ASSOCIATION OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PENSIONERS NEWSLETTER Spring 2021 Issue 62 Autumn 2019 Autumn

Association of Oxford University Pensioners http://www.aoup.ox.ac.uk

President: Professor Sir Brian Smith ([email protected]) Chairman: Professor Gilliane Sills ([email protected]) The Map House, Vernon Avenue, Oxford, OX2 9AU The Committee: Secretary: Sheila Allcock ([email protected]) Membership Secretary: Phil Richards ([email protected]) Treasurer: Geoffrey Clough ([email protected]) Newsletter Editors: Lindsay Battle, Colin Sparrow, Anne Walters ([email protected]) Events Administrator: Carole Barr Website Manager: Rosemary Williams ([email protected]) Other Committee Members (* co-opted): David Bicknell, Jim Briden, Wendy Claye*, Rodney Eatock-Taylor, Ulli Parkinson, Jackie Procter.

Membership of the Association Staff who have worked in the University or a college until reaching retirement are eligible for AOUP membership in one of two ways. Membership is granted automatically for life to University staff who at the time of their retirement are employed by the University, and also to their spouses or partners. Staff who at the time of their retirement are employed by a College, and their spouses, partners, widows, widowers, may opt for AOUP membership by joining as a Social member, paying an annual subscription which is currently £5. Social membership is also open to University AOUP members who choose to pay the annual subscription. All AOUP members receive the Newsletter twice a year, and are able to attend the winter talks. Social members are entitled to apply to join in all excursions and other activities organised throughout the year. Membership Application forms are available from The Membership Secretary, AOUP, 24 Marlborough Road, Banbury, OX16 5DQ, or download from the AOUP web page (http//www.aoup.ox.ac.uk), or via email ([email protected]). Subscriptions for Social Membership are due on 1 January. However, if no renewal is received by 31 January you will be deemed to have withdrawn from Social Membership. Subscriptions: The Treasurer, 46 Laurel Drive, Southmoor, OX13 5DJ Trips and Visits: The Events Administrator (address on application forms)

Newsletter: The Newsletter Editor, c/o The Pensions Office, University of Oxford, 6 Worcester Street, Oxford, OX1 2BX

Pensioner Welfare Officer: Julia Powles is based in The Pensions Office at 6 Worcester Street. She can be reached on 01865 616203, where messages can also be left, or by email: [email protected]

Changes of name and/or address or notifications of death should be sent to the Membership Secretary either by email or using the form inside the back cover.

All opinions are the authors’ own and not those of the editors, AOUP or the University.

Table of contents

Editorial 2

Chairman’s Report 2

Pensioner Welfare Officer’s Report 3

Spring/Summer Programme for 2021 4

Features  The New Chemistry Research Laboratory 5  William Wordsworth’s 250th Year: 11 Walking through Lockdown with the Poet of Nature.

Reports of Winter Talks 2020/2021  The Rise and Fall of Opioids 17  Who Was Pleasance Walker? 20  Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders. 23  The History of Nuneham Courtenay 29

Miscellany  Book Review: Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under 30 Attack by Richard Ovenden.  Ice Skating in Winter 33

University Single Sign-On (SSO) Account 35 Important information for those who use a University email account

Obituaries 36

The Editors would like to thank the following for contributing illustrations to this issue: Karl Harrison, Rob Judges, Malcolm Airs, Hannah Britton, Sara Marafini, Wikimedia, Wikipedia

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Editorial

When we produced the Autumn 2020 issue of the Newsletter we were hoping that by the time we produced this Spring 2021 issue we would be back to some kind of normality and be able to have a printed version. Unfortunately that is not the case and again we are able only to produce an electronic version to go on the AOUP website. With the ongoing vaccination programme we are hoping we will be able to print the Autumn 2021 issue and distribute it as normal by post. This edition features Professor Richards’ illuminating account of the ingenuity, tenacity and measure of serendipity which it took to realise his vision for the unique conjoining of academic and commercial interests to fund the new Chemistry Research Laboratory, opened in 2004. The University’s scientific research is very much in the world’s eye at the moment with the ongoing achievements of the team at the Oxford Vaccine Group who have magnificently contributed to a global way out of the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic last spring, even though nature was of solace as never before, one event that was easily overshadowed was the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth: amends are now beautifully made in our second article. We would welcome contributions from members: either as feature articles or shorter pieces on perhaps an aspect of your career or any other topic of interest. The Editors’ email address is inside the front cover. The Editors Chairman’s Report

What a lot can happen in a year! Looking back at my report a year ago, I was concerned about climate change and wondered whether I could give up using the car so much. Come the pandemic, and it’s been easy not to fly, and tiered restrictions and lockdown have reduced my car usage – we no longer have the weekly drive between Oxford and Woodstock for choir rehearsals, and we’ve had fewer longer journeys to the south coast to sail our boat. As I write, we’re locked down again, but the vaccination programme is well under way and things will go on changing for the better – we’ll be able to meet family and friends again and go on holiday. It’s a time of opportunity, both personal and worldwide – a time to reset priorities to the things that really matter and, hopefully, a time to build a new world, with investment in green energy, in the reduction of air pollution and a re- distribution of wealth. I desperately want to believe this – there have been times of progress in the past, so why not now? However, I’m also realistic – so even small steps in the right direction would be welcome. AOUP continues to be house-bound, though not inactive. We had to cancel all our planned winter outings, but the series of winter talks has gone ahead, on Zoom. Our speakers have risen to the challenge magnificently and members of the audience no longer need to live near the Engineering Science Department, with its lecture theatre that’s been the venue in the past. Judging by the number of ‘views’ of the recording of each talk, members have taken the opportunity to catch up on talks that they couldn’t attend live. We’ve discovered other uses for Zoom – the annual reception for new pensioners in November and a Christmas quiz, to take the

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place of the Christmas lunch in Exeter College. The quiz was a team event, with people allocated to groups containing five or six members to tackle the challenge. It provided some social interaction, as well as making sure that no-one felt individually defeated by the questions! And our conversation groups – French, German, Spanish – are flourishing by Zoom, and the AOUP Ramblers are just biding their time until the lockdown eases. We’ve accepted that the coming of spring doesn’t yet ensure the right conditions for our usual summer outings, and the first one planned is in July, when we hope to visit Highclere Castle and gardens, and the Egyptian exhibition there. We also expect to mark the beginning of the summer ‘season’, in April, by another quiz. None of this would be possible without input from an active committee and I really appreciate all the effort from so many people that has made these activities happen. We’ve found ways of discussing ideas and plans for action, so there is still the sense of joint activity and achievement. It continues to be very rewarding to be part of AOUP. Gilliane Sills Pensioner Welfare Officer’s Report

I am writing this in mid-February, still in national lockdown and uncertain about when things will begin to change. Parts of the university remain open, for example laboratories and a few libraries, but much is closed. Staff are working from home wherever possible and of course the students are also learning from home, having online lectures and tutorials and even virtual practical sessions. How things have changed! I was delighted to be able to visit a few of you during the summer when the rules were relaxed, but I have largely continued to be in touch by phone and email. Lately it’s been great to hear your stories of getting vaccinated; it sounds as if in many cases there has been a real celebratory atmosphere in the vaccination centre. At the same time, I sense this latest lockdown has been particularly challenging; I think we are all feeling the burden of isolation more painfully in these winter months. As it’s said, the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn... So how to keep going? I think exercise can really help, and of course this is one thing we are all allowed to do! It’s great for our physical health: it helps us to maintain a healthy weight, strengthens our muscles, bones and joints, it’s good for our heart and circulation. And perhaps particularly important at the moment, physical activity is good for our mental health too, boosting our mood and helping to combat anxiety and depression. We’re all different and it’s really important to find the right level of physical activity for you in your current circumstances. I know some of you are still running long distances, but that’s not for everyone! If you are in any doubt about what’s right for you ask your GP or a physiotherapist for advice before you start. And if you try something and it causes you pain or discomfort stop straight away and again seek advice. The good news is that even a small increase in activity can make a difference to your health and wellbeing. If you are someone who finds yourself seated for much of the day, then doing some light activity, at least once every hour, will be

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beneficial. For example, getting up to make a cup of tea, do a little dusting or light gardening, even just standing up. The national guidelines say to try to combine activities across a week that do three things: improve your strength, improve your balance and get your heart rate up. For example, lifting weights (can just be a tin of beans in the kitchen), standing on one leg (with support if needed) and walking briskly. Or if you are already more active, examples that would fulfill each of these things would be heavy gardening, tai chi and cycling. Some activities of course cover all bases. For more information you can look at the NHS website, or see this link to an infographic: Physical activity for adults and older adults (publishing.service.gov.uk) Always start slowly and build things up gradually. If you set yourself realistic goals that you can achieve it will help to keep you motivated. Try to find activities that you enjoy. There are lots of resources online, including both live and pre- recorded classes. Age UK Oxfordshire run a very good service called Generation Games. Usually, they organize their popular classes at venues across the county but at present they are doing them online, and if you aren’t online, they can send you an exercise booklet or free DVD to get started. Their telephone number is 01235 849403. Good luck! And as ever, please feel free to get in touch, it’s always good to hear from you. Contact details below.

Julia Powles,

Pensioner’s Welfare Officer, University of Oxford, 6, Worcester Street, Oxford, OX1 2BX. Tel: 01865 616203, Email:[email protected]. My working days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Spring/Summer Programme 2020/2021

Talks – All taking place on Zoom

17th Mar Stephen Powles Otters - Coming to a River Near You

19th May Alistair Lack Oxford Architecture

16th June Stephen Dawson Oxford Preservation Trust

Visits & Events

21st April Zoom Quiz

13th & 27th July Egyptian Exhibition at Highclere

15th December Christmas Lunch

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At the present time it is hoped that the visit and Christmas Lunch will go ahead, however if Covid-19 restrictions are still in place then they may have to be cancelled. Please check the AOUP website for updates: http://www.aoup.ox.ac.uk

The new Chemistry Research Laboratory

My main task on becoming the first overall Chairman of Chemistry was to build a new Laboratory. Prior to becoming Vice-Chancellor, Colin Lucas chaired a committee to look at future needs and sites for new developments, and Chemistry lobbied successfully to be allocated what most Oxford people referred to as the ‘Oxfam Car Park’, the car park on the corner of South Parks The Chemistry Research Laboratory and Mansfield Roads, run by the charity on Saturdays. We preferred this site to the alternatives of refurbishing existing laboratories or going to a greenfield site outside the city, for example at Harwell. I had seen how non- productive laboratories are when everyone leaves at five in the afternoon. In a university lab one needs to be close to the centre of town so that graduate students can have access 24 hours of the day and can, for example, come back after dinner to check on their experiments. We hired the architectural practice RMJM to conduct a survey of what we needed and rough costings. It was clear that on the site we could build a building which could house all the Organic Chemistry research, then occupying the historic but smelly and barely safe Dyson Perrins building; about half of Inorganic Chemistry, and perhaps a quarter of Physical Chemistry. So far this was essentially hypothetical with a notional cost of about £60 million. These notions would probably have remained just that, had it not been for the timely introduction of the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF) with cash from the Research Councils and The Wellcome Trust. It was clear that we should make an application as our case was strong, but it was not clear as to just how much money we dared ask for. My soundings in the central administration suggested that the maximum we could request was £30 million. However, as a department we had a very effective Advisory Council which included in its membership both Dame Bridget Ogilvie, the former director of The Wellcome Trust, and Peter Doyle, the ex- AstraZeneca research director and chairman of the BBSRC research council. They counselled asking for the full £60 million. This caused some consternation with the Research Councils, but we persisted and were awarded £30 million, the biggest JIF grant given to anyone. Had we asked for £30 million, we would probably have received £15 million. With this sum in the bag, providing we got planning

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permission, the project would become real. RMJM drew up detailed plans with not a little help from major pharmaceutical companies, which had themselves recently built new laboratories, notably Glaxo Wellcome, SmithKline Beecham and AstraZeneca. Our first scare in respect of the site was that we would lose it to the Said Business School, which had just had its plans to build on the Merton Field rejected. Happily for us, Wafic Said did not like the site and preferred to locate his building by the railway station. Getting the plans past the City planners was far from straightforward, but happily the Labour chair of the committee was Maureen Christian, the widow of Materials Professor Jack Christian, and a strong proponent of modern architecture. She was an old political hand and knew all the tricks. She brought up the issue at the Planning Committee meeting just before the lunch break, when she knew folk are keen to get away. We succeeded by one vote. Unfortunately, the rules of the game are that members of the committee are able to demand a vote of the full Council, and this was done by the Greens, who oppose any development. The vote at the full Council was crucial and we would have lost over £30 million were it to have gone against us. Watching from the public gallery, things did not look good. The Council had a very slim Labour majority with a lot of Lib Dems and Greens who were temperamentally opposed to a new laboratory. Once again, Maureen Christian’s knowledge of how to play local government politics saved us. She demanded a named vote. Many of the Lib Dems were actually University employees and could not comfortably oppose, and so abstained, while she had personally telephoned each Labour councillor with individual arguments as to why the building was a good thing, be it employment opportunities or aesthetics. Again we won by a single vote. When we came to start the construction it was Maureen who broke the ground with a JCB. We now had a massive start towards the funding of the project to which another sum approaching £10 million was furnished by a HEFCE scheme. This still left a shortfall of nearly £25 million when cost escalations were included. Charities were our next avenue for support. The E.P. Abraham Trust, with funds derived from the work in the Dunn School of Pathology that yielded the cephalosporin antibiotics, contributed half a million pounds. We were also successful in raising a large sum from the Wolfson Foundation. This was not straightforward, but it was very rewarding. Lord Wolfson took a very close personal interest in how his charitable donations are employed. We visited him and his advisors, taking with us the architects and a model of the building: he would have preferred brick. He also made it quite clear that he would not pay VAT and that his limit was £2 million. At the same time, he was clearly very taken with my ideas of a seminar room which would be equipped to webcast lectures. This emboldened me to ask for £2 million to furnish one floor of the building, plus £1.5 million for the seminar room. Wonderfully, he gave us the full £3.5 million. I had hoped that British industry, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, would be major contributors. In fact they produced nothing; not even my old friend Tom McKillop who I knew from Parisian post-doc days and then CEO of AstraZeneca. The only money we received from British industry was £250,000 from Thomas Swan, Tom having been a Brasenose chemistry friend and, in this case, giving his

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own money and not that of shareholders, since his very successful and innovative company is personally owned. With still a shortfall of more than £20 million I managed to pull off what was an original and important deal, which has had wide ramifications. Together with Melissa Levitt of the University Development Office, I approached David Norwood, an entrepreneur and chess grandmaster, who had founded his own company, IndexIT, and had backed a number of University spin-outs. The first approach was the crude ‘give us some money’. In fact Dave had just sold his company to the London stockbroking firm Beeson Gregory, who had themselves recently had an IPO and were thus quite cash-rich and needed to use some of the money raised on their flotation. This was an extraordinary period before the dotcom bubble burst when financiers were almost fighting to be able to put money into high tech ventures. Quickly the conversation with Dave moved to thoughts of a deal. His first proposal was that Beeson Gregory would provide some funding in return for the right to be the investors in spin-out companies emanating from the Chemistry Department. Attractive though that notion was, it was not workable from our point of view. When spin-outs are set up there has to be the crucial three-way meeting and division of equity involving whoever puts up the money, the University contributing the intellectual property, and the academic without whom it will not work. If one party has the right to be the investor it would not be possible to bargain on the price and, furthermore I could not commit my colleagues to accept cash from a guaranteed source. They might prefer to use their own money or that of people who had backed them in earlier ventures, and of course Chemistry had had a few which was why Dave and Beeson Gregory were interested. The alternative with which we came up was for the company to provide an upfront sum in return for half of the University equity in Chemistry spin-outs. The parameters were: the size of the sum; the percentage of the University equity (typically 25%); and the length of time of the partnership. After some haggling, a nervous business when playing with a chess grandmaster, we came up with £20 million for half the University equity for a 15-year period. Having got this deal agreed in principle with Dave, we then had to convince his chairman, Andrew Beeson, of the wisdom of the arrangement. The key meeting was held over a lunch at Gee’s in the Banbury Road. The discussion did not start very encouragingly. Andrew seemed unconvinced by the opportunities, but a chance twist in the conversation changed everything. He asked if the tie which I happened to be wearing was a Vincent’s Club tie. I replied that it was indeed and we started to converse about sport: my interests, and then he told me of his interest in Real Tennis. I responded by asking him whether he had come across one of my pupils who happened to be the world champion under the age of 28. The whole atmosphere changed. The deal was done and my former pupil, Spike Willcocks, ended up working for Beeson Gregory. The first company from the Department at which he looked for Beeson Gregory was based on the research of Hagan Bayley. Spike liked the look of it, and jumped ship, becoming one of the new company’s first employees. The company, Oxford Nanopore, whilst still a private company, has a fair value approaching £2 billion. Surprisingly, the hardest part of the deal was getting the University to accept. The fact that nothing like this had ever been done before counted massively against

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us, but in the end a decisive Registrar, David Holmes, saw it through. I also had to convince my colleagues that their equity was not affected and that the deal was in their best interests. This was made more complicated by the fact that, since Beeson Gregory was a public company, news of the deal was a price-sensitive topic which could not be revealed until the market was informed. I thus had to send out an explanatory email at the same time as the details were announced to the Stock Exchange and also hold a series of meetings with all the Chemistry academics. Only one failed to accept the value of the deal. With hindsight, we were extraordinarily lucky with the timing, but in fact all parties have done well out of the arrangement. Chemistry had produced an amazing number of spin-outs with Beeson Gregory providing access to funds as well as business advice, so that the company has had a good return: the academics have set up some fourteen companies, and the University has received over £100 million as a result of spin- outs from the Department. So successful has been the partnership that, when Beeson Gregory merged with Evolution, the new group set up a subsidiary with the very dotcom name IP2IPO which made similar deals with ten British universities and was itself floated as an independent public company on the Alternative Investment Market, AIM, before moving to the main London Stock Exchange as the public company IP Group, of which I remained the senior non-executive director for several years, having been for a while the chairman of IP2IPO. The final contribution to the funding for the new laboratory, which we decided to call the Chemistry Research Laboratory, came about as a result of my involvement as a director of IP2IPO. The company was trying to interest the distinguished American backer of high technology and philanthropist Landon T. Clay in supporting some of their ventures. At the lunch held to encourage this, I happened to end up sitting next to Landon. I remembered that he was the man who had put up five separate one million dollar prizes for solutions to various mathematical problems. He had been much influenced by the success of Andrew Wiles in solving Fermat’s last theorem. He was pretty impressed that I knew that one of his problems was the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He was not to know that my only acquaintance with this problem was that Bryan Birch happened to be one of my Brasenose colleagues. After the lunch, I went back to my lab and suggested to my secretary Liz that we should write a begging letter. We did and it was successful both in financial terms and in developing a friendship with Landon. Very generously he gave us £250,000 The Ground Breaking Ceremony. Graham Richards with the Mayor of Oxford to name one of the laboratories, not after himself, but after Jeremy

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Knowles, the distinguished Oxford chemist who became head of Organic Chemistry at Harvard and later Dean of Arts and Sciences there. In all we raised £64.5 million so that the University had to put not a single penny into the cost of the building, and furthermore we had sufficient funds to do the job properly without having to cut corners or to do anything on the cheap. On the design I assembled a small, but extremely effective, committee from amongst my colleagues, one from each chemical tribe, but also with different skills. Jenny Green was invaluable in ensuring the design made sense; Colin Bain virtually designed the basement himself and was adept at reading the plans, while Steve Davies even went so far as to go to Italy to inspect the stone which would be used in the construction. The builders, Laing, one of Britain’s top, even blue-blooded companies, had been engaged to build the laboratory under a two-stage contract. This means that, during the first phase, everything is done with an open book, the design and the preparation of the site. At that stage we, the clients, could sign on with the same builder to proceed to the second stage as was usual, or to change to another builder. We were thus more than a little perplexed when, just as we were about to sign up for the second stage, Laing’s put their construction division up for sale. They had made huge losses on the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and on the National Physical Laboratory. Despite the predictions of the construction press that the company would be purchased by the major French firm Bouygues, in fact they were sold to the then little known Ray O’Rourke for the princely sum of £1 with their debt. There was some hesitation amongst the University professionals as to whether we ought to sign for the second stage with the new Laing O’Rourke, as they argued that Ray was a concrete man rather than a builder. To help us decide I had Ray O’Rourke The Topping Out Ceremony and some of his senior team to a meeting in my office, and was totally won over. I thought he was wonderful and indeed the way in which he has subsequently almost reinvented the construction industry has proved that we were right. The construction represented Laing O’Rourke’s first major project and they did a wonderful job for us, using some quite novel techniques. Amongst these was using ‘top down construction’. After The Queen at the opening of the CRL a surrounding containing wall was made,

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again using a novel plastic filter in the trench rather than the traditional Bentonite, the floor plate was put in place and thereafter construction went up and down at the same time with consequent saving of time. The site manager, Mike Morris, did a wonderful job keeping all our neighbours and the Oxford citizenry happy. The site was surrounded with lovely hanging baskets of flowers, but the thing which worried me most was that we had to remove 50,000 cubic metres of Oxford clay, since much of the building is below ground and of course well below the water table. I had visions of massive traffic jams and mud all over the road, for which I would get the blame. In practice, they timed the lorries to avoid rush hours and by radio ensured that there never queues of trucks. I never received a single complaint. The only time I did lose my cool was over the date of the final completion. The due date was July 2003 and as that day approached, it was clear that we would not make it. At a meeting in my office all the professionals swore that they would make 15 September. The certainty of the date was very important to us, not in fact because of the academic year; although that was a consideration, but because once completed we had to move some The Duke of Edinburgh touring the CRL basement very expensive and delicate instruments into the building. Just to move our nuclear magnetic resonance machines was going to require all the Brucker technicians in Europe, and this had to be planned in advance. I still thought 15 September was ambitious, but was assured that this was certain. On this basis, we booked the move for 1 October. Come the day they were nowhere near ready so, at serious expense, we had to delay and went for 15 December. The move had to be made at this time, but in truth the building was not really ready, and the move was massively complex, made worse because one of the few systems which did not perform well were the lifts. We were saved by the fact that one of our better decisions had been to hire the building manager long before construction was complete. Richard Jones was an inspired choice and it was his skill which ensured that we did get into the building in time for a royal opening in February 2004. My original choice to open the building was Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford chemist and the first scientist and first woman premier. Sadly, the Vice- chancellor vetoed this idea. He was worried that the choice was too controversial, whereas I felt it might undo some of the damage caused by the failure The lunch in the Atrium

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to award her the honorary degree. We fell back on my second choice, HM The Queen. Happily she was gracious enough to accept the invitation, and we had a wonderful day with her and the Duke of Edinburgh, culminating in a lunch in the large atrium which is a major feature of the laboratory. Now, after fifteen years of use, it is clear that we have what is possibly the best university chemistry laboratory in the world. In particular, the working conditions for the graduate students could hardly be bettered. They work in a way very reminiscent of a modern pharmaceutical research lab. Each has his or her own work space in a clean area, and can see into the working laboratories through a glass wall. It was a great pleasure during my last years as chairman taking round distinguished visitors. These included the King of Sweden, the Chinese Prime Minister, Fidel Castro’s son and many senior academics and industrialists. It was gratifying to hear the man who is probably the most distinguished organic chemist in the world say, ‘We have nothing to match this in North America’.

Graham Richards

William Wordsworth’s 250th Year: Walking through Lockdown with the Poet of Nature

Up the brook I roamed in the confusion of my heart, Alive to all things and forgetting all. These lines from William Wordsworth’s poem ‘It was an April morning, fresh and clear’, spurred my own wandering footsteps on 7th April 2020, as I trod the path to a familiar waterway near my home in West Oxfordshire. It was an important day, marking 250 years since the birth of one of Britain’s most significant poets and the author of the lines that I carried with me. Two weeks into a national lockdown and I, like many others, was not where I expected to be. The celebrations that had been planned to mark this anniversary had been postponed or moved online to the virtual world we had all just begun to get to grips with. As I could not be in the Lake District – Wordsworth’s home for the greater part of his life and the landscape to which he has been imaginatively attached ever since – it seemed a fitting celebration to walk the oft-traversed paths to my local river, cloudy with blackthorn, in as much of his spirit as I could muster. ‘It was an April morning’ speaks of the poet’s characteristic immersion in his environment, here a Grasmere Lake at dusk, and beyond, Rydal Water fellside in Grasmere. At first, his

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awareness of his surroundings, like his and the stream’s passage through the landscape, is in flux, both present and passing. Yet, moments later, Wordsworth’s restless feet are arrested by the ‘glad sound’ of a waterfall and its accompanying voices:

beast and bird, the lamb, The shepherd's dog, the linnet and the thrush Vied with this waterfall, and made a song, Which, while I listened, seemed like the wild growth Or like some natural produce of the air, That could not cease to be.‡

The harmonious soundscape that draws the sound of farm animals within the wild chorus and makes all seem rooted to or arising from this spot anticipates the sense of connection that Wordsworth finds in this quiet dell, which exists as his ideal fusion of secluded nature and rural community, and which soon becomes ‘[his] other home,/ [His] dwelling, and [his] out-of-doors abode.’ Wordsworth’s enduring connection to place, his sense of dwelling within a landscape where habitual returns become a form of inhabiting, begins here, in the experience of pausing within a place and becoming aware of, and attuned to, his environment. This year, as successive restrictions circumscribed our movements to ever smaller localities, Wordsworth’s poetry took on new resonances for me. The numerous lockdowns we have endured across the country have, perhaps, prompted many of us to accept the invitation that has always been proffered in Wordsworth’s writing, that of embracing a deeper communion with the natural world. More of us spent more time out of doors, getting to know our own local environments and giving our attention to what Wordsworth wonderfully calls ‘all the mighty world/ Of eye, and ear’. In the early days of the first lockdown, I discovered a tiny woodland less than five minutes from my house and later the most exquisite bluebell wood, both of which had been totally unknown to me. As a nation, we heard more birdsong, planted more flowers, learnt to experience our local landscapes in new ways, to embed ourselves in them differently as the world seemed to slow and the circumferences of our freedoms contracted. Wordsworth’s poetry so often celebrates the wonder that comes with attending to those things around us that might go unnoticed. More than the famous daffodils, mesmerising though they are, Wordsworth writes in praise of the celandine and the daisy, the latter of which he names ‘The Poet’s Darling’. Part of his delight in these flowers is their ubiquity – the daisy is the ‘unassuming Common-place/ Of Nature’ – that makes them frequent companions of his solitary rambles or reveries such that he can write of the celandine:

In the lanes my thoughts pursuing, I will sing, as doth behove, Hymns in praise of what I love.

These ordinary, overlooked flowers share space, in Wordsworth’s poetic landscapes, with the transporting songs of the skylark and the cuckoo.

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Wordsworth’s poem ‘To the Cuckoo’ celebrates the return of the bird’s ‘wandering Voice’ as an emblem of spring and one that transports the poet to his childhood days of seeking to find a bird ‘Still longed for, never seen!’ The cuckoo is ‘an invisible Thing,/ A voice, a mystery’ in Wordsworth’s poem, as he gives expression to the experience of hearing the distinct call of the bird echoing around the hills, as if from every direction. The first time I heard a cuckoo (in pre-lockdown times), high on the fells beside Derwentwater in the Lake District, I seemed to step inside Wordsworth’s visionary landscape. The low, two-noted song seemed to rise from the lake itself, a bodiless sound in the air all around me. ‘To the Cuckoo’ reveals an experience of wonder and prompts us to take notice of the individual sounds surrounding us, wherever we are. Wordsworth’s poem is also a marker of the decline of a particular sound within the British Isles, a reminder not to take for granted the sentiment of its opening lines – ‘O blithe New-comer! I have heard,/ I hear thee and rejoice’ – and perhaps a spur to the action of conservation. During the early days of lockdown, when the usual hum of traffic disappeared from our streets, the birds seemed to sing louder, as if filling up the empty space. Theirs is a rich tapestry of sound in every local landscape – from garden to hedgerow, lamppost to woodland – that not only the poets would mourn if it were lost. A sense of discovery often pervades Wordsworth’s writing, as in ‘The Sparrow’s Nest’, which opens with the evocative line: ‘Look, five blue eggs are gleaming there!’ Written in the present tense, the poem invites, indeed commands, the reader to step into the very moment it documents and to experience the joy of such a discovery for themselves. Wordsworth draws attention to the receptive sensory faculties of eye, ear, and flesh throughout his poetry, bringing the natural world within the grasp of his reader and making it tangible, experiential. The lyric moves from the present act of espying the hedge sparrow’s nest to the memory of encountering a like nest, in the garden of his childhood home in Cockermouth, with his sister Dorothy. From a single moment of awe in nature, the poem traces the defining inspiration for such a feeling – here revealed as Dorothy herself. Wordsworth celebrates Dorothy’s heart for nature, even as a child, which has a transformative influence on him, concluding the poem:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy.

The poem, as so much of Wordsworth’s writing, explores the human connection that binds the poet to nature, and the feeling for nature that, in turn, deepens his sympathy for human life. Writing this essay in darkest December, the wonder that Wordsworth proffers in poems like these seems a little harder to find reflected in the world around me. The spring songbirds have migrated south, the trees are bare, and for many of us, human connection is once again found only at the uncrossed and uncrossable thresholds of doorways and screens. Wordsworth is yet a poet for these times, finding in nature, and the memory of the natural world, recompense for experiences of isolation, doubt, and despair. In one of his most famous poems, ‘Lines written a

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few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’, Wordsworth explores the power of a particular landscape to bridge a gap of absence. The poem opens with a weighty sense of the passage of time, enhanced by repetition and reflected in the passage of waters:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs[.]

It is hard not to hear the ache in the word ‘long’, an ache no doubt shared by many of us this year, even if the length of separation has been but one long summer and long winter. Wordsworth reflects on the struggles of the intervening years, of his experience of ‘lonely rooms’, of ‘darkness’ and ‘joyless day-light’, ‘when the fretful stir/ Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,/ Have hung upon the beatings of [his] heart’. His response to these moments of loneliness and anxiety is a passionate affirmation of the power of nature and his recollection of the River Wye to bring ‘tranquil restoration’ and a lightening of ‘the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world’:

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!

The poem does not elide suffering in its movement toward nature, indeed, ‘Tintern Abbey’ is animated by Wordsworth’s sense of loss and doubt, which emerges again as he stands on the riverbank and reflects on how he has changed since he first ‘came among these hills’ in all the rapture of youth. His connection to nature now draws him nearer to human suffering, the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ audible in his encounters with the natural world. Wordsworth’s sense of both loss and nature’s recompense is sharpened by the presence of his sister Dorothy. The Wordsworth siblings had known separation from early childhood, following the tragic death of their mother when William was but seven and Dorothy only six years old, and the death of their father just five years later. In 1798, when ‘Tintern Abbey’ was written, the pair had reunited but still lacked the security of a permanent home together – a home they would at last find the following year in a small cottage in Grasmere. Wordsworth’s sense of the uncertainty of their futures is present in his passionate address to Dorothy, his ‘dearest Friend’ and ‘dear, dear Sister’, at the poem’s close. Wordsworth brings Dorothy within his experience of the landscape, establishing with From Dove Cottage Garden, Grasmere her a community of two that can withstand trials of ‘solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief’ through the enduring memory of shared experience and devotion to each other and to nature. He imagines a time of

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renewed separation, when he will no longer be able to hear Dorothy’s voice or see her ‘wild eyes’ and affirms his faith that she will not forget:

That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

The poem feels its way through the fragility of time passed, absence, change, and separation, building to a high note in Wordsworth’s numinous sense of the interconnectedness of humanity and nature – ‘a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused’ – and ending here, in the simple act of standing alongside another person. The riverbank retains an imprint of community; it is a spot that can be returned to – on foot or in the mind – and relied upon to bridge a distance of time, of persons, and of place. More than thirty years on from the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Dorothy Wordsworth – who’s own 250th anniversary is celebrated on 25th December 2021 – penned a response to the poem’s concluding hope and claimed the recompense of memory. ‘Thoughts on my Sickbed’ emerges from Dorothy’s personal experience of a kind of ‘lockdown’ following the onset of a debilitating illness in 1829 that increasingly left her unable to walk and confined to bed. The poem opens with a reflection on her sense of the gifts of nature, enriching her interior ‘hidden life’ from youth.‡‡ She writes of her immersion in the natural world and her minute observations of it, capturing the sense of wonder and discovery that she shared with her brother:

With busy eyes I pierced the lane In quest of known and unknown things; The primrose a lamp on its fortress rock, The silent butterfly spreading its wings[.]

Dorothy brings her brother and their family unit within the expression of her relationship to nature, describing them as ‘Companions of Nature’, a community that responds to the human and the non-human with equal affinity: ‘The stirring, the still, the loquacious, the mute—/ To all we gave our sympathy.’ The poem shifts from a contemplation of Dorothy’s unmediated early response to nature, her attunement to the world around her, to a recognition that a greater gift has followed. An ‘offering’ of flowers from the garden, brought to her sickbed, inspires her to walk through memory in the places she can no longer physically step:

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I felt a power unfelt before, Controlling weakness, languor, pain; It bore me to the terrace-walk I trod the hills again.

No prisoner in this lonely room, I saw the green banks of the Wye, Recalling thy prophetic words – Bard, brother, friend from infancy!

No need of motion, or of strength, Or even the breathing air, I thought of nature’s loveliest scenes, And with memory I was there.

Walking with the Wordsworths in these strange times, then, invites varied modes of being into our own lives. Spring is once more on the horizon and with it perhaps the chance to walk again (or for the first time) with ‘busy eyes’ that heed the minutiae of nature, or to find in one’s neighbourhood a wild spot that might become, in time and with intention, an ‘out-of-doors abode’. We might choose with Wordsworth to pay attention not only to the wonders of the circumambient world but to its markers of distress or suffering, to be present in nature and hear ‘the still sad music of humanity’ without being overwhelmed but drawn to a deeper sympathy and a corresponding impulse to action. We might sit with Dorothy and walk only in the mind’s eye, embracing the solace of nature through memory and imagination. Or we might find in walking through familiar landscapes a means of connection. The Wordsworths were in the habit of naming places in their locality after family members and friends, layering a personal, lived geography over the landscape and establishing community through shared ground. The poem this essay opened with, ‘It was an April morning’, is a record of one of these named places. At the poem’s close, Wordsworth dedicates the ‘wild nook’ to his sister, here in the guise of ‘Emma’, and imagines a linguistic afterlife to this spot that endures beyond absence and death, as the name ‘EMMA’S DELL’ – and the community it represents – lives on through the shepherds with whom Wordsworth has shared it. As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, the known, named landscape affords the poet an abiding sense of connection, even in solitude or separation. ‘When first I journeyed hither’, a poem Wordsworth wrote for his younger brother John, shares in this sentiment. (Published as ‘When to the attractions of the busy world’, 1815.) It is lesser known than others I have discussed here, but more than any other seems a poem for this moment. Having neglected as a spot for contemplation and composition a ‘stately fir-grove’ near his cottage home in Grasmere because of the ‘perplexed array’ of trunks that limit his ability to walk freely, Wordsworth is delighted to discover that his brother, while staying with him, has worn a path through the trees:

My thoughts were pleased within me to perceive That hither he had brought a finer eye, A heart more wakeful: that more loth to part

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From place so lovely he had worn the track, One of his own deep paths!

John, with a sailor’s ‘habitual restlessness of foot’, has experienced this place also with a ‘watchful heart’, an attitude that enables an awareness of the potentiality and promise of nature. In the poem, John, a ‘silent Poet’, has returned to the sea and Wordsworth draws strength from the thought that as he paces in John’s footsteps in the fir-grove, John might also be pacing along with him, in his own circumscribed space, across the deck of his ship – a mirrored walking that maintains a relational, empathetic connection between them. The poem is made more poignant when read with the knowledge that a short time after its composition Sour Milk Ghyll, Grasmere John was drowned in a shipwreck and that the day of John’s return that the conclusion of the poem longs for did not come to pass. Nevertheless, the poem’s final lines speak beyond their own moment and into ours, offering a mode of walking that finds connection in separation, companionship in solitude, and solace in shared footsteps:

Alone I tread this path, for aught I know Timing my steps to thine, and with a store Of indistinguishable sympathies Mingling most earnest wishes for the day When We, and others whom we love shall meet A second time in Grasmere’s happy Vale.

‡All quotations of Wordsworth’s poetry are taken from William Wordsworth The Major Works, (ed.) Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ‡‡Dorothy Wordsworth ‘Thoughts on my Sickbed’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, (ed.) Duncan Wu, 4th ed (Chichester: Wily-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 609-611.

Hannah Britton

Hannah is a postdoctoral researcher who completed her PhD on the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats in 2018. Reports of Winter Talks

The Rise and Fall of Opioids – Jane Quinlan

The talk was about the changing attitudes to opioids over the last 100 – 150 years. The fact that opium, morphine and cocaine were freely available in Victorian society

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led to significant levels of addiction which necessitated strict controls by the early twentieth century. Natural opioids are derived from the latex sap that oozes from the unripe seed pods of the opium poppy Papaver somniferum when it is scored, not from the seeds themselves. The Sumerians cultivated opium poppies as far back as 3000BC and an Egyptian medical papyrus from around 1550BC describes its use in: ‘A remedy for too much crying in a child’. In the late nineteenth century morphine, cocaine and alcohol were used in tonics that were freely available to the general public, and indeed the original Coca Cola contained cocaine and cola nuts, a source of caffeine, and was sold as a nerve tonic (the cocaine was removed from the recipe in 1903). In 1845 ‘Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup’ was sold to be given to teething children and contained 2mg/ml of morphine. Recreational use of cocaine was well known, and the fictional Sherlock Holmes used cocaine to alleviate the boredom of existence. In the early nineteenth century British traders were taking opium grown in India and importing it into China, with the connivance of corrupt officials even though this was illegal, to use as a currency instead of silver to buy tea and silks because they didn’t want to deplete the country’s silver reserves. In 1839 the Emperor ordered the seizure of large quantities of opium from the traders which led to two Opium Wars. In the UK as the social impact of addiction became more apparent in the late nineteenth century restrictions were introduced on the sale of opioids. In 1868 the sale of opium was restricted to pharmacies and in 1908 opium, morphine and cocaine were moved into part 1 of the Poisons Schedule. In 1909, however, the Anglo-Chinese Opium Agreement ended the involvement of England in the Indo- China opium trade. In the middle of the First World War the Army Council restricted the sale of cocaine to soldiers except on prescription by a doctor as there were reports of use of cocaine by soldiers on leave which risked compromising the efficiency of the army. In 1920 the ‘Dangerous Drugs Act’ was introduced which made it an offence for anyone except pharmacies, doctors or vets to possess, hold or sell opioids, and in 1928 cannabis was added to the act. There are two types of pain. Acute pain, resulting from tissue damage caused by trauma, surgery or cancer and lasting less than 3 months, can be relieved by opioids. Chronic pain which is caused by nerve damage, is not associated with injury or disease and goes on for longer than 3 months, cannot be relieved by opioids. John J. Bonica, who is known as the founding father of Pain Medicine, identified this second type of pain which the medical profession had hitherto ignored. He was inspired to dedicate his career to the alleviation of pain by his experiences of treating WW2 veterans when he was Chief of Anaesthesiology in the US army, and his own suffering with chronic pain through injuries sustained in the years he spent as a professional wrestler (known as John “Bull” Walker), his means of funding his way through school and college. This was the start of the study of pain and its treatment. In 1965 John Lloyd set up the Oxford Pain Relief Unit, in 1974 John Bonica founded the International Association for the Study of Pain and in 1979 the British Pain Society was founded. In 1950s pain was seen as an inevitable consequence of cancer and it was left to patients themselves to self-medicate. One such medication that was available at

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the end of WW2 was Brompton Cocktail, which consisted of morphine, cocaine, cannabis and gin (although the gin could be swapped for another spirit). In 1967 Dame Cecily Saunders (she became a Dame in 1980) set up the St Christopher Hospice which was the first institution to give palliative care to cancer patients. In 1970 Robert Twycross, who was an associate of Dame Cecily Saunders, after studying thousands of cases showed that morphine was useful as pain relief in patients and didn’t become addictive if given in a controlled manner. At the same time in America the pain receptors in the brain which morphine attached to were identified and the natural opioids Enkephalin and Endorphin were identified. In 1982 the World Health Organisation formulated the Pain Ladder for acute pain treatment. This had three levels; Level 1 – Mild Pain, which could be treated with common paracetamol; Level 2 – Moderate Pain, where codeine was added to the mix; and Level 3 – Severe Pain where morphine was added. The use of this ladder for chronic pain, and the experience of the palliative care doctors that morphine didn’t become addictive, led to more GPs and clinicians prescribing morphine for chronic pain. Typical studies of the treatment only lasted for 3 months and even though some patients were taking opioids for years there were only a few longer studies performed to see if there were any long-term benefits. In fact these patients were less likely to get back to work, and described worse pain and more depression than those not taking opioids. In 1996 the Association for the Study of Pain (ASP) said pain should be the fifth vital sign along with temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure and in 2004 it announced that pain relief should be a universal human right. This led to patients in the developed world demanding pain relief for chronic pain from their doctors which was supported by doctors in the ASP who said that doctors should not be too scared to prescribe morphine. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the combination of the Pain Ladder, 5th Vital sign, Universal Pain Relief and apparent non-addiction led to the perfect storm of patients demanding ever higher doses of morphine for chronic pain relief even though it was not achievable. This was also boosted by a five-sentence letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 that said that out of 40,000 patients treated with morphine for acute pain only 4 became addicted. This letter was cited 608 times over the next 30 year despite no review or follow-up of the patients. In 1950s the Sackler brothers, who were all qualified doctors, were buying up pharmaceutical companies and an advertising agency. In 1960 they launched the Medical Journal which was the first medical paper sent directly to doctors and, although it used case studies that looked scientific but were in fact adverts, it was used to sell products directly to the doctors. In 1962 they bought Perdue Frederick and changed its name to Perdue Pharmaceutical and in 1996 launched Oxycontin which is a strong opioid similar to morphine and by 1999 chronic pain relief accounted for 86% of opioid prescriptions. In 2001 they spent $200m on advertising and promotions for their products and used marketing data to identify high prescribing doctors and to target physicians to be more liberal with prescribing opioids, stating that Oxycontin had a lower risk of addiction than morphine. In 2004 Oxycontin was the leading drug of abuse in the US and in 2007 they were found guilty of misbranding Oxycontin as being less addictive than morphine despite knowing it was twice as strong and just as addictive and were fined $634m.

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By 2016 in US intentional/accidental drug overdose overtook car accidents and shootings as the leading cause of death (64,000 v 40,000 v 38,000). Between 2007 and 2013 the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programme was introduced by many states and this coupled with the DEA in 2012 demanding that doctors who prescribe opioids should be registered with them, which many doctors did not, led to patients looking to illicit markets for heroin instead. In 2012 Fentanyl, which is 50- 100 times stronger than heroin, was being mixed with heroin, but as often the mixing was not thorough the dose received could be zero or fatal and led to an increase in the deaths from heroin use. In UK we should take notice of the American experience with the use of opioids for chronic pain treatment and the British Pain Society recommend that a maximum dose of 120mg morphine equivalent per day with a function-based assessment of effectiveness be used and if low dose of opioids do not achieve the desired effect they should be stopped. Colin Sparrow

(Addendum: On 21st October in USA Perdue Pharma came to a settlement with the Department of Justice and agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges to resolve a probe of its role in fuelling America’s opioid crisis. They will admit enabling the supply of drugs “without legitimate medical purpose” and pay $8.3bn in settlement. The firm still faces thousands of cases brought by states and families and the deal with the Department of Justice must receive court approval.)

Who was Pleasance Walker? - Caroline Roaf

On 18th November 2020 Caroline Roaf gave us a talk on the letters of Pleasance Walker on Zoom, ably supported by our Chairman, Gilliane Sills, who accepted no nonsense from the software. Caroline began by saying that she has always found letters in general so fascinating that at one time she had planned to produce an anthology of letters. It was through a series of coincidences that she encountered Pleasance Walker’s: a collection that was written to her father and mother between April 1915 and February 1919 from France. There are eight letters written in 1915, five written in 1916 and then 115 letters and postcards dating from March 1918 until early February 1919, the month when Pleasance returned home. The letters spent many years in the attic of her married home, 8, Fyfield Road, where Pleasance moved in 1921 and lived until her death in 1965. At an auction, a member of the public bid for the contents of the attic, because she wanted to buy the carpenter’s chest for her husband. The trunk containing a wasps’ nest, some photographs and the letters came as a job lot. Caroline borrowed them from their new owner and photocopied them in the early 1970s, the pioneer era of photocopying. For many years life got in the way of Caroline’s intention to study them. With permission from the owner however, using the photocopies, she has now edited a book called Trenches and Destruction: letters from the Front 1915- 1919, Pleasance Walker by C.R. Roaf. The original letters remain in private hands, while the photographs that accompanied them went to the Oxford Museum and

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have been used extensively for teaching. Caroline has given the photocopies to the Oxfordshire History Centre in Temple Road, Cowley. When the First World War broke out, Pleasance Walker, born 1882, was already a 33-year-old woman, living with her parents at 30, Norham Gardens. She was a good amateur orchestral violin player, enjoyed reading, owned two bicycles, loved cats and nature, was a Sunday school teacher at St Giles’ church, moved in a wide circle of friends and relations and did not seem to have any plans to leave home or marry. Her older brother Frank, born 1881, was already in the Royal Navy, having been sent from the Dragon School to the Royal Naval Training College at Dartmouth, aged 12, while her younger sister Rosalys, born 1886, had joined an order Pleasance Walker of Anglican nuns. Pleasance had an Portrait by Michael Gabriel allowance of £7.10s a quarter, which her father paid her from his salary as a Demonstrator in Physics at Oxford University. Her background was, therefore, middle-class but not affluent. The family enjoyed healthy walking holidays in Wales and had a resident servant Nana, who did light domestic duties and had once been the children’s nanny. Pleasance’s first communication, in fact a postcard to her mother dated 4th April 1915, showed her working in a French emergency hospital at Mondville near Caen. She had come from England as part of a Voluntary Aid Detachment. It is not clear from the letters where in England she trained or why she began to work in a French hospital, rather than in one run by British staff. She reported that many of the other members of the detachment were now ill but she still felt perfectly well. Phyllis Huxley, a friend from Chalfont Road, Oxford, was planning to join her detachment soon. A month later, Pleasance wrote to say that Nurse Carter, who had trained the detachment, had come to visit them. Nurse Carter had been impressed with Pleasance’s skill at doing dressings and had also commented that the VAD workers in France were already doing dressings that no trained nurse in England would be allowed to attempt. Monsieur Fortin, the doctor in charge, had praised her for her calmness during theatre work. The next letter was written on 12th May 1915 from a different French hospital in Mons. Pleasance had just been appointed head nurse and seemed to have found something she really wanted to do with her life. By then, she had also found a supportive friend, Alison Sandilands. The two of them stuck together throughout the war, Alison specialising in nursing fever cases, while Pleasance continued to work in surgical wards. Missing out the intervening years, Caroline now read parts of two letters written in 1918. In the first dated 27th September 1918, Pleasance described her work in a

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ward nicknamed The Torture Chamber, where soldiers suffering from bad fractures had to lie motionless for weeks on end, while their legs or arms were suspended in positions favourable to healing. The doctors were leaving all the dressings and even the ordering of supplies to the young English woman, because they trusted her formidable skills. The patients were often in shock, in addition to which they were not all French speakers. Pleasance often searched for people who could speak Arabic or German, to communicate with her patients. The last letter was written the day after Armistice Day from Saint Contin, part of France that had only just been liberated from German control. Pleasance described it as a ruin. The French poilus wanted revenge but the Armistice prevented them from penetrating German territory to indulge in some retaliatory destruction. Pleasance told her father about the death of a 20 year old German soldier, who could not communicate with her, as they had no common language. She wondered whether her father would have changed his mind about wanting to slaughter every German if he had witnessed the deathbed of this young man. She also related how a civilian family had somehow, against regulations, returned to their ruined farmhouse, only to encounter an unexploded bomb in their outhouse. The seven- year-old son had died, while all the rest of the family had been wounded except for a tiny baby less than three weeks old. At the start of the letter, Pleasance wondered whether the rumour she had heard about the signing of the Armistice was a piece of German propaganda, designed to trick the French, American and British armies into exposing themselves to greater danger. By the end of the letter however, she had read a newspaper report verifying that the Armistice had in fact been signed. A feature of all the letters was the way Pleasance echoed what her parents told her about events in Oxford and beyond. Her writing was always full of telling detail. Although she did not keep incoming letters, she must have received plenty. She often asked her mother to use her precious allowance, which her father continued to pay, to buy potted meat, chocolate or sweetening tablets. Friends and family also sent her small sums of money to spend on comforts or even equipment for her patients. Another feature of Pleasance’s letters was her erratic spelling. She had a way of doubling consonants in the middle syllables of words. For this reason, Caroline surmises that Pleasance was not educated at Oxford High School but in a more relaxed institution, possibly St Faith’s School, run by the Anglican nuns of the Convent of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. This convent was the one Pleasance’s younger sister, Rosalys, had joined. In the lecture, we only had a taste of the many interesting topics covered in this sequence of letters. For instance, Pleasance’s practical interest in music meant that she commented knowledgeably on all the leading composers and instrumentalists who came to Oxford while she was away in France. As for Pleasance and Alison, after the Armistice Madame Derémetz, the matron of the hospital in which they were then working, offered them senior positions in a hospital which was about to be established to care for severely disabled French soldiers. Pleasance had already decided to return to Oxford, while Alison, who was not from a middle-class background, contemplated taking up the offer. Both of them were also nominated for the French Croix de Guerre, though neither of them was eventually decorated. Pleasance came home in February 1919. She initially suffered a complete breakdown in health, after so many months and in fact years with irregular days off.

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In December 1921, she married Herbert Lister Bowman, Professor of Metallurgy and went to live in 8, Fyfield Road. Many years later, when Pleasance was an old lady, Caroline, then in early married life, walked past this house regularly. Their paths did not however cross until she read the collection of letters after Pleasance had died. Caroline met surviving members of the Walker family as a result of publicity connected with her book. They were able to put names to some of the people in the photographs. The ladies’ striking hats were a feature of the Edwardian family groups. Any photograph of Pleasance by herself as a young woman always included a cat or kitten, as did the photograph showing her in old age. If you would like to know more or follow up some of Pleasance’s other interests, you could buy a copy of Caroline’s book by emailing the author at [email protected] and sending £10.00. Caroline is giving all proceeds from the sale to the Museum of Oxford in the Town Hall. Caroline Dalton

Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders – Jane Robinson

Jane Robinson began her talk by setting the scene for an event that took place on a cold, foggy March evening in 1920. Two groups of women were walking towards the Palace of Westminster where that day the all-male, bar one, members of this establishment had been debating the important issues of the day. The two groups of women although different in outward appearance, one striding purposefully, wearing slim loose-fitting coats with hems well above the ankle and close- fitting hats, the second, following more slowly, dressed along old-fashioned lines with hats as wide as their hips, were gathering to celebrate the same event, a banquet to mark the acceptance of the SDRA – the Sex Disqualification Removal Act, which had received Royal Assent the previous year, and would change the lives of women for ever. Following on from the partial success of right to vote campaigns, two years earlier, this Act marked a significant step forward in that it allowed women to pursue a career in any civil profession or vocation without disqualification by sex or marriage. Among the guests, which included the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney General and Solicitor General, were Ray Strachey, described as a Renaissance Woman and her friend and mentor, Millicent Garrett Fawcett

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Millicent Garrett Fawcett, now in her 73rd year and a veteran of the suffrage campaign which must have made entering the Palace of Westminster by invitation something of a novelty. Ray Strachey had studied mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, played cricket with aplomb and wanted to enter Parliament. Having been unsuccessful in 1918, 1920 and 1922, she decided on the next Gwyneth Bebb Thomson (on the left) best option: to work as political secretary to Nancy Astor, the only female member of parliament at that time. Also present at the banquet were Helena Normanton (1882-1957), one of the first female barristers to take silk in England; Lady Rhondda (1883-1958), a businesswomen and political activist from Wales, but perhaps most interesting was a young wife and mother, Gwyneth Bebb Thomson, born in 1889, one of seven children. Gwyneth was educated at home and then at a progressive boarding school, St. Mary’s in Paddington. Determined to work for a living she went to St. Hugh’s Hall, Oxford in 1908 to study Jurisprudence, a surprising choice since women were not allowed to enter the legal profession at this time. She left Oxford without a degree although her marks would have resulted in a first class degree had the University been prepared to recognise women at this time. In 1913 she sued the Law Society for refusing to allow women entry to the Law Society to train to practise law but lost both the case and the following appeal on the grounds that as no women had ever been admitted there was no precedent and without a precedent they could not be admitted. Ridiculous as it may seem, this was a common argument used to prevent women entering other professions such as academia, architecture, the church, engineering and medicine. During the First World War Gwyneth married a solicitor, Thomas Weldon Thomson, and worked for the Ministry of Food until her first child was born on the day the SDRA was signed off. Inspired by this she applied to Lincoln’s Inn to read for the bar. She was accepted and after a year of studying in the evenings while still working for the Ministry of Food, she passed her first-year exams. Gwyneth was an example of young women quietly battling society for the right to study and to work and bring up a family. Most remain unrecognised: Virginia Woolf described them as a society of outsiders. The SDRA had a positive effect in some areas: Oxford, for example, decided to award degrees to female Elizabeth Blackwell students from October 1920, although Cambridge held out until 1948, but there was still resistance to allowing women into the

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workplace. Immediately after the First World War, women struggled to find work as jobs were returned to the men released from the forces and in need of work. As time went on the old expectations that a woman’s role was in the home were revived and objections to the employment of women were found in all walks of life. The Inns of Court added a lack of lavatories to the absence of a precedent for employing women; engineers claimed that women would not be able to withstand the irregular hours and meals, while RIBA claimed that skirts and fragile ankles would prevent them from climbing ladders! On a more self- indulgent note, members of the Senior Common Rooms were concerned that women would eat all the cheese at formal dinners. Women were not going to be invited into the professions: they would have to make their own way in. While there were pioneers leading the way such as Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to be registered by the General Medical Council as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson a medical practitioner, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1839-1913), the first to qualify as a doctor, it is perhaps the little known women who waged a quiet battle against authority and prejudice that allowed society to be where it is today. One such example is Ida Mann (1893-1983). She was withdrawn from school aged sixteen, by her father, and transferred to a local college to train as a clerk. On passing the Civil Service Girl Clerk’s examination, Ida’s first job was at the Post Office Savings Bank. She then decided that this was not the life she wanted and despite opposition from her father, Ida qualified at the London School of Medicine for Women, the only medical school in the UK open to women at that time. She was awarded a DSc for her work on the embryology of the Ida Mann human eye in 1924, qualified as a surgeon and had secured a staff post at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London by 1927, as well as running her own private practice at Harley Street. She was appointed Reader in Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford in 1941, and in 1945, became first female to be appointed Professor of Medicine at Oxford. If one were asked to name a female engineer of note, Amy Johnson (1903-1941) might well come to mind. Initially introduced to flying as a hobby, she gained her Pilot’s Licence A in July 1929 and by December she had Margaret Partridge qualified for the Ground Engineer’s C Licence, the first

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woman in the country to obtain this. In recognition of this, she was elected a member of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1930. Solo flying guaranteed international recognition but just as interesting are the achievements of a relatively unknown female engineer Margaret Partridge. Born in Devon, she studied maths, at Bedford College, London. The course included applied maths or mechanics which she loved, being a practical person. Awarded her degree in 1914, she was one of very few women with these qualifications. For a brief period she taught maths in a girls’ school but soon realised this was not for her and in 1915 joined a firm of consulting engineers in London where she was put to work in the office. In 1917 she found work with Messrs Lyons & Wrench who made searchlights and X-ray machines. She took advantage of the opportunities available to women working in industry during the First World War and trained as an engineering apprentice learning about everything made in the factory, rising to supervisor and designing small electrical engines. If the war had not ended, Margaret might well have stayed with the firm but jobs were needed for returning servicemen and rather than return to the office or teaching she took herself back to Devon and advertised herself in the local papers as a Country House Lighting Engineer. Supported by hard-won financial backers and eventually employing several members of staff and training her own female apprentices she brought electricity to several villages in Devon and the town of Beccles in Suffolk. By 1927 she had won the distinction of being the first woman to wire an entire village for electric light. She was the first member of the Women’s Engineering Society to be in charge of her own enterprise and by 1945 was president of the Society. After retiring to Willand in Devon, she was told that the village hall needed rewiring. Summoning the members of the Women’s Institute, the most frequent users of the hall, she taught them how to rewire it themselves. Gertrude Leverkus was severely myopic and her mother despaired of marriage for her heavily bespectacled daughter, but Gertrude herself was not deterred and at seventeen enrolled at the University of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture – the first woman to do so. The more prestigious Architectural Association’s school did not admit women until 1917 and then only grudgingly driven by economic necessity. Surprisingly, unlike most fathers of this period, Gertrude’s father had encouraged her in this venture, possibly because he himself would have liked to have been an architect. Talented at drawing, for which she had won a prize at the age of eleven, Gertrude was taken on as a pupil in 1919 by Horace Field, a highly respected neo-classical architect working in London at this time. She became one of the first women members of RIBA and went far beyond designing kitchens, the role envisaged for women by male architects. Maud Ryden (1876-1956) was a small, physically disabled woman who will be remembered as a famous preacher who changed people’s hearts and Maud Ryden minds. She was born with dislocated hips, the

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youngest of eight children, but could never come to terms with her mother’s assertion that God had made her lame. A friend of Ray Strachey and Millicent Thomson, she read history at Oxford, finding enjoyment and friendship in the social life of Lady Margaret Hall. After Oxford she worked in welfare in London and Liverpool, trying to find a physical and spiritual home away from her mother. In the 1920s her interest shifted to the role of women in the Church and in 1929 she began the official campaign for the ordination of women when she founded the Society for the Ministry of Women and in 1931, she became the first woman to become Doctor of Divinity. In 1944 she married the recently widowed Reverend Hudson Shaw after the death of his wife Effie. Maude died in 1956 leaving a legacy of philosophical and religious teachings, an inspiration for those who followed in her footsteps. Remembered for her liberal views and way of life, she remained a staunch supporter of equal rights for women in every field. It has taken until 2015 for the Anglican Church to appoint its first female Bishop. In 2019, half of the medical students in training were female and half of practising solicitors were female, something made possible by the pioneering work of so many little-known women in the last century. To find out about more of them you will have to read the book.

Margaret Abel

The History of Nuneham Courtenay – Malcolm Airs

Like many of us, I imagine, I always approach Nuneham Courtenay rather warily, but the next time I drive slowly through the village it won't be because of the speed cameras, but because an AOUP lecture has opened my eyes to what I have so often looked at but never thought about. Addressing over 160 members via Zoom on 20 January, architectural historian and Vice-President of the Oxford Preservation Trust, Malcolm Airs, gave an engrossing Stiff Leadbetter’s design for Nuneham House account of the history of building and dwelling in what Horace Walpole deemed 'one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world’. Palladio insisted that the ideal site for a Villa, not a Seat, was rising ground, fronted by a river and embraced by low hills. The Classicist 1st Earl Harcourt agreed and after a four-year tour of Europe was sure he had found it at Nuneham. The architect of the Radcliffe Infirmary, Stiff Leadbetter, was commissioned to build

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what was probably the first Palladian Villa designed to be a Principal Residence; James 'Athenian' Stuart's rigour ensured consistency of interior style. What, though, to do with the jarring incongruity of the existing village, with its alehouses, corn-mill, parsonage, school and green, definitely in the way in the choicest part of the landscape? Answer: demolish and replace with a new and properly designed village some mile and a half away from the house. Prompted by many such examples of the power of wealth exercised on a grand scale, Oliver Goldsmith in his poem The Traveller noted in lament, 'Have we not seen at pleasure's lordly call,/The smiling long- frequented village fall?', and in The Deserted Village declared, 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,/Where wealth accumulates and men decay'. But Earl Harcourt had reason to believe Capability Brown he could not be found guilty of neglecting the duty of the nobleman to spend his money wisely. The new village was classically elegant, consisting of matching pairs of cottages along the Oxford-Henley road, with the symmetry of line that we still enjoy. Drawings survive indicating that the Earl personally designed the cottages to be commodious and healthy, with two rooms on the ground floor, one a pantry and the other a fifteen-foot living room. That this amount of space for a family was thought ample gives food for thought. But when the medieval church was pulled down, what replaced this loss was a replacement in name only, a Classical eye-catcher, which lacked furnishings and monuments of course, but also a chancel, a font and a central pulpit. With episcopal blessing the church bells were sold to meet the cost of Athenian Stuart's new building, one only being left, but since the church was over a mile from the new village, the summons to worship was inaudible there. A century passed before the village got a church built for use rather than show. The villagers were said to be pleased with their new accommodation and content to move; it is certain that none of them was in any position to object. But one did: Babs Wyatt pleaded to remain in her cottage. The Earl was 'moved by her appeal and her "clay-built cot" was allowed to stay in the landscape garden. In her lifetime she was looked on as an Arcadian shepherdess and, after her cottage had been pulled down at her death, an inscription was put on the tree beside it by the 2nd Earl Harcourt.'‡ This 2nd Earl Harcourt was such a disciple of Rousseau that he brought the exiled philosopher to Nuneham, erected a statue in his honour, gave away his carriages and attempted to organise the villagers on communitarian lines. But middle age, and a wife, cured 'the Republican Earl' who returned to a coroneted carriage and his proper position at court. Genuinely interested in landscaping, he worked closely with Capability Brown on remodelling the gardens for a more natural

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look. I hope I'm not alone in regretting that the idea of building a Gothic ruined castle was scrapped. The Carfax Conduit was installed instead. The house itself seems to have struck each generation as not quite right or as actually inadequate. Malcolm Airs took us through a dizzying list of changes and extensions, first by Brown, then by Smirke. Removal of flights of steps; addition of a whole new wing; linking pavilions between the main block and the wings; the addition of new rooms above the loggias; a Classical lodge. The illustrations Malcolm presented showed just how far the house was from ever attaining a final, steady Nuneham Courtenay House Chapel state. But it became ideal for entertaining on the grandest scale. In 1841, when Prince Albert was taking an honorary degree, Nuneham was the setting for lavish hospitality for Queen and Consort and all the heads of Oxford colleges. Over the years death duties affected the family fortunes greatly, but, in the early twentieth century, a later Harcourt, buttressed by the wealth of his American wife, did return to the house something of its earlier glitter. Astonishingly, the park was stocked with emus and kangaroos; Edward VII visited. The death knell for Nuneham was the Second World War, when it was requisitioned by the RAF and eventually sold to the University of Oxford, which seems never to have known what best to do with what it had acquired. There would be no profit in ending this report by rehearsing the subsequent history which led to the university largely divesting itself of the problem. It would be right, though, to Nuneham Courtenay House River Frontage end by noting that Malcolm Airs was responsible in 1980 in his then role as Conservation Officer at South Oxfordshire District Council for negotiating the unique legal agreements that safeguarded the appearance of the village and designated it a conservation area when the estate was dismantled and the cottages sold individually. At the moment members of the public cannot visit the house nor see the Conduit and the whole area is under threat by plans for roads and gravel extraction, but the village the 1st Earl Harcourt realised with such imperious largeness of vision and purse remains and its beauty

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will continue to give pleasure. We must be grateful for that, grateful too that we didn't have to stand by and watch our own cottages being pulled down so that the Earl could create a village more to his liking.

Cottages in Nuneham Courtenay

‡(Mavis Batey, the pioneering garden historian to whom Malcolm Airs paid tribute in his talk, in her account: 'Nuneham Courtenay: An Oxfordshire Deserted Village', Oxoniensia, 1968, p.111).

Stephen Gill

Miscellany

Book Review: Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden

In this age of alternative truth, fake news, and increasing concerns about the role and future of democracy, this book is timely. How do we know what is fake and what is true? How do we judge decisions made by our leaders against the promises they made? Are we reading sanitised descriptions of actions taken by leaders? Whose version of history do we believe? Even in culture and the arts, are we only seeing a fraction of what an artist wanted us to see of their own creations – and how does that self- censorship affect our understanding of their work and contemporary society? The book is about the destruction of knowledge. Destruction could be by accident or by design. Accidental loss might be by disaster such as fire or flood, or as an unintended casualty of war. The more sinister intentional destruction could be for reasons of ethnic cleansing (a people’s culture as well as human individuals), to influence cultural or political identity, to enhance or destroy reputations, for revenge, or to assert control. The phrase ‘information is power’ is pertinent to the text, as is ‘the pen being mightier than the sword.’

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If this sounds overdramatic for a book that is, on the face of it, an eminently readable history book, the timely publication of Richard Ovenden’s work should be taken as a serious wake-up call. The author encourages us to learn from history, something societies are notably poor at doing (Jonathan Freedland’s excellent BBC Radio 4 series The Long View illustrates this point https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s7d6). In essence, the text is a commentary on the importance of systematic collection and preservation of knowledge, with a plea to ensure that preservation is by design, rather than happy accident. Much of the comment is (understandably) about digital preservation, and Ovenden points out the fragility of digital records. The author argues that guaranteed sustainability is key to long-term preservation. He acknowledges that commitment to preservation includes significant challenges: legal, financial and geopolitical. This is clearly of real concern to him when he references Thomas Bodley’s wisdom of the early seventeenth century in ensuring ‘infrastructure’ for future longevity and sustainability of his collections. Bodley’s safety net included sources of funds, endowments, and statutes, physical storage locations, and roles and responsibilities. One solution to the problem of longevity as presented by the author is to ensure sustainable growth and support for libraries and archives. To misquote Mandy Rice Davies you may think “well he would say that wouldn’t he?” Yet it is true: knowledge is constantly under attack somewhere in the world, and the importance of libraries and librarians (for simplicity in the remainder of this review I shall use the term ‘libraries’ and ‘librarians’ to mean ‘libraries and archives’ and ‘librarians and archivists’) is key to impartial collection, retention, curation and control of information and knowledge. By committing to sustainable preservation, there is a greater chance of knowledge surviving for the benefit of future societies, and even of supporting the ‘truth’. The actions required are those of any librarian’s toolbox – collection, selection, curation, description, access, preservation.

One thing that struck me as I read is that there is little that is new: ● Ensuring works survive by making multiple copies and sharing them was practiced in the ancient Middle East: this idea is taken up in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe https://www.lockss.org/) digital preservation initiative today. ● Today’s digital copies have to undergo format migration so that, as technology develops, older works can still be accessed and read, and so they are in the ‘best/latest/more robust format.’ The ancients realised this too when scrolls in Ancient Egypt were superseded by parchment. ● Burning the Books provides many historical examples of books being destroyed by political or religious opponents, and yet shockingly, within the last five years the Turkish government destroyed more than 300,000 books taken from Turkish schools and libraries as it targeted anything associated with Fethullah Gülen, the US-based Muslim cleric accused by Turkey of instigating 2016’s failed military coup (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/turkish-government- destroys-more-than-300000-books).

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Ovenden observes that, as a general rule, librarians tend to be trusted and impartial. They are not driven by commercial priorities and shareholder dividends. Being trusted parties helps to underpin trust in the quality, descriptions, reliability and veracity of the sources they curate, giving readers a fighting chance to make their own informed judgments on authors, content, bias, and context. The job description of librarians and others who have retained and rescued knowledge needs to include courage, guile, and a lot of luck. We learn of many selfless individuals who had the foresight and pluck to smuggle, hide, and rescue works from libraries and archives that were burnt, bombed, and ransacked, or intended to be posthumously destroyed. In addition to superhero librarians, we read about close colleagues of well-known authors, and those incarcerated in ghettos who took significant personal risks in their decisions and actions to ensure the survival of works. The heroes and villains of the book are many and various. The cast list comprises characters ranging from activists and archivists, poets and librarians, the oppressed, political and military leaders and the aristocracy, to plundering conquerors and empire builders. It is packed with historical description of events, peoples, cultures, history, and of course libraries, archives and collections. Details are added that bring the stories to life and the author provides deeply researched ‘potted histories’ as context that set the scenes for the general reader. The topics are presented in chronological order, starting in Ancient Greece and ending with today’s digital collections and open scholarship, on a journey via the Reformation, Nazi Germany, Sarajevo and more. The first two chapters set the foundation on which the remainder of the chronology sits in terms of libraries – their buildings and collections, their purpose, and their scholars. The value of knowledge shines through the text. For example, the value of knowing your enemy, or destroying knowledge in an attempt to annihilate those with different beliefs. It is also a sober reminder for those of us ‘paying’ for many of today’s services with our data – think of ‘big tech’ and the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident. Even within academia, some publishers have realised the value of information and are rapidly turning into data services that gather, manage and manipulate data about research, researchers and institutions, which is then presented by them as league tables, or to show research trends and research performance. Ovenden also bemoans the fact that iconic buildings receive international attention on their tragic loss (e.g. during the Balkans war in the 1990s), but not the books and archives they contain, and whose value is arguably as great, or even greater. Unsurprisingly Bodley’s Librarian includes a chapter on the Bodleian. Richard Ovenden’s deep knowledge of this great institution and the treasures it contains is apparent. He speaks with joy of the works under his care as temporary curator (not owner) in a continuous line that will keep going into the future. The book includes personal comments and experiences of the author, and in this way includes an element of memoir. He states that “Throughout this book I have tried to convey the long history of attacks on knowledge and the impact that the destruction of libraries and archives has had on communities and on society as a whole”. He definitely achieves his aim, but acknowledges that he hasn’t stopped the attacks on books and knowledge. He blames this chiefly on ignorance and complacency, never more

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so than in our current indifference and laxity about the preservation of digital assets. As he pleads, such complacency leads to underfunding and, equally risky, leaving control and retention of digital knowledge to commercial entities (‘private superpowers’) as we are now doing. I’m hoping there will be a future follow-up volume to Burning the Books that adds more examples and commentary on what we’ve got right or not in the interim, once we’ve had time to digest some of the fallout from today’s scenarios (Trump & fake news, Brexit, COVID-19, climate change, to name a few). As Ovenden says “the preservation of knowledge is fundamentally not about the past, but about the future”. If you didn’t receive a copy of this book for Christmas, then make sure it’s on your birthday present list – the subject matter is too important to be ignored. It would be easy to conclude negatively that history has demonstrated the precariousness of knowledge, and that there are many similar examples of knowledge destruction around today that pose a very real threat to society. Instead, in my opinion the best response to the scenarios that Richard Ovenden describes and warns us of, is the subject matter of the final chapter ‘why we will always need [sustainably funded-] libraries and librarians’. I’ll drink to that.

Sally Rumsey

Sally, a librarian, is a Jisc OA Expert currently working with cOAlition S (see https://www.jisc.ac.uk/about/who-we-are-and-what-we-do and https://www.coalition-s.org/) and was the former Head of Scholarly Communications & RDM, Bodleian Libraries. She worked under Richard Ovenden at the Bodleian Libraries (2006 – 2019).

Ice Skating in Winter

It is Lockdown again: here is a winter parallel to the soaring speed and freedom of the swift’s summer flight evoked in Owen’s Ode in the Miscellany of last autumn’s edition. Please escape into this extract from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, in which the sheer exhilaration and excitement of ice skating as a child is so atmospherically conveyed. These lines were written about a year before the poet moved into Dove Cottage (pictured).

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And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom, I heeded not their summons: happy time It was indeed for all of us—for me It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud The village clock tolled six,—I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home. All shod with steel, We hissed along the polished ice in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew. And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

William Wordsworth The Prelude (Book 1, lines 425-463 (1850 version) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prelude_(Wordsworth)/Book_I

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University Single Sign-On (SSO) Account

I am writing to you to encourage you to enable your University Single Sign-On (SSO) account with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). You may be aware that we have taken steps to improve the security around our IT accounts recently. The need to do this was quite pressing. In 2020 many of us were presented with fake, but very convincing, emails with the goal of capturing SSO credentials. The cyber- criminals were seeking to acquire access to university accounts for a multitude of reasons. These include getting hold of our personal and research information, developing an attack that could assist in fraudulent activity, or downloading malware that could hold the university to ransom. The purpose of this note is to advise you to be cautious about unexpected emails or strange login screens, report anything suspicious to the Oxford Computer Emergency Response Team (OxCERT) and encourage you to enrol in Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). MFA has become compulsory for nearly all IT account holders in the University and is being implemented throughout Hilary Term. MFA requires a second factor, in addition to your SSO password, to log into University systems. If your password should be stolen via phishing (a fake login page), it is unlikely that the cyber- criminal could do much without the second factor. This second factor can be a request to approve the login on your smartphone, or a text message to your mobile phone, or an automated telephone call to your fixed landline. You may be familiar with this security process through online banking or social media accounts. At this time, we are not enforcing MFA on University accounts held by the majority of retirees. We will, however, be scheduling MFA for a small group of retirees that have full access to Nexus 365 as part of ongoing research or teaching engagements. For everyone else, we would encourage you to self-enrol if possible. If you retain an affiliation with your college or department then your IT support team can support you to enable MFA. If you do not have a department or college affiliation then please contact the IT Service Desk if you need any assistance. For information about how to self-enrol with MFA and how to set it up, please see the page on our website with https://projects.it.ox.ac.uk/mfa-information-for- retirees. We will be sending an email to all retirees on Monday 1 March with details about whether you have been scheduled to have MFA enabled on your account or whether you are being asked to self-enrol. The more University accounts that are protected by MFA, the more we are all protected from cyber-criminals.

Graham Ingram

University of Oxford Chief Information Security Officer

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Obituaries

The Association has been notified of the following deaths. Please note that the University’s Pensions Office is not necessarily informed in every case of the deaths of widows/widowers of University pensioners. So if readers are aware of any member of the Association (pensioner or spouse/partner) whose recent death has not been reported in the list, the Editors would be grateful to be informed. They can then pass the information to the Pensions Office as appropriate. Sometimes we do not receive details of the deceased’s post or departmental or college association. In such cases the AOUP Chairman will be glad to hear from any reader who does have the information, as it can then be recorded in a subsequent issue. The pandemic has impeded resolution of such cases through editorial enquiry; so, regrettably, there is a higher than usual frequency in this list.

2016 Mr John W Durnford, 19 November, Technician/Caretaker, Ruskin School of Drawing.

2020 Mr Malcolm Batts, 9 February, Buttery Assistant, All Souls College. Dr John F Bithell, 7 March, University Lecturer in Statistics, Emeritus Fellow of St Peter’s College. Mr David Carpenter, 10 March, husband of Mrs Caroline Carpenter, Conference Manager, St Catherine’s College. Ms Lesley E Forbes, 18 March, Keeper of Oriental Collections, Bodleian Library, Fellow of St Cross College. Dr Nicholas J Allen, 21 March, Emeritus Reader in Social Anthropology, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College. Dr Derek Hopwood OBE, 22 March, Director of the Middle East Centre, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College. Professor Richard Sharpe, 22 March, Professor of Diplomatic, Fellow of Wadham College (Death in Service). Mrs Eileen Shaw, 31 March. Mr John R Lucas FBA, 5 April, University Lecturer in Philosophy, Emeritus Fellow of Merton College. Mr Robert Wilson, 5 April. Mr Richard K Calvert, 8 April, University Development Office. Professor Wilfred Beckerman, 18 April, Tutor in Economics, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College. Sir Eric Anderson, 21 April, Rector of Lincoln College 1994 – 2000, subsequently Honorary Fellow. Mrs K H Mullins, 24 April, Graduate Housing.

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Professor Stefano Zacchetti, 29 April, Yehan Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies, Fellow of Balliol College (Death in Service). Ms Christine Lees-Baxter, 1 May, Finance Officer, Medical Sciences Division. Mrs Jean Naish, 21 May. Mr E W J Taylor, 27 June, Computing Services. Dr R Morrin Acheson, 4 July, University Lecturer in Biochemistry, Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College. Mr David J Chamberlain, 9 July, Deputy Director, Careers Service. Mr James C Casey, 13 July, Department of Experimental Psychology. Mr Harold L Tucker, 21 July, widower of Mrs Sylvia M Tucker, PA to the Keeper of Scientific Books, Radcliffe Science Library. Professor Ian D L Michael, 23 July, Emeritus Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish, Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College. Dr Brian Buck, 24 July, University Lecturer in Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College. Professor Malcolm L H Green FRS, 24 July, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College and of St Catherine’s College. Mr Stephen Kemp, 24 July, Nuffield Department of Population Health. Mr Brian F Davis, 25 July, Caretaker, Residential Properties, Estates Division. Mr Ronald E Lewis, 25 July, Messenger, St Hugh’s College. Dr John J (Jim) Coulton, 1 August, Emeritus Reader in Classical Archaeology, Emeritus Fellow of Merton College. Mr John M Shrimpton, 9 August, Chef, Nuffield College. Dr Donald R Harris, 10 August, Director, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College. Mr Christopher Tompkins, 10 August, Architectural Assistant, University Surveyor’s Office. Mr Jeffrey Brooks, 21 August, Carpenter, Merton College. Dr Margaret U Rees, 25 August, widow of Dr David A Rees, Tutor in Philosophy, Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College. Mr David M J Davies, 27 August, Buttery Scout, Lincoln College. Miss Susan Bonnington, 28 August, Lead Research Nurse, Nuffield Department of Surgery. Mr John T Coleman, 29 August, Workshop Technician, Dunn School of Pathology. Mr John T Blackwell, 1 September, Technician, Department of Plant Sciences. Mr Kenneth C Witchard, 5 September, Porter, Bodleian Library. Michael V G Hicks, 7 September, Lincoln College. Mrs Ann O’Brien, 7 September, Green Templeton College. Mr Jeremy P S Montagu FSA, 11 September, University Lecturer in Music and Curator of the Bate Collection, Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. Mr Gordon Barker, 14 September, husband of Mrs Doreen Barker, Secretary, University Offices.

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Mrs Sandra Williamson, 16 September, Hall Manager and Resident Warden, University College. Mrs Constance Hinchliff, 17 September, widow of the Revd. Professor Peter B Hinchliff, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church. Mrs Roseanne Witt, 18 September, wife of Dr David C Witt, University Lecturer in Engineering Science, Emeritus Fellow of Merton College. Mrs Pearl E Aldridge, 19 September, Departmental Undergraduate Studies Officer and PA, Dunn School of Pathology. Dr B Ann Waswo, 22 September, Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College. Mr Colin C Newbold, 25 September, Maintenance Technician, Magdalen College. Mrs Helen D’Arcy, 7 October, Cleaner, Merton College. Professor Peter Sleight, 7 October, Field Marshal Alexander Professor Emeritus of Cardiovascular Medicine, Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College. Mrs Laura M Brackley, 8 October, Cleaner, Bodleian Library. Mrs Eileen Pilbeam, 12 October, Department of Physiology. Mr Francis J Lamport, 13 October, University Lecturer in German, Emeritus Fellow of Worcester College. Miss Katherine G Lomas, 13 October, PA to the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry, Dyson Perrins Laboratory. Mr Brian Taylor, 14 October, Superintendent of the Book Bindery, Bodleian Libraries. Mrs Mary Rogers, 15 October, Cleaner, Theoretical Physics. Miss Sheila R Broughton, 17 October, Cataloguer, Department of Catalogues, Bodleian Library. Mr John W Davies, 21 October, University Lecturer in Law, Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College. Mrs Nicole Gore, 21 October, widow of Dr Keith O Gore, University Lecturer in French, Emeritus Fellow of Worcester College. Professor Marcus J Banks, 22 October, Professor of Visual Anthropology, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Fellow of Wolfson College (Death in Service). Mrs Jean M Wheable, 23 October, Gallery Attendant, Ashmolean Museum. Mr John C Greenford, 27 October, Medical Research Technician, Department of Engineering Science. Mrs Ivy E Green, 29 October, Glasswasher, Department of Ophthalmology. Professor Norman H March, 2 November, Coulson Professor of Theoretical Chemistry Emeritus, Emeritus Fellow of University College. Dr Raymond E Franklin, 3 November, University Lecturer in Engineering, Emeritus Fellow of Worcester College. Mr M Everard Robinson, 7 November, Director, Libraries Automation Service. Mr Stanley Mills, 8 November, widower of Mrs Kathleen M Mills, Receptionist, Institute of Archaeology.

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Mrs Carolyn Guillot, 12 November, Course Administrator, Department of Psychiatry. Mrs Kathleen M Sheehan, 14 November, Laboratory Technician, Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology. Mrs Anne Baker, 16 November, Department of Experimental Psychology. Dr Gerald T Warner, 17 November, Administrator and Research Officer, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College. Mr Dennis J Marsh, 18 November, Electronic Engineer, Department of Zoology. Mr Henry (Dick) Crabb, 19 November, Carpenter, Jesus College. Mr Peter J Watson, 24 November, widower of Mrs Brenda I Watson, Bursary Clerk, Trinity College. Mrs Dorothy G Argyle, 26 November, Catering Supervisor, Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics. Mr Harry Cook, 30 November, Messenger, University Offices. Mrs Pamela Y Evans, 2 December, Secretary, Health Care Epidemiology. Miss Nina E Phipps, 3 December, Administrator, Department of Earth Sciences. Mr Leo Bateman, 7 December, widower of Mrs Jean S Bateman, Domestic, Corpus Christi College. Professor Bryan C Sykes, 10 December, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College. Mr David B Scott, 11 December, Accounts Assistant, Wolfson College. Professor Peter M Neumann OBE, 18 December, University Lecturer in Mathematics, Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College. Mrs Joyce Wedge, 20 December, widow of Mr John F Wedge, Electrician, Department of Nuclear Physics. Mr Clifford R Cartwright, 21 December, SCR Butler, New College. Mrs Jane E Smith, 21 December, Secretary, National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit. Mrs Joan P Dunckley, 27 December, Kitchen Assistant, Trinity College. Mr Stephen M Frost, 27 December, Lodge Porter, Hertford College. Professor Angus B Hawkins, 30 December, Director (Public and International Programmes), Deputy Director, Department for Continuing Education, Fellow of Keble College. Mrs Lurline E Savery, 30 December, Scout, New College.

2021 Mr Kenneth R Howson, 4 January, Technician, Department of Engineering Science. Mrs Susan J Salmon, 5 January, Nurse, Magdalen College. Mr John D Brown, 12 January, Assistant Registrar, University Offices. Dr Bruce R Tolley, 15 January, University Lecturer in French, Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College. Mrs Jacqueline R Kennedy, 18 January, widow of Mr Scott Kennedy, Lodge Porter, Hertford College.

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Mr Stephen T Curtin, 20 January, Porter, Bodleian Library. Mrs Mary B Lillis, 23 January, Housekeeper, Magdalen College. Mr Derek E Page, 28 January, Storeman, Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics. Mr Derrick M Auger, 4 February, Department of Pharmacology. Mrs Nima Y Dakar, 4 February, Scout, New College (Death in Service). Mr Terence A Mugglestone, 4 February, Lodge Porter, Wolfson College. Mr Frederick J Belcher, 5 February, Gardener, University Parks. Mrs Audrey L Drohan, 5 February, Scout, Corpus Christi College. Dr Jane H Mellanby, 8 February, University Research Lecturer, Department of Experimental Psychology, Emeritus Fellow of St Hilda’s College. Mr Brian H E Coates, 9 February, Scientific Glassblower, Clarendon Laboratory. Mrs Ann L Rogers, 10 February, Secretary, Department of Plant Sciences. Mr John L Harris, 11 February, Maintenance Operative, Balliol College. Mrs Elizabeth C Glyn, 12 February, Secretary, Phonetics Laboratory. Dame Fiona Caldicott, 15 February, Principal of Somerville College 1996-2010, subsequently Honorary Fellow, Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Pro-Vice- Chancellor (Personnel and Equal Opportunities). Mr Graham T Joiner, 17 February, Kitchen Clerk, University College. Mrs Blanche Ballard, 19 February, Administrative Assistant, Medical School Offices. Mr Peter J Busby, 23 February, Technician, Biomedical Services. Mrs Patricia Band, 2 March, Administrator, Astrophysics.

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Change of Address

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To ensure that the Newsletter reaches you regularly, will you please record any change in the address to which the magazines should be sent on the above form and send it to: The Membership Secretary, AOUP, 24 Marlborough Road, Banbury, OX16 5DQ or by email to: [email protected]

Notifications of death should also be sent to the Membership Secretary.

THE ASSOCIATION OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PENSIONERS website:

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Do have a look at the website, and feel free to make suggestions about what you would like to see on the pages.

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Pictures of past trips can be found there, plus posts from members about their various hobbies and activities, including local walks and wildlife.

Cover: Snowdrops at the Harcourt Arboretum, University of Oxford

© Oxford University Images/Jill Walker

Front cover: Cowley Road street art Back cover: Decorative tiles and mosaic in the Examination Schools