CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE THE PELICAN RECORD Vol. LI December 2015 CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE THE PELICAN RECORD Vol. LI December 2015 i The Pelican Record Editor: Mark Whittow Design and Printing: Lynx DPM Limited Published by Corpus Christi College, Oxford 2015 Website: http://www.ccc.ox.ac.uk Email: [email protected] The editor would like to thank Rachel Pearson, Julian Reid, Sara Watson and David Wilson. Front cover: The Library, by former artist-in-residence Ceri Allen. By kind permission of Nick Thorn Back cover: Stone pelican in Durham Castle, carved during Richard Fox’s tenure as Bishop of Durham. Photograph by Peter Rhodes ii The Pelican Record CONTENTS President’s Report ................................................................................... 3 President’s Seminar: Casting the Audience Peter Nichols ............................................................................................ 11 Bishop Foxe’s Humanistic Library and the Alchemical Pelican Alexandra Marraccini ................................................................................ 17 Remembrance Day Sermon A sermon delivered by the President on 9 November 2014 ....................... 22 Corpuscle Casualties from the Second World War Harriet Fisher ............................................................................................. 27 A Postgraduate at Corpus Michael Baker ............................................................................................. 34 Law at Corpus Lucia Zedner and Liz Fisher ..................................................................... 39 The Sierra Leone Education Project Geoffrey Goodall ......................................................................................... 43 A Month in Lüderitz: Sharpston Scholarship Travel Report Anastasia Carver ........................................................................................ 47 “Bare Ruined Choirs” in St Dogmaels Abbey Ian Wood .................................................................................................... 51 Reviews The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags by Eldred Durosimi Jones Geoffrey Goodall ......................................................................................... 53 Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow edited and translated by Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood Thomas Charles-Edwards ......................................................................... 55 Obituaries Brian Campbell ..................................................................................... 62 Robert Cook .......................................................................................... 66 Geoffrey Cox ........................................................................................ 68 Nick Mackintosh .................................................................................. 69 John Moles ............................................................................................. 70 Desmond Oswald ................................................................................ 77 1 The Pelican Record Michael Palmer ........................................................................................ 79 William Prosser ........................................................................................ 80 Brian Sedgemore ...................................................................................... 83 The Record Chaplain’s Report ..................................................................................... 85 Chapel Choir ............................................................................................. 88 The Library ................................................................................................ 89 Gifts to the Library ................................................................................... 93 Archivist’s Report .................................................................................... 102 The Junior Common Room .................................................................... 106 The Middle Common Room .................................................................. 109 Travel Grant Reports .............................................................................. 111 Clubs and Societies Rowing ...................................................................................................... 119 Men’s Football ......................................................................................... 121 Women’s Football ................................................................................... 122 MCR Football .......................................................................................... 124 Women’s Hockey ..................................................................................... 125 Men’s Cricket .......................................................................................... 125 Women’s Cricket ..................................................................................... 126 Netball ....................................................................................................... 127 Rugby ........................................................................................................ 127 Classics Society ....................................................................................... 127 Owlets ...................................................................................................... 128 Corpus Tortoise Fair ............................................................................... 129 Werewolves ............................................................................................. 130 Cheese Society ......................................................................................... 131 The Fellows ........................................................................................ 132 News of Corpuscles Deaths ....................................................................................................... 143 Scholarships and Prizes 2014–2015 ....................................................... 144 Graduate Examination Results .............................................................. 146 Undergraduate Examination Results ................................................... 148 New Members of the College ................................................................ 156 2 The Pelican Record PRESIDENT’S REPORT Read Nick AT THE TIME OF WRITING this report on the 2014–2015 academic year, the President finds in his in-tray the Government’s Higher Education Green Paper, “Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice”. The policy consequences of this consultation are not certain, though they are likely to be evident by the time of next year’s report. What is already plain, however, is that it signals yet another step towards the “marketisation” of higher education, including the likely arrival of “new providers” whose declared purpose is to increase competition, deliver more utilitarian teaching, drive up standards and drive down prices. The chief proposal is the idea of a “Teaching Excellence Framework” that will aim to rank universities by the quality of their pedagogy and supposedly help student consumers in finding value for money. This is not the place to dilate on the probability that the TEF will impose a burdensome new regime on universities while doing little or nothing to improve the quality of teaching. But it is hard to see that it will bring any benefit to Oxford in general or Corpus in particular, where the unique tutorial system and regular, frequent meetings with academic supervisors provide an education designed to do much more than prepare undergraduates for the world of employment. 3 The Pelican Record If some are thinking, “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”, it is worth contemplating the academic performance of this year’s undergraduates. While largely architects of their own success, they have all enjoyed the tailored tutorial attention for which colleges are designed and for which Corpus, as one of the smallest, is especially well equipped. Several of the most outstanding results this summer were achieved by Finalists who had had to intermit their studies for reasons of health and whose return to Corpus required particular pastoral support from tutors. This was not the relationship of customer and provider; nor was it one that would have been improved by the imposition of a TEF. Of the sixty-six students who sat Finals, over a third secured Firsts; 89 per cent were placed in the top two classes. This put us tenth – out of thirty – in the Norrington Table. (It has to be said that the Table has become a measure of insignificant differences: by way of illustration, last year’s top college fell this year to twenty-fifth, but still boasted 30 per cent Firsts and 59 per cent Upper Seconds.) Prize winners in the Final Honours Schools were Harry Begg (Gibbs Prize for Distinguished Performance in English); Zuzanna Bien (Gibbs Prize for her Experimental Psychology Research Project); Patrick Meyer Higgins (Gibbs Prize for the best First in Biological Sciences); Il-Kweon Sir (Comparative Philology Prize for the best performance in Philology and Linguistics); Hannah Lucas (Gibbs Prize for Distinguished Performance in English, and Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize for the best performance in the Shakespeare paper); Cora Salkovskis (Gladstone Prize for the best undergraduate thesis in History); Olivia Thompson (Arnold Ancient