so that I would programme that funds some of our graduates. This has just been increased look after the Research Fellowship elections. An additional attraction of by the generous donation of Mark Pigott (of PACCAR, the truck maker the proposal was that we would not have to pay someone to do the job. based in Seattle, who make DAF trucks). He has established a fund to Now the Governing Body is as corruptible as the next body. But on this 4 provide scholarships for Masters students. There is activity and College matter it stayed sea green. The Fellows resisted the bribe, thinking that the 5 THE PROVOST support at all levels. However, the greatest financial support by far and a prospect of the Provost doing some useful work was so frightful that they’d major use of our endowment income is funding the research fellowship prefer to pay for it not to happen. (Naturally, I think the rejection was programme. Financial pressure means that we will not be able to sustain it caused by republican suspicion of praeposital power rather than a THE PROVOST at quite the same level but it has made a radical difference to the energy of reflection on my personal capacity; after all my previous record indicates the place. In my perambulation I see the surge and feel its intellectual brio. that I could have done the job.) I also see new people. When I wrote last year, we didn’t know who would I remember a conversation I had with Noel Annan, former Provost, just at be next Bursar. The cards are now turned up and have revealed Keith the point he was leaving his subsequent position as Provost of UCL to Carne, who has been for many years a Mathematics Fellow, as well as become the first full time Vice Chancellor of the University of London. sometime Financial Tutor. In current Cambridge, it is most unusual to “Before me,” Noel boomed, “London had a walking stomach. But now they have an academic as Bursar and in King’s we have not had one since Ken will have a walking head.” As he spoke, I examined the article in question, Polack. I said last year how our new Senior Tutor followed the great unsullied by any clouding canopy of hair. Magnificent. In such peripatetic Classics tradition of Patrick Wilkinson and Geoffrey Lloyd. To find the placing, I am a bit of a walking stomach but more of a walking smile. suspicion of a tradition of a mathematical bursar, we’d have to go back to However, even smiling becomes hard work. So it’s time to cease my Angus Macpherson. admiring perambulation of the College and crawl back into my residential mouse hole to resume my statutory sleep. I’ll arrange for someone to wake Or to Keynes (who, like Keith and Angus, read the Maths tripos). This year me up this time next year so I can tell you what’s been happening was the 100th anniversary of Keynes’ election as a Fellow. On the exact day, a (although I’ll wake up earlier if anyone offers to fund a research fellowship few of us assembled to toast his picture in the SCR. It is salutary to remember or pay for Gibbs). that at the end of his life, when he was saving the world (as they now call it) by negotiating the Bretton Woods financial settlement, he was simultaneously Ross HaRRison Bursar of King’s, seeing minor financial details through College Congregations near where we were drinking his posthumous health. Otherwise much as before. The Governing Body continues with its republican suspicion of creeping imperialism, much more so than when it was manipulated by Keynes. I commented on this last year. It happened again after Wyn Evans resigned as Research Fellowship Manager. Wyn oversaw the surge and I thank him for its great success. College style, a The Fellowship Fellows 7 THE FELLOWSHIP THE REVEREND IAN THOMPSON (1959-2009) It is with great regret that we record the death of Ian Thompson, our much loved Dean. Ian was not only an admirably accomplished Dean of Chapel. He also, unprecedentedly in recent times, combined the role with that of Lay Dean, where he was equally successful. Nor did it stop there. With great energy, care, and determination, he supported many groups in College and outside, particularly in connection with rowing. He also had a major input into the revision of the College Statutes and Ordinances. His sudden death left the College in a state of shock and he will be much missed. There will be a full obituary in next year’s Annual Report. new Life Fellows • Dr Aileen Kelly and Professor Bob Rowthorn were elected into Life Fellowships. Fellows moving on The following Fellows left their Fellowships in King’s in the last year: • MATT CANDEA has left to become a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. • QUASSIM CASSAM has left to become Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University.