The Brazen Nose 2014-2015 BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 1 19/01/2016 14:16 The Brazen Nose The Brazen The Brazen Nose Volume 49 2014-2015 Volume 49, Volume 2014-2015 BRA-19900 Cover.indd 1 20/01/2016 11:30 Printed by: The Holywell Press Limited, www.holywellpress.com BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 2 19/01/2016 14:16 CONTENTS Records The Amazing Women Portraits A Message from the Editor ............. 5 Project by Margherita De Fraja ....... 97 Senior Members ............................. 9 Alumni Nominations for the Class Lists ..................................... 18 Amazing Brasenose Women Project Graduate Degrees ........................ 21 by Drusilla Gabbott ...................... 100 Matriculations ............................... 26 Memories of Brasenose College Prizes .............................. 30 by Abigail Green .......................... 103 Elections to Scholarships and John Freeman: Face to Face with an Exhibitions 2014 ......................... 33 Enigma by Hugh Purcell ............... 107 College Blues ............................... 38 My Brasenose College Reunion Reports by Toby Young ............................. 123 JCR Report ................................. 40 Patrick Modiano and Kamel Daoud HCR Report ............................... 44 As Principled Investigators Library And Archives Report ........ 46 by Carole Bourne-Taylor ............... 124 Presentations to the Library........... 52 Review of Christopher Penn’s Chapel Report.............................. 54 The Nicholas Brothers & ATW Penn Music Report ............................... 57 Photographers of Southern India Arts Week .................................... 63 1855-1885 by Sophie Gordon ........ 129 The King’s Hall Trust For The Arts .. 64 The Ashmole Society Report ....... 65 Travel Ale Verses ..................................... 68 Introduction ............................... 141 The Ellesmere Society Report ...... 69 Travel in the Philippines Financial Review .......................... 70 by Robert Slinn ............................ 142 Clubs Ink And Water BNCBC Women’s Team Report .... 73 by Syed Ali Asad Rizvi ................ 144 BNCBC Men’s Team Report ...... 74 Expedition to Iceland The Bowman Boatclub Fund ........ 77 by Alastair Graves...................... 145 Football Men’s Team Report........ 79 Merida by Francesca Anthony ........ 148 Rugby Football Report ................ 82 Orielton Field Course 2015 Ladies’ Hockey Report ................. 83 by Edward Lavender ...................... 150 Cricket ......................................... 83 Netball ......................................... 85 News & Notes ......................153 Tennis .......................................... 86 Brasenose Society .................157 Year Reps & Gaudies ............162 Articles Development & Alumni Report 166 The Admission of Women to Donors to Brasenose 2014-15 ...170 Brasenose by Graham Richards ........ 88 Obituaries ............................186 A Brasenose Tutor at Ypres by Llewelyn Morgan ........................ 92 BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 3 19/01/2016 14:16 4 THE BRAZEN NOSE BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 4 19/01/2016 14:16 EDITOR’S NOTES 5 EDITOR’S NOTES Dr Llewelyn Morgan (Tutorial Fellow in Classics) Welcome to another Annual Record, paradoxically the second we’ve sent to the printers in a single year, 2015, (you may be reading this in 2016 but I am writing it in 2015). That achievement is only, however, down to our unconscionable delay in producing Brazen Nose 48 (2013- 14), for which I offer my abject apologies. The drought of 2014 is far too high a price to pay for two Brazen Noses on your doormat in less than twelve months, and I can only imagine how bereft you all felt. That we are now right back on schedule is entirely down to the assiduous efforts of Julia Diamantis and Jenny Wood in the Alumni Office. My gratitude to both of them is profound. If two Annual Records in one year feels thoroughly contra naturam, that’s because years matter to a place like Brasenose. Old Members know very well that they can never escape their year of matriculation. Come to a gaudy seventy years later, like the wonderful Jubilee Lunch I attended a couple of days ago, and you still have the date 1946 attached to your name. To put that another way, it is the makeup of your academic year in College, the glorious lottery that throws you together with strangers who become your very closest friends, which does most to give your life, willy-nilly, a Brasenosey shape. On balance, our respect for years may, admittedly, owe slightly more to the earth’s movement round the sun than to the University Calendar, and we undoubtedly attach significance to certain multiples of years because we are, as it happens, creatures possessing ten fingers and ten toes. Again, though, a college has its higher reasons for marking anniversaries, or maybe just peculiar emphases masquerading as higher reasons. To the world at large this was a year to recall Magna Carta, Agincourt, and Waterloo. Waterloo? Pah! We all know that the really significant event of 1815 was not that damned near-run thing on the road to Brussels but the foundation of the Brasenose College Boat Club. Brasenose beat Jesus, and condemned two centuries of Oxford undergraduates to perishingly chilly mornings on the river, a full month before Wellington and Blücher wrapped things up regarding Bonaparte. The Summer Eights dinner was a special celebration in 2015, and it was an event halfway between us and the foundation of the Boat Club, BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 5 19/01/2016 14:16 6 THE BRAZEN NOSE the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, that took me, most unexpectedly, to the unmarked grave of a former Fellow of Brasenose, as you can read later in this publication. In January it was Malcolm Thomas’s twenty- five years as a scout that the College was delighted to celebrate with a tea party. But the anniversary that did most to animate this academic year at Brasenose, as it also did last, was not a hundredth or two-hundredth but a fortieth: forty years since the first women students matriculated in October 1974. I am pleased to say that this forms as strong a thread in the record of the year that you have before you as it was in our experience of 2014-15. You can read Graham Richards’ recollections of the process that made Brasenose one of the first co-educational Oxford colleges, and Abigail Green’s important reflections on the legacy of that momentous decision. But as I perused all the submissions to the Nose this year, from the Ashmole Society to Arts Week and the women’s rowing report, it was heartening to see how inspirational our current students continue to find that event a generation ago, and how creative their responses are to it. In the report of the Brasenose Society, and in Margherita de Fraja’s account of her “Amazing Women” photographic project, you will find accounts of the focus of celebration, the “Into the Mix” event on 2nd May 2015, a fantastic instance of collaboration between old members and current students. One cannot help being struck, not only by the energy of these celebrations, but by the lack of complacency that characterised them: as Professor Green insists, and as also comes through in the interviews of former women students by contemporary students that was part of Margherita’s project, admitting women as students is one thing, achieving true equality in the academic profession or any other is quite another. How many more years will that take? Brasenose has been basking in the glory of a second Prime Minister for a few years now, but woke up on the morning of 8th May 2015 to discover, to its mild surprise, that this would continue to be the case for at least another five years. In fact this brought our total to three Prime Ministers, since Sir John Gorton (1932) served as Prime Minister of Australia from 1968 to 1971. Imagine our excitement when Malcolm Turnbull (1978) was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Australia last September, thus succeeding Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, and we rose to four Prime Ministers, still a little way short of Christ Church, but (importantly) equal to Balliol, who have three British PMs (Heath, BRA-19900 The Brazen Nose 2015.indd 6 19/01/2016 14:16 EDITOR’S NOTES 7 Macmillan and Asquith) and a Prime Minister of Bechuanaland (and later President of Botswana), Seretse Khama, who I am assured was the best of the bunch. But in one respect we may have the beating of Christ Church and Balliol. Has any other college ever boasted two Prime Ministers simultaneously? For once, if so, I don’t really want to know. Let’s enjoy it while we can. The robustness of Australian party politics hardly seems to promise an incumbent any very extended tenure of office, anyhow. And since I have mentioned tenure, allow me to welcome in print some new arrivals in the Fellowship, Elias Dinas in Politics (who in fact arrived in January 2014, and I am running out of apologies), Conrad Nieduszynski (Biochemistry), Andrea Ruggeri (Politics), and our new Chaplain Dominic Keech. The departing interim Chaplain, Reynaud de la Bat Smit, took with him an aura of Rock ‘n’ Roll celebrity not seen at Brasenose since the Beatles dropped by in 1964 (a 50th anniversary we passed last year without much fuss). Richard Haydon had taught Mathematics at Brasenose for nearly forty years when he left us at the end of 2013, and we wish him (yet again, somewhat belatedly) a happy retirement, and I should mention as well two Senior Kurti Fellows who contributed generously to the intellectual culture of the College but have now moved on, Peter Somogyi and Francis Robinson. Alan Bowman was by comparison a comparatively recent arrival, Camden Professor of Ancient History from 2002, and for the last five years our Principal. Five years might be just one hundredth of the lifetime of this College, but Alan’s time as Principal has had an impact out of all proportion to its length. If a Principal needs to harness the consensus without ever letting the College feel it is being harnessed (or bridled or lassoed), then an ideal character for the role possesses decency, wisdom, is free of self-importance, and has seriousness but also a sense of humour.