Reflections on a vice-chancellorship

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol is both its academic
leader and its chief executive officer. Professor Eric Thomas, who
trained as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, took up the post in 2001.
He joined Bristol from the University of Southampton, where he
was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Biological Sciences.
He led the Government task force on how to increase voluntary
giving in higher education, is Deputy Lieutenant of the City and
County of Bristol, served for four years as Chair of the Worldwide
Universities Network and is Chair of the Research Policy Committee
of Universities UK.
<strong>Reflections</strong> on a
vice-chancellorship
Eric Thomas
Nick Smith
100 15

The first thing my predecessor, Sir John Kingman,
said to me when we met after my appointment was ‘I
hope you realise you’ve just got the best job in British
higher education’. He may have been a little biased,
but I recognised that he was very close to the truth.
It is the best job because it combines the stimulation
and challenge of being Vice-Chancellor of one of the
world’s leading universities with working in one of the
UK’s most invigorating and entertaining cities – all
at a point in history when universities are at least as
important as they have ever been.
In this article I want to explore three subjects I have
already touched upon: the job, the University and the
city.
In 2009, a vice-chancellor has to be a leader. In the
past, he or she may have been able to be an umpire,
but that is no longer sufficient. The size of a university
such as Bristol, the complexity of its internal structure
and culture, the myriad external partnerships in which
it is involved and the need for a strategic approach to
the use of scarce resources means that the head of the
institution has to have a plan for the future and has to
lead the whole university through the implementation
of that plan.
However, the Vice-Chancellorship is not some
individual, charismatic leadership role. The constitution
of universities like Bristol demands a consensual
approach; leading such a place has to be a collective
undertaking. The Vice-Chancellor is part of a senior
team, all of whose members are acting as leaders; the
trick is to co-ordinate and utilise the strengths of that
team to plan the way forward and lead everyone in the
agreed direction. A vice-chancellor cannot close-lead
6,000 staff, but he or she can close-lead 20. Making
a reality of collective leadership through sustained
interaction and discussion is the single most important
success factor.
Universities are full of massively talented and creative
people – staff and students. The art is in trying to
keep those individuals travelling in roughly the same
direction while giving them the freedom to fly. It is
unshackled creativity that produces new knowledge
and insight. Intellectual risk-taking is at the very centre
of the process and both the academic staff and the
students must be made aware that such activity is not
just allowed but positively welcomed. Empowerment is
a trendy management word, but it perfectly describes
the right approach in a university.
Intellectual empowerment is mandatory, but academics
and students also require facilities. They need modern
laboratories and libraries. They need up-to-date IT
systems. They need money to pursue their academic
activities. It is a very important part of the Vice-
Chancellor’s role to provide these.
So, leadership and empowerment are crucial aspects
of the Vice-Chancellor’s job. What else The third
function is representational. It is vital that the Vice-
Chancellor is articulating the University’s ambitions
and values internally. I have a two-year schedule in
which I visit every department and support service.
This is mostly to keep me educated about the activities
that are under way and the challenges that are being
faced. However, it is also an opportunity for me to
discuss with colleagues why the University is taking a
particular path. It is hugely reinvigorating for me to see
what our academics are creating and how the support
services are developing new ways of enhancing the
business.
It is the Vice-Chancellor who most commonly
represents the University and who meets a huge
number of external partners from all parts of society. In
many respects, the Vice-Chancellor is the public face
of the institution. I often form a view of a university
through the character of its leader. It is obviously both
superficial and unfair to do this, but I suspect it is
probably the same for most people. It is therefore vital
that the Vice-Chancellor not only embodies the values
of the University but also publicly acclaims them. He
or she must create and sustain partnerships that are
essential to the success of the University – partnerships
with the local community, local politicians, the NHS,
Westminster and Whitehall, business, the charitable
sector and the media, to name but a few.
The Vice-Chancellor is also the most important carrier
of intelligence about higher education and the outside
world into the University. Other individuals have a
similar role, but the Vice-Chancellor should be the most
engaged with current thinking and with the drift of
policy and politics locally, nationally and internationally.
This gathering of intelligence becomes increasingly
important as the individual stays longer in office and
becomes better networked and a more national figure.
This means that the role at the beginning of a term
of office is very different from the role at the end.
The beginning should be about the implementation
of important changes, the end about the very best
representation of the University.
It goes without saying that such representation is
now international. Universities like Bristol are very
important local institutions but they now operate in a
highly connected, global environment. Knowledge is
very fluid and impossible to control – it can go around
the world almost as soon as it is produced. Our staff
work with global collaborators and competitors. They
are immensely mobile and can, and do, take their skills
anywhere. The Vice-Chancellor should constantly be
looking for international opportunities and making
international comparisons. In my interview for this
post, I said that a very important part of my role was to
daydream. Part of that daydreaming involves comparing
Bristol with other successful universities. What are the
differences What are their strengths and our strengths
Might we do better if we operated in a similar manner
to them, or is our way the best just at the moment
These musings occur in bed, on trains and aircraft,
during informal conversations with university leaders in
other countries, or even when mowing the lawn.
If that is a brief description of what I do, what is the
character of the University I lead Every university
has a unique set of characteristics, a unique culture.
Central to Bristol’s story has always been the pursuit of
intellectual excellence. I feel that ambition very strongly
every day; it informs all discussions and planning. It
is taken as a given – almost as part of the DNA of
the place. This is true of many universities, but it is
almost palpable here. I think geography is important.
As the University was growing, it could almost see its
role models – Oxford, Cambridge and London – and
staff from those great universities could easily move to
Bristol. Its proximity to the capital meant there was a
very large population from which to attract the most
talented students. We have also been fortunate in having
inspirational chancellors as role models. These have
included Winston Churchill, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jeremy
Morse and (currently) Brenda Hale – individuals of
great talent and intellect, right at the top of British
society.
The University produces fantastic graduates who go on
to succeed in every area. I meet thousands of alumni
each year and it is striking how many of them are
intellectually challenging, creative, entrepreneurial in
every sense and slightly ‘edgy’. By that I mean they are
sharp, and prepared to come at problems and challenges
from different and unconventional angles. Maybe this
is a result of the combination of influences that the
University and the city exert on people during some
of their most formative years. Maybe they chose to
come to Bristol because they liked the distinctiveness
of the place. Maybe they wished to avoid the wholly
predictable. Such characteristics are highly sought after.
As the editor of a national newspaper told me, ‘Bristol
graduates don’t behave as if they have the golden ticket’.
It is inspiring to meet them.
Furthermore, we have superb staff. I have said this
already, but it bears repetition. Their belief in what
their talents can lead them to create is quite literally
liberating. It enables me to set ambitions and an agenda
that really push the boundaries. This is not vanity on
their part, but rather a realistic understanding of where
they can go and how they can get there. It stretches
right across the horizon of academic and business
activity; it is a combination of confidence and risktaking.
The staff also work in a very interdisciplinary
way – far more than I have experienced elsewhere. This
is a longstanding strength of the University and has its
roots in historical patterns of behaviour and leadership.
Many of these qualities, including an entrepreneurial
and creative outlook, have their counterparts in the
<strong>Reflections</strong> on a vice-chancellorship
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University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
Top, left to right:
Professor Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Vice-Chancellor, 1909
Sir Isambard Owen, Vice-Chancellor, 1909-21
Professor E F Francis, Acting Vice-Chancellor, 1921-22
Below, left to right:
Thomas Loveday, Vice-Chancellor, 1922-45
Professor A M Tyndall, Acting Vice-Chancellor, 1945-46
Sir Philip Morris, Vice-Chancellor, 1946-66
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
<strong>Reflections</strong> on a vice-chancellorship
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
University of Bristol Library, Special Collections
Top, left to right:
Professor J E Harris, Vice-Chancellor, 1966-68
Professor A R Collar, Vice-Chancellor, 1968-69
Sir Alec Merrison, Vice-Chancellor, 1969-84
Below, left to right:
Professor Peter Haggett, Acting Vice-Chancellor, 1984-85
Sir John Kingman, Vice-Chancellor, 1985-2001
nature of the city itself. Bristol is a major asset to the
University (and we hope that the reverse is also true).
It is a successful and enterprising city and is currently
in one of its heydays. It has moved from being a
mercantile city through an industrial phase to become
a modern knowledge city, an ideas city, a designated
Science City. Its major industries today are aerospace,
creative industries, silicon design and manufacture,
and professional services. The city is a thousand years
old, and yet it feels dynamic and young. It has a rich
cultural environment featuring everything from
theatre and the BBC to rock music and animation.
It is a wonderful, diverse place to live and it helps us
attract the very best staff and students. It is brilliantly
connected: the capital is only 90 minutes away; and
the city has its own airport but is also less than 90
minutes from the world’s most connected airport,
Heathrow. The city has benefited from close proximity
to the South East economy, which is one of the most
successful in Europe. Some would argue that Bristol
may have been subsumed into that economy. History
will tell. The city energises me every day and I love
showing it off to friends who visit. We have a huge
amount to be proud of: this is one of Europe’s great
cities and maybe we should shout that just a little bit
louder.
I have talked about the job, the University and the
city, but I have left the most important group until
the end: the students. Students make a university. They
provide its stimulus, they are its beating heart and they
go on to become its ambassadors. For their first year in
office, new vice-chancellors form a group of which I
have taken over the chairmanship. I always say to them
that if the job is getting difficult or they are feeling
a bit down, they should go and see something the
students are doing. Their values, talent and ambition are
mesmerising. Our students give around 100,000 hours
of voluntary activity to this city each year. They have
the confidence of youth – nothing is unachievable.
Every year we are renewed when the latest cohort
arrives. Our academics are reinvigorated by them. My
favourite evening of the year is when I take out for
a pizza any student at Bristol, the University of the
West of England, Bath or Bath Spa with whom we
have family connections. There are usually about ten
of them. Just listening to their conversation, hearing
what their ambitions are and what they are already
doing refuels all my ambitions for this University. We
get fabulous young people here and I am clear that
they will be more than capable of dealing with the
challenges that the future will deliver. My old age,
should I get there, is safe in their hands.
Some may think this article is too emotional or too
hyperbolic, but I am only telling it as it feels to me
every day. Universities are forces for good. They
transform people, they transform knowledge and they
transform their localities as well as wider society. We
are in a knowledge society and universities are right at
the centre of that. In medieval times, towns and villages
were built around the manor house; in Victorian times,
they were built around the factory. If we were building
new towns and villages now, they would be built
around universities. That is how important universities
are in the 21st century.
To be the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol in this phase of
its development is a real privilege. For me, the success
and future of Bristol informs virtually everything I do.
I don’t regard that as anything other than a positive
force. This is personal. The period 1995-2015 offers us
the unparalleled opportunity to make transformational
investments in infrastructure at this University. It is my
job to carry on the work started by Sir John Kingman
and to ensure that these investments are successful.
The best reward for me would be that in 2060,
when all that’s left of me is a portrait, the then Vice-
Chancellor says that the University leaders in the early
part of the 21st century really seized the opportunities
available and that, 50 years later, Bristol is still reaping
the benefits.
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1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
The four
cornerstones:
a centenary
crossword by
ESROM
12
14
15
20
27
31
37
13
16 17
18
19
21 22 23
24 25 26
28 29
30
32
33 34 35 36
38 39
40 41
CREDIT
Across
Down
The crossword will celebrate its centenary in 2013, four years after
the University of Bristol. Types of clue have differed over the years,
and this puzzle offers a medley of definitions, general knowledge, local
knowledge and cryptic clues. The setter gratefully acknowledges help
from Bandmaster and Phi.
There will be a £100 book token for the sender of the first correct solution (with
the four cornerstones identified) received at the University of Bristol by 1 May 2009
and subsequently drawn from the hat by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Eric Thomas.
The winner will be notified on 24 May 2009 – the 100th anniversary of the day on
which the royal sign manual was attached to the University’s charter. With his or her
permission, the winner’s name will be posted at www.bristol.ac.uk/centenary on that
date. The solution to the crossword, and the setter’s accompanying notes, will also be
published at that web address on the same date.
To submit an entry without defacing this book, complete and return the postcard that
accompanies copies of the book issued or sold between the date of publication and
the end of April 2009, or transcribe your solution on to a single sheet of paper and
indicate your name, telephone number and postal and/or email address. Either way,
the four cornerstones must be identified. Send your entry to Barry Taylor, University
of Bristol, Senate House, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TH, to arrive by 1 May 2009.
People involved in the compilation, editing and design of this book are not
permitted to enter the competition.
1. Residence repeatedly showing future potential (5,4)
8. ‘Pow’ is a relatively objective term for Burns (4)
12. What’s 8 1 /2 x 3 1 /2 inches (6)
13. Pirate with his heart in his bottom (3-3)
14. Stone-blind I’m not (6-7)
15. US city attached to wrong state – take it out with
rubber (5)
18. Seminars (9)
20. What the creed itself needs (2-4)
22. Crime writer; magazine; band (5)
25. Is it morally wrong about ‘first-class’ (5,4)
27. It’s irregularly formed, and so are they usually (5)
29. International scout conference (6)
31. May trees indicate a local watering hole Yes (9)
36. Get the kid undressed (5)
37. Many a freak storm is shattering with its noise (13)
38. What’s common (not U) about a former love is how
it was! (6)
39. ‘By his ______ hat and staff, and his sandal shoon’
(Shak.) (6)
40. Tacked in all directions (4)
41. Big spouter spouted a cry of woe to the audience (4,5)
2. I cut a path to the top – it sounds like a Wagner hero
introducing himself (3-3)
3. It makes a lout like a king The reverse (5)
4. Tricky problem with a meat dish, one for...... (3,6)
5. ......a bigwig, too (2,4)
6. Heavy hint (4)
7. The relevant machine cut a strip of wood (4)
9. What Job’s horse said among the trumpets (2-2)
10. Workshop would be grander with street frontage (7)
11. Vice-Chancellor conveyed by horse or car (6)
12. Even in fog will early birds assemble here (6)
16. It’s said once with a blow and twice after it (5)
17. An anti-submarine mortar (5)
19. Clue’s mine, unfortunately: light’s yours! (9)
21. ‘______ but full of dash’ (old clue to setter’s code) (5)
23. Uplifting start to environmental story gives one cheer (5)
24. Once again started touching a festering sore (7)
26. Maggiore’s smaller neighbour (6)
27. MOT has failed a best-selling engine (6)
28. There’s copper and zinc in it, and sometimes tin (6)
30. My voluntary service lends grace to degree-giving (6)
32. I’m aggressive, yet watchful at heart (5)
33. Recognised but little used, we hear (4)
34. End of smoking gives rise to objections (4)
35. It’s idyllic when you get past this test! (4)
134 100
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Wattie Cheung
Julia Donaldson is the author of many best-selling books for children,
including The Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale and The Giants and
the Joneses. She has also written children’s plays and songs, and runs
regular storytelling workshops. She was a student at the University of
Bristol from 1967 and 1970 and it was there that she met her husband,
Malcolm, who became a paediatrician.
From ‘Greensleeves’
to Gruffalo
Julia Donaldson
100 149 57

Going to Bristol was a big adventure for me. It meant
moving away from my parents for the first time, and
also living somewhere other than London. I instantly
loved Clifton which managed, almost miraculously it
seemed to me, to be so near town and university and
yet separated only by the Suspension Bridge from real
countryside, as well as being an attractive place in its
own right.
My hall of residence, Clifton Hill House, was
strictly supervised – no male visitors after nine, and
if you wanted to stay out late you had to make an
appointment to see the warden and obtain a key from
her (or else climb over the wall). Never having been
to boarding school, I quite liked my cubicle-like room
and made friends with the other occupants of D
Corridor, but by the end of the year I was very happy
(ecstatic, actually) to move out into an attic flat in
Worcester Terrace, which felt like playing houses. You
would bump into your friends in the street and talk
about the rising cost of bacon ends.
I was studying Drama and French, and acted in a
lot of plays. I particularly remember being a gullible
peasant wench in Molière’s Dom Juan, in which the
lead was taken by a dashing postgraduate called David
Illingworth. Another, rather pretentious, play was called
I Am Not the Eiffel Tower, in which I acted a tree. There
were six trees, each dressed in a different colour (I was
red) and we had to stand on stage throughout the play
and sway either violently or gently according to the
mood of the scene. I was rather good at the swaying
and was appointed Chief Tree. The other trees were
told to do what I did, with a comical result on one
occasion when my bra strap snapped and I instinctively
clapped a hand behind my back, to be copied by the
blue, green, yellow, orange and purple trees.
There was a pianist in that play, who also had to
improvise in a mood-reflecting way. He was Colin Sell
(now well known for his participation in Radio 4’s
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue), and he introduced me to
his room-mate, a guitar-playing medic called Malcolm.
Along with my friend Maureen, a fellow drama
student, the four of us went busking round the pubs in
RAG week, singing a mixture of ’60s pop songs and
numbers from shows. (Our greatest hit was ‘If I Start
Looking Behind Me’ from Salad Days.)
In my second year, I was sent to Paris, along with the
other Drama and French students. Maureen and I soon
deserted our suburban digs in favour of a room in a
seedy hotel in the Latin Quarter. It was brimming with
hippy students and travellers of every nationality, plus
an ancient Englishwoman whose room was stacked
ceiling-high with decades of newspapers.
We were supposed to be studying French at the
Sorbonne but grew weary of the lectures, which all
seemed to be about how Proust was wafted into the
temps perdu every time he had a bite of a cake called
the petite madeleine. We developed a double-act where
Maureen was Proust and I was Petite Madeleine,
which I’m afraid we found more entertaining than
the lectures. We were also doing a drama course in
the Cité Universitaire, in which students from round
the world rehearsed and performed experimental
plays. There was one in which the cast dressed up as
penguins and cycled through the audience, and another
in which a pigeon was sacrificed on stage. I was
operating the lights for a play that consisted of scenes
from a 17th-century Spanish comedy interspersed with
advertisements for washing machines. I noticed that
the producer, an ardent Pole, had designed rather an
odd lighting plan, in which no one seemed to be lit
properly; when I mentioned this to him, he replied:
‘Je veux que l’action se passe à l’ombre.’
Paris was a much more expensive city to live in than
Bristol, but we got round that by busking. Maureen
and I could each play about three chords on the guitar,
and we would set out most evenings for the cafés on
the Champs Elysées, where we sang ‘Greensleeves’,
‘Plaisir D’Amour’ and ‘Blowing in the Wind’, and then
went round with the hat. We did get a little tired of
our repertoire, even once we’d added ‘Where Have
All the Flowers Gone’, and were therefore thrilled
when Malcolm (the guitar-playing medic) suddenly
arrived, with a battered guitar and straw hat, and taught
us dozens of Beatles songs, plus numbers from the
A day in my life
Julia Donaldson
Tea in bed. Second cup.
Dislodge cats. Get up.
Son to school. Spouse to work.
Sit at desk – mustn’t shirk.
Scratch head. Dream up snail.
Maybe team her up with whale
Chew pen. What next
Can’t think. Feel vexed.
Feed cats. Open post.
Read it, over slice of toast.
Little boy wants to know
Date of birth of Gruffalo.
Little girl wonders why
Giant gave away his tie.
Out to shops. Get idea
(Big grin, ear to ear):
Brilliant climax – whale gets beached!
(Rhyme a problem . . . reached Beseeched
Leeched Well never mind, just now.)
Snail then rescues whale – but how
Back home, get stuck.
Go off snail. Consider duck.
Phone rings. Who is it
School, requesting author visit.
Check diary . . . shocked to see
‘Monday, Brookwood Library’.
That’s today! Leap in car.
Thank goodness, not far.
Tell a story, act and sing.
Kids join in with everything.
(Teacher sits there marking books,
Blind to my accusing looks.)
Answer questions. Back to house.
Joined by son, later spouse.
Open bottle. Cook salmon.
Practise piano. Play Backgammon.
Have bath – that’s when
Inspiration strikes again:
Snail could learn to write with slime!
(Quite an easy word to rhyme.)
Crawls on blackboard, leaves a trail . . .
Children run and save the whale.
Story planned! Tomorrow, start
Writing it – the easy part.
From Greensleeves to Gruffalo
(continued on page 152)
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musical Hair. Our busking act was transformed, and at
one stage we were spotted by a record producer, who
wined, dined and recorded us. Although no contract
actually ensued, he encouraged us to write our own
songs. We set a French poem called ‘Metamorphosis’ to
music, and I also wrote a few soulful songs about how I
was missing my boyfriend.
Back in Bristol, the relationship with the pined-for
boyfriend didn’t work out, and before long Malcolm
and I were an item. We started doing cabaret for
various student events, and during our holidays would
go busking, often writing songs to suit the country.
(The best one was in Italian about pasta.) We also
joined the Bristol Street Theatre, formed by David
Illingworth of Dom Juan fame, devising and performing
entertainments for children in more deprived areas of
the city. We did shows about Guy Fawkes and circuses
and bog men, which probably had a greater influence
on my later writing than the Ibsen and Strindberg I’d
been studying in the Drama Department. Dave went
on to write for the Old Vic until he died of cancer
when he was only thirty.
guinea pig’s fur the right way. A publisher was on the
phone, asking if they could use the words of one of my
songs, ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, as a children’s picture
book.
Once I had that book in my hand, with its vivid and
witty illustrations by Axel Scheffler, I knew I wanted to
write more books – a lot more. I still loved writing the
songs, but the market was drying up and also they were
so ephemeral. After a number of plays for schools and
quite a few rejection letters, I eventually came up with
The Gruffalo, which has led a charmed life, and since
then I have been pretty solidly writing rhyming books
as well as some plays and novels for older children.
The books led to demands for author visits, and when
Malcolm could spare the time from his hospital job
he would join me to act a kind giant, a stupid dragon,
a wicked Emperor and, of course, the Gruffalo. We’ve
now developed this act into an hour-long theatrical
show, including several songs. Although no one
is throwing money into the hat, we feel the same
exuberance as we did in our Bristol busking days.
My songwriting eventually developed into a rather onand-off
career, writing to order for children’s television.
The BBC would phone me and ask for ‘one song
about roller-skating and another about horrible smells,
by next Tuesday’. On one occasion, they sent me six
postcards from a museum in Belfast with instructions
to write a song about what a wonderful museum it
was. (I had to include one verse about a polar bear,
another about a prehistoric fish and another about a
vintage car.)
Malcolm and I moved from Bristol but then returned
there when he worked as a doctor in the Children’s
Hospital on St Michael’s Hill. Our own children went
to school nearby, only a stone’s throw from the Drama
Department, yet a world away.
It wasn’t till 20 years after graduating and a move to
Glasgow that I received the phone call that was to
change my life. This time it wasn’t a request for a song
about wearing light colours at night or stroking your
152 100

Tim Pigott-Smith graduated in Drama from the University of Bristol,
trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and began his professional
acting career at the Bristol Old Vic in 1969. He has played leading
roles with both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal
National Theatre and has starred in such outstanding television series
as The Jewel in the Crown and The Chief. His films include Clash of the
Titans, Escape to Victory, The Remains of the Day and V for Vendetta. He
is also a distinguished director and a frequent broadcaster. In 2008, the
University made him an honorary Doctor of Letters.
City of ghosts
Tim Pigott-Smith
Catherine Shakespeare Lane
100 157

For me, Bristol is a place of ghosts. One of the great
pleasures of going back is that in Clifton, where I spent
five years as a student at the University and the Old
Vic Theatre School, you can walk many of the treelined
streets and see no apparent change. This is a place
where time remembered exists so closely with time
present that the phantoms of the past appear readily
before you.
It wasn’t until I became a professional actor and joined
the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company that I began to
spend more time down the hill in the city centre. This
is an area which retains a similar feel today – rivers and
docks have a certain ambience that doesn’t alter that
much – although there have been huge changes down
beyond the theatre. It was a part of the city you tended
to avoid back in the sixties.
When I left the Bristol Old Vic in 1970, the theatre
was closed for refurbishment. The shell of that gem of
an 18th-century auditorium was retained. How fragile
and tiny it looked when everything around it had been
demolished, prior to the modernisation. It was at that
time that the dowdy entrance was knocked down.
The pokey little box office disappeared, too. I loved its
homely mess and the great swathes of pencil-marked
booking sheets – they seemed so straightforward
and personal compared with computerised booking
systems.
In the rebuild, the theatre was joined to the
Coopers’ Hall and the New Vic was added. It is this
refurbishment that eventually fell into such tragic
disrepair that, as I write this, the theatre is closed. I am
glad to say that the refurbishment appeal is well on the
way to achieving its target, and hope is rising again for
one of England’s oldest and best theatres.
When the theatre was reopened in 1972, it seemed to
have lost some of its atmosphere. Perhaps the ghosts of
the Theatre Royal did not survive the rebuilding. There
used to be two – Sarah Siddons’ lover hanged himself
beneath the stage and was said to haunt the understage
area, and there was a little old man who used to
materialise in the auditorium occasionally to watch
rehearsals. Maybe they have moved on, and newer
ghosts will materialise.
Time may or may not bring ghosts, but it doesn’t
always bring improvements. Looking at the traffic
congestion in St Augustine’s Parade and Lewins
Mead, I yearn for the clock to be put right back. This
now-ruined spot seems to be made worse with every
new intervention. How glorious it would be if the
motorised misery and the idiotically re-crafted traffic
islands could be magicked away and replaced by the
water that once flooded that whole area. I love the
sepia pictures in the City Library of the tall-masted
schooners that once rode the tide where now cars
queue and jostle for position.
There was a story that from the pub next door to
The Bristol Hippodrome, an underground passage
ran all the way up to the Downs. That sounds quite
romantic, but its purpose was said to be darker. Bristol
had been deeply involved in the horrors of the socalled
triangular slave trade. The rumour was that slaves
were shipped into the city centre, bundled into the
pub and taken through the underground tunnel to the
Downs. It was thought that here they could be less
publicly taken to slave auctions on Blackboy Hill – to
which the ‘Whiteladies’ were said to go in considerable
numbers. I now know that most of this has no basis in
fact, but just those names are redolent of another age.
It is a strange and wonderful irony that at a time
when the Bristol Old Vic is closed, and theatre as an
institution is going through a self-questioning and
impecunious time, my old University is investing a
great deal of money in improving the facilities in the
Drama Department. Conditions were always pretty
rough, but it never seemed to matter. Indeed, you
could argue that lectures in leaking Nissen huts were
ideal preparation for the life of an actor – we rehearse
in notoriously dreadful places. I am currently working
at the Old Vic in London, where the backstage
conditions could do with an investment on a tenth of
the scale of the University’s.
The Old Vic Theatre School up on the Downs has
also expanded recently. In my time, we had one newish
studio, but most of the rooms we used were part
of two old houses joined together. I can remember
those rooms as if it were yesterday – the colour, the
dimensions, the smell of them. The people who taught
me there, and at the Drama Department, are rarely out
of my mind for long. They are living ghosts who had a
profound influence on my life.
My fellow students and I were lucky – in both
the Drama Department and at the School we had
legendary teachers. As I write this, I am about to
come down to Bristol on my day off for a celebration
in memory of the last of them. Shared admiration
for those who taught us was one of the things that
made us close as groups – in the past week alone, I
have seen four of my contemporaries. I have one old
Drama Department friend who never left Bristol. I was
with her recently in the University’s Wills Memorial
Building. In our day, the Drama Studio was in a large,
windowless, dark room at the side of the main hall in
that splendid building. We did amazing plays in there –
everything from the classics to surrealist plays and Yeats’s
Noh dramas, ignoring the vibrations from the hourly
chimes of the great bell in the tower above. And Pinter’s
first play, The Room, was first performed in that studio.
Some ghosts in there!
The place where you spend formative time in your life
is easily memorable for everyone, but I found Bristol a
strangely atmospheric city from the day I arrived. I can’t
imagine that Clifton will change much in the coming
years. I hope not. I like to think that the students who
walk its streets now will be able to return and meet
their ghosts as easily as I meet mine.
City of ghosts
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Dave Pratt
Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. He graduated
in Drama and German from the University of Bristol in 1980.
As correspondent first for The Guardian and then for the BBC, he
chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in the former
Yugoslavia. He has won several major awards for his work, including
the Sony Gold Award for his outstanding contribution to broadcasting.
The author of three books on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, he
has regularly been consulted by the US and European governments
on major policy issues. For three years he ran an NGO assisting with
the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He now lives in
London. His latest book, McMafia, is about global organised crime.
From Bristol to
Mr Big
Misha Glenny
100 165 57

I used to play musical cafés in order to avoid the
attention of the communist secret police when
meeting dissidents in communist Eastern Europe.
But heading for a soulless shopping mall in the Worli
district of Mumbai was different. I was waiting for a
signal not from an oppressed political activist but from
an assassin.
When it came, by mobile phone, I walked to a café
about 100 yards away and sat down at the appointed
table. Five minutes. Another message. Up I got, playing
the dumb foreigner with the bemused waiter, and
moved to another café three doors down. Once again,
I was instructed by text message to sit at a table next to
some other people.
Like a ghost, Mahmood was suddenly on the bench
next to me. The elaborate ritual, he explained, was for
security purposes. ‘There was a police inspector I know
by sight in the first café,’ he said. ‘He probably wouldn’t
have noticed but I do not take risks. Also it is always
important to sit next to people who are already there
– it’s the people who come and sit next to you after
you’ve arrived that you have to be careful about.’
I noticed that Mahmood had placed himself close to
the back exit. ‘I have to watch out for trigger-happy
police officers and some of my former colleagues,’
he continued. Mumbai is the home of the police
‘encounter’, where officers take out known gangsters
in bloody shootouts and then ask questions later.
I had already met Mumbai’s Encounter King, Inspector
Pradeep Sharma, who has killed over 120 gangsters,
and I didn’t want to stand in the way if Sharma and
Mahmood were to ‘encounter’ each other.
Mahmood was a retired hitman. Short and wiry, he
was also sharp-featured and very good-looking, if a
little weather-beaten. During the 1990s, he was one
of Mumbai’s most successful assassins. He had once
worked for D-Company, the most powerful organised
crime syndicate in India, run by the renowned
gangster, Dawood Ibrahim.
Furthermore, he was the most shocking character I
met as I travelled the world for three years meeting
mobsters, policemen, victims and lawyers for my book
about global organised crime, McMafia. I say shocking
because this cold-blood killer was an educated and
urbane man with a degree in engineering who offered
perceptive comments on the social and economic
issues facing India.
At one point in our conversation, I had to wait
while he dropped into a mosque to say prayers; he
then resumed talking lyrically about Mumbai and its
traditions. And also telling me how he killed victims
in their cars when they stopped at traffic lights: ‘The
first team approached the car and broke the window
glass. Then I went in and boom – straight at the head
.... Once it was done, I disappeared. I never went home
after a job and no-one knew where I was.’
It was almost impossible to reconcile his warmth and
erudition with the knowledge of what he had done,
whacking over 20 men. How can I be warming to a
murderer, I asked myself Indeed, how in God’s name
had I ended up here in the first place At university
I had studied drama – how could that have funneled
me into a life, if not of organised crime, then of one in
close proximity to the mob
Like many first-year drama students at Bristol, I had
nurtured quiet fantasies about treading the boards of
the Royal Shakespeare Company or hitting the red
carpet on Oscar night. Fortunately I’m reasonably
sober when assessing my own capabilities, and while
they still talk reverently of my performance as one of
the ugly sisters in Cinderella (alongside Gregory Doran,
now star Shakespearean director at the RSC), Olivier I
was not.
The great blessing of the Drama Department is that
there is so much more to it than acting, directing or
set designing. I was fortunate in being taught by three
academic and practical masters in theatre and cinema:
Ted Braun, Martin White and the late George Brandt,
all of whom encouraged me to explore my intense
fascination with Eastern Europe and the politics of the
Random House UK
Cold War period through the media of stage and film.
After university, I ended up taking a British Council
course in Prague to learn Czech. While ostensibly
studying the dramatic theories of the novelist and
v
playwright, Karel Capek, I was in fact embarking on
a criminal career, smuggling books and dismembered
Xerox machines to dissident organisations like
Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
Before long I had struck out on my own to become a
freelance journalist in Vienna, covering Eastern Europe.
This led me to the Balkans, and the appalling wars of
Yugoslav succession that broke out in Croatia in 1991.
There followed the slow realisation over the next
decade that, in contrast to the received wisdom, this
war had much less to do with ethnic hatred (as many
supposed) and a hell of a lot more to do with organised
crime, as syndicates from all Balkan countries indulged
in an orgy of violence, larceny and primitive capital
accumulation.
By the time I had figured out that the Balkans had a
very specific role to play in the new global shadow
McMafia: crime without frontiers
by Misha Glenny
economy that had emerged after the collapse of
communism and the advent of globalisation, I had
actually met a few Mr Bigs around the region. I felt that
if I were to understand the brave new world of global
crime, I would need to meet their counterparts in other
countries. I was not primarily interested in judging
them but in understanding their motives, their desires
and how they perceived themselves and their position
within the emerging world order.
I started my search in the former Soviet Union,
where familiarity with the territory gave me a
real advantage. Nonetheless, meeting with one of
Ukraine’s top gangsters in the Black Sea port of Odessa
proved stressful and involved a surprising amount of
paperwork. Mr Big’s assistants demanded the sort of
form-filling that usually accompanies an interview with
a president. Among other things, he wanted to know all
the questions I was going to ask him in advance.
Each time I went to see a Mr Big, I was slightly
nervous. Frankly, having covered the wars in Bosnia and
Croatia, I had already spent periods of several months
facing bullets and mortar attacks, so a fear of imminent
From Bristol to Mr Big
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death was no novelty. But with the gangsters the fear
was different: I felt utterly alone, with a powerful
sense that if anything did happen, there would be no
witnesses and I would simply disappear without a trace.
was relieved that the MB members had chosen a café
in a shopping mall for the meet. In a public place, it
was much less probable that I would end up being
bundled into a car.
When the Odessa Don finally granted my wish,
it was prefaced by the musical café nonsense. The
little tea-shop where we finally met was close to
Derebasovskaya, a fashionable shopping street running
up from the sea. It was so dingy that I could hardly
make out Mr Big, especially as his two minders
were permanently smoking. Mr Big was gruff and
unpleasant and only agreed to talk because he trusted
the intermediary. We spoke for about three quarters of
an hour. Except for an off-the-record verbal attack on
his main opponent, he would only discuss the main
object of my research – Karabas, Odessa’s legendary
gangster, gunned down in April 1997 when Chechen
gangsters and one of Moscow’s biggest organised
crime groups started fighting over control of the port,
the main export terminal for Russian oil. Whenever I
tentatively tried to get him on to the subject of these
more recent events, he and his minders made it very
clear with their scowls that this was forbidden territory.
Mr Big and his entourage in Odessa were probably
the most intimidating in their style. But a few months
later I was at it again, arranging a rendezvous through
a journalist contact with two senior representatives of
the Movimiento Bolivariano (MB) in Cali, the biggest
centre of Colombia’s cocaine industry. The MB is the
urban wing of the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia which keep 17,000 men, women
and children under arms. Ostensibly involved in a
Marxist-inspired revolutionary struggle, the FARC is
in fact ‘an organised crime syndicate in fatigues’, as one
dispassionate observer told me.
They do grant occasional interviews in order to get
their point across. But they are just as likely to kidnap
the supplicant journalist as they are to answer his or
her questions. My intermediary and I approached
the meeting place with considerable caution in case
we were being followed by Colombia’s secret police
(whose reputation is as unforgiving as the FARC’s). I
On this occasion, too, I learned a huge amount about
the motives for these people’s actions and the methods
they used. ‘We became engaged in kidnapping in the
early 1990s soon after we had set up the cells here
in Cali,’ the two doctors, one male and one female,
explained. They described a life living underground,
moving from flat to flat, and told of how their
followers regularly engaged in shoot-outs with rival
right-wing gangs for control of the drug trade in Cali’s
barrios. They were quite open about the movement’s
drug trafficking, claiming that this was the only way
that the peasants growing the coke could get a decent
wage. They argued that the death and destruction
the business caused was all legitimate because of the
FARC’s ideological struggle.
Whether cannabis exporters in Canada, traffickers of
women in Israel or yakuza protection rackets in Japan,
they all had one thing in common – they were really,
really clever and they took their business extremely
seriously. These guys are not going to go away in a
hurry.
Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, who studied medicine at Bristol, has
been the Chief Medical Officer for England, and the UK’s Chief
Medical Adviser, since 1998. He holds critical responsibilities across the
whole field of public health and health care and advises the Secretary
of State for Health, the Prime Minister and other government
ministers. He is also recognised as an international champion of patient
safety and has chaired the World Health Organization World Alliance
for Patient Safety since its launch in 2004.
Pointing true
north
Liam Donaldson
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‘Man, what a crowded scene.’ That was the way my
companion reacted to the packed Freshers’ Week
event we both attended. He seemed more in tune
with the times – 1967 – than I was. Shoulder-length
hair, floral-patterned shirt, dark glasses (even though
it was a rainy October morning). My mother had
dressed and sent me away in her image of a university
student: short back and sides, Harris tweed jacket, grey
flannel trousers, white shirt and tie. Her louche flourish
– Hush Puppies – wasn’t right either. I had never
wanted my hair to grow as quickly as I did that first
term. The student uniform was quickly consigned to
the Salvation Army, but when I returned to my small
northern town for Christmas I was equally out of tune
with the slow pace of the sixties revolution up there.
Flower power bloomed late in Rotherham.
With the sixties in full swing, it was an exciting time
to be a student; but after the first two years, becoming
a clinical medical student demanded a degree of
conformity and more. As we moved through the wards
of Bristol’s hospitals, exposure to death, disease and
suffering was both a sobering and maturing influence
on hedonistic youth.
Our text on clinical method written by Bristol’s
then Professor of Medicine, Alan Read, was called
The Clinical Apprentice. We were indeed apprentices,
modelling our practice, behaviour and attitudes on
our masters, many of whom were inspirational and
deeply impressive. We saw senior doctors introduce
themselves to patients, look them in the eye and shake
their hands. We saw them listening with respect. We
saw them revisit a diagnosis that did not seem to make
sense. We saw them worrying about a patient who was
not getting better when they should have been. In
short, we saw them go the extra mile time after time to
achieve the highest standards of care. And these values
and virtues infused our own practice as we began to
climb the career ladder ourselves.
worried whether we were doing enough to preserve
their humanity. I wanted them to be centred on their
patients as human beings. I wanted them to be ‘extramilers’.
When I became Chief Medical Officer in 1998, I
was conscious that I was entering a complex political
environment and moving into Whitehall. I was
conscious, too, of the history of the post: I was only the
15th person to be appointed Chief Medical Officer
since 1855. I had left clinical practice behind many
years ago. As the ‘nation’s doctor’, my patients were
50 million strong and I wanted to serve them well. I
needed a personal credo to guide my work and my
decisions. I returned to the fundamental principles
and values learned all those years ago when I stood in
my short white coat around the bedside in Bristol’s
hospitals. Putting the public’s needs first – and not just
sometimes. Being honest and open, especially at times
of crisis. Speaking out without fear or favour when
necessary.
These are some of the ways that I positioned the Chief
Medical Officer’s role. Sometimes uncomfortable,
sometimes attracting criticism, sometimes stressful, I
have never regretted always pointing myself to ‘true
north’.
Today’s British medical students are taught the things
that I, and my classmates, learned by hit and miss.
Medical education is the better for modernising its
curricula, but we baby boomers owe a great deal to the
education we received in the summers (and winters) of
love.
Later in my career, I was a medical teacher myself.
The young women and men who came into the
medical schools where I worked were bombarded
with knowledge and technological opportunities. I
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Will Hutton, who graduated from the University of Bristol in 1971
and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University in 2003, is
Chief Executive of The Work Foundation. He was Editor-in-Chief of
The Observer for four years and still writes a weekly column for the
paper. He has written several best-selling economics books, including
The World We’re In and The State We’re In. His latest book is The Writing
on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century.
Alexandra Jones worked at the former Department for Education and
Skills and at the Institute for Public Policy Research before becoming
Associate Director at The Work Foundation. She runs the Ideopolis
research programme, investigating how cities can be economically
successful and sustainable in the knowledge economy.
Katy Morris graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007
and has been working as an Assistant Researcher on the Ideopolis
programme.
Bristol: Ideopolis
Will Hutton, with Alexandra Jones and Katy Morris
100 223

I was an undergraduate in the Bristol of the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The port was decaying; shipbuilding
was in decline; the city centre was a tribute to post-war
brutalist redevelopment and Clifton was a rabbit warren
of crumbling bedsits and student flats. But there was still
a buzz in the air. The place felt it could go somewhere –
nobody quite knew where.
Today we know. Bristol is one of Britain’s most
successful cities, with a remarkable capacity for
reinvention and transformation. From a small
Roman settlement to a centre of manufacturing and
shipbuilding (and, we should not forget, the slave trade);
from being overtaken by the fast-growing industrial
centres of Manchester and Liverpool to thriving once
more based on aerospace and financial service industries;
Bristol has continually adapted to the changing wider
economy.
At the heart of each reincarnation lies the city’s ability
to build on its natural assets and to innovate. Its port
helped the shipbuilding industry thrive; when this
declined, the city built on its existing manufacturing
expertise to develop a fledging (currently flourishing)
aerospace industry. Now the city is undergoing an
intellectual renaissance that is supporting everything
from high-tech manufacturing to thriving local creative
industries, notably the BBC’s Natural History Unit.
So what are the assets on which this recent,
intellectually-driven economic growth has been built
In part this is about Bristol benefiting from a highly
skilled population: over a third of the population are
graduates, many graduating from the 100-year-old
University of Bristol or the University of the West of
England in the city, or the nearby University of Bath
and Bath Spa University.
But these highly skilled workers are attracted to Bristol
from all over this and other countries because it offers
not only a high quality of life – access to beautiful
countryside and a thriving creative sector – but also
highly skilled jobs. Nearly two-thirds of employment in
Bristol is in the knowledge-intensive sectors of financial
and professional services, high-tech manufacturing,
education and healthcare. Contrast this with the
average in Great Britain of 54 per cent. The levels of
knowledge-intensive employment are now so high
that Bristol could be classified as what we at The Work
Foundation term an ‘Ideopolis’ – a highly successful
‘knowledge city’ that drives growth in the wider region.
Only some of its social indicators let Bristol down as an
Ideopolis.
Bristol’s Ideopolis status has partly developed because
of historic good fortune. The growth of BAE Systems,
Rolls Royce and Airbus in and around Bristol has
been built on the founding of the British and Colonial
Aeroplane Company in Filton in 1910, enabling the
city to build a reputation in this area. But attracting
and retaining these highly skilled jobs has not just been
about history. If it had been just about history, then
Bristol would not have displayed such deep structural
economic problems during the 1980s, or declined so
badly in the early 1990s recession.
Instead, Bristol has become an Ideopolis because it has
provided a constant supply of new ideas, research and
highly skilled workers, as well as a high quality of life to
help attract and retain its workers and its companies. The
universities have played a vital role in this in different
ways and, at its centenary, it is timely to review what
role the University of Bristol in particular has played in
contributing to the recent success of the city.
It is clear that the international focus of the University
of Bristol has played an important role in developing the
city of Bristol’s international brand. The University has
long been an institution that attracts high quality young
people to live and study in the area, as well as producing
high quality and globally renowned research. These
activities are prestigious and raise the profile of the city,
as well as providing local businesses with a constant
supply of high quality labour and access to high quality
ideas.
This latter benefit – knowledge and skills – has become
more important in recent years as the structure of
the economy has changed. Over the past 30 years
we have moved away from an economy dominated
by basic manufacturing: we are now what is often
called a ‘knowledge economy’. Since the 1970s it
has been knowledge-intensive manufacturing and
services that have generated the most new jobs and
productivity in the UK. Companies that have prospered
in all sectors have done so by using new information
and communication technologies to become highly
innovative and fast at creating tailored products to meet
increasingly sophisticated customers’ needs. Globalisation
has both accelerated the sophistication of customer
demands and increased the speed at which businesses
need to respond.
The effects on the UK economy of this growing
importance of knowledge are startling. Between 1995
and 2005, 12 new jobs were created in knowledgeintensive
industries for every one new job created in
other industries. When financial and professional services,
high-tech manufacturing, and education and healthcare
are included in the definition of knowledge-intensive
industries – the Eurostat definition – nearly half of all
employment in the UK is now in knowledge-intensive
industries.
Firms are also putting their money where their mouth is
in this changing economy. In 1970, firms were investing
just £4 on ‘intangible’ investments – research and
development, software, marketing, training and design
– for every £10 on traditional investment in ‘tangible’
machines, tools, computers and buildings. The balance
has shifted entirely. As understanding customers and
responding to their needs matters more, all industries
and forms of economic activity are increasingly relying
on ‘intangibles’ such as brand and marketing to derive
comparative advantage, and spending on the creation
and exploitation of knowledge and other intangible
assets has tripled over the past 30 years. In 2004, for
every £10 firms invested in machines, tools, computers
and buildings, they invested £13 on the intangible
investments which contribute to their responsiveness and
innovativeness.
This shift matters to cities like Bristol because the story
of the knowledge economy has been a story of cities.
Cities contribute more than their share of population
to national productivity because of the importance of
exchanging knowledge. Ideas and innovation happen in
places, and institutions such as the University of Bristol
play a vital role in the creative mix by contributing ideas,
innovation and people to the mix.
At times there has inevitably been some tension
between the University’s aspirations in terms of research,
prestige and global reach, and its responsibilities to the
local community. Recognising that its international
focus has on occasion come at the expense of the
city of Bristol, the University has made positive steps
towards shifting the balance in recent years. Part of this
involves collaborating more with the University of the
West of England, the University of Bath and Bath Spa
University, as seen in the Science City Bristol initiative.
Collaboration between the universities is also evident
in SPark, the £300 million science park for Bristol and
Bath, which will create accommodation for specialist
science and technology businesses and an estimated
6,000 new, highly skilled jobs, with obvious benefits for
the city as a whole.
Nonetheless, despite its advantages, the city of Bristol
continues to face real difficulties. Poor quality transport
infrastructure inhibits the ability of the city to make
the most of its access to a region of highly skilled
workers. There remain pockets of seemingly intractable
deprivation in the south of the city and too high a
proportion of the workforce with low-level skills, further
reinforced by the quality of many of the state secondary
schools in the city. In the long term, these poor schools
affect the sustainability of the supply of skilled labour,
whilst inadequate transport reduces labour mobility.
When combined with the persistently high levels of
inequality, this poses a threat to Bristol’s status as an
Ideopolis.
The University cannot and should not attempt to
address all of these challenges, but there is always room
for more work to ensure that it benefits the local
community as much as its global community. There is an
obvious role for the University in raising aspirations and
the quality of secondary education: its work with the
Bristol Council to help teachers improve their classroom
Bristol Ideopolis
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skills and its sponsorship of the Merchants’ Academy in
Withywood, south Bristol, are both very encouraging
developments, but the scale of the state-school problem
is such that more work is needed. There is also scope
for the University to work more closely with local
employers, further education colleges and young people
to address skills deficits amongst the existing workforce.
Another possibility could be setting up an alternative
to Newcastle’s ‘Centre for Life Sciences’, working with
the city to create a joint university/city project building
on an area of research excellence. The possibilities are
endless; the role of the University and the city is to
define the desirable and the probable – and then to
implement it.
In a city like Bristol, the economy has proved time and
again that there is no room for complacency. Thriving
industries have declined; boom times have been and
gone; inequalities have persisted throughout. If Bristol
is to be as resilient and economically successful in 2109
as it is in 2009, then it must strive constantly to grow
its intellectual assets and to close the gap between
the knowledge-haves and the knowledge-have-nots.
And at the heart of its strategy to grow its intellectual
assets and increase equality have to sit the universities,
hospitals and schools: the institutions producing the next
generations of ideas and innovation. For the University
of Bristol the challenge is to look to this future to
ensure that, when its 200 th anniversary comes around
in 2109, its story is one of both global research and
local impact and that its place is at the heart of a city
brimming with intellectual assets and ideas.
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