magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

Two faces of
18 24 32 35
Afghanistan
The film invisible
star
Rooms a view
with
The Gift of
Education
Somerville
2010
magazine
Of Witchcraft and
War Crimes | 12
Fighting China’s
Grim Reaper | 14
With thanks to
Dame Fiona | 28

2 | Somerville Magzine
Contents
Principal’s Message 3
News & People 4
Commemoration 5
1959 Golden Anniversary Reunion 6
Somerville London Group Chair 7
A year in the life of
the Lord Mayor of Oxford 7
Four generations and an FRS:
Angela Mclean 8
Fellow Profile: Professor Fiona Stafford 9
Somerville ‘Formal in London’ 10
Gaudy 1986 – 1995 10
Val Malone: 31 years of
Somerville service 11
Of witchcraft and war crimes 12
Fighting China’s grim reaper 14
Powers of observation 16
A quick step in Ethiopia’s slow lane 17
Helicopters over the
Turquoise Mountains 18
Earning from history: Noah Bulkin 21
From Somerville to Columbia:
Michele Moody-Adams 22
The invisible film star: Tessa Ross 24
A creative corner that is forever
Somerville: Francesca Kay 26
There is nothing like a Dame Fiona 28
The Caldicott Appeal 31
Rooms with a view: Niall McLaughlin 32
Campaigning for Somerville 34
The gift of education:
Lord Harris of Peckham 35
Alumni events 2010 36
Somerville College
Woodstock Road OX2 6HD
Telephone 01865 270600
www.some.ox.ac.uk
Meeting the World’s Great
Challenges – together
The Food Animal Initiative (FAI), a tenant of Oxford University
based at The Field Station Wytham, continues to undertake
groundbreaking research into food production systems. Its
aim is to deliver better animal welfare, improved farmland
environments and higher quality food, whilst still allowing the
farmer to make a reasonable return.
This work, in collaboration with Professor Marian Dawkins of
Somerville College, is particularly significant in the context of
the debate around food security and the need to find sustainable
ways to increase production to feed a growing population.
Research and development are of vital importance in delivering
the agricultural systems which are needed to meet the
challenges of food security and climate change.
Tesco is involved in a number of research initiatives across
agriculture, including being a founding sponsor of FAI.
Recently our research efforts have broadened, with a greater
focus on climate change in the UK and internationally. The
company now has over 60 per cent of its space overseas
and operates in 13 countries, including China, India and
the United States. This means we can play a part in work on
climate change beyond our shores.
As a business we are dealing with the challenge in three ways.
First, we are reducing our own emissions. We are building
low-carbon stores. Two of the first such stores were in Bangkok
and Seoul and our first zero-carbon store has recently opened
in Ramsey near Cambridge. It is made of wood, makes optimal
use of natural light and energy, and has its own combined heat
and power plant. We are using trains, barges and doubledecker
trucks to reduce the number of road journeys, and we
are also trialling trucks powered by gas from waste.
Second, we are helping customers to cut their own carbon
footprints and live more sustainable lifestyles. We are carbon
labelling products and introducing other products and
services to help customers cut their energy use. We are also
introducing “buy one get one later” promotions on some
perishable goods, helping to reduce waste.
Third, we are bringing down emissions all the way through
the supply chain. We are working with some of the world’s
largest suppliers to achieve a 30 percent reduction by 2020
in the carbon impact of the products in our supply chain,
working together to tackle hotspots quickly.
In our own business we will halve emissions against a 2006
baseline by 2020 and become a zero-carbon business by
2050. This programme is supported by research and development
across our Group and in a number of universities.
Such collaboration between academic institutions and industry
can play a useful part in identifying improvements that
benefit consumers, the supply base and the environment.
We are proud that Somerville plays a part in that network.
Magazine Committee: Julie Hage (Head of Development), Liz Cooke
(Secretary to the Somerville Association), Antonia Kasunic (Annual Fund
& Alumni Relations Officer). Freelance Copy Writer: Elin Williams.
We would like to thank Tesco for their generous support
of Somerville Magazine since 2005.

Somerville Magzine | 3
Principal’s Message
DAME FIONA
CALDICOTT
This year’s Magazine includes many stimulating
stories about the lives of Somervillians throughout the
world, ranging from two very different perspectives on
Afghanistan by Thomas Wide (2003) and Tom Norton
(1997) in their respective civil and military roles, to the
inspirational new Dean of Columbia College in New York,
Michele Moody-Adams (1978), Sarah England’s (1986)
thought-provoking observations about tobacco control
in China, and Nick Martlew’s (2002) humanitarian
plight working with Oxfam in Ethiopia. Creatively, as
ever, Somervillians have been highly commended in
the past year, with Francesca Kay (1975) winning the
2009 Orange Award for New Writers for her novel An
Equal Stillness, and Tessa Ross (1980) receiving a New
Year’s honour for her services to broadcasting. I do hope
that you enjoy reading about the remarkable work of
these and many more of your fellow Somervillians, who
unquestionably demonstrate the enduring Somervillian
spirit for which the College’s alumni are renowned
In my introduction to the Magazine last year, I wrote
about how the outlook from parts of the College had
been transformed by demolition on the Radcliffe
Observatory (formerly the Radcliffe Infi rmary) site. The
planning of Somerville’s two new buildings of student
accommodation on the periphery of the site, behind
House and the Library, has proceeded apace since then.
Planning permission has been granted and contractors
have been appointed, so we can look forward to work
on site being commenced in the early summer. Our
students have appreciated being involved in the design
of the rooms, while regretting that these (available in
October 2011) will not benefi t most of them. Alumni
are also excited at the prospect of new accommodation
being available when coming to stay in College. It will be
interesting to see if these rooms, or those in the Dorothy
Hodgkin Quad, which are arranged as four bedroom
fl ats, are the most popular.
Meanwhile we are busy fundraising for the building
and are optimistic that we can achieve our target of £2
million, thanks to the generosity of alumni and friends
of the College. Such support for, and investment in, the
College and its future is very heart warming.
In contrast, many of you will remember the damp, cold
climate in Oxford, particularly in Hilary Term. This was
particularly inclement this year, and many students and
staff had persistent infections interrupting their studies
and work. The daffodils fi nally appeared in the quad as
the vacation began, and hopefully everyone will return
for the summer term in better spirits, even if they face
academic hurdles.
There have been celebrations, sometimes mixed with
regret. Such is the calibre of our tutorial fellows that
we lose them because they are promoted to chairs.
So Tobias Reinhardt moved to the University’s Chair
of Latin, associated with Corpus Christi College, and
James MacDonnell (Biochemistry) left to take up a
chair at King’s College, London. Our newest fellows,
Hilary Greaves in Philosophy and Luke Pitcher in
Classics, have engaged in their busy academic
schedules and our Domestic Bursar, Carol Reynolds,
Librarian, Anne Manuel and Director of Development,
Julie Hage, are now well established in their posts.
Joanna Innes, Tutorial Fellow in History, has become
Vice-Principal for my last year, and for Dr Prochaska’s
fi rst, providing very helpful continuity from August to
September and beyond.
It does feel strange to be part of the cycle of the
academic year for the last time, and to be able to
contemplate a holiday in October as 2010 - 11
begins. The Somerville women’s soccer team rose to my
challenge to win Cuppers last month, having reached
the Final for the third time. Scoring for the fourth time in
the fi nal minutes ‘Dame Fi’s Barmy Army’ did me and
the College proud. Those are the moments that
I will miss the most.
Even more than events, I will miss the people who are
what Somerville is today. The students, academics and
staff, as I have said before, make this a wonderful place
to work, and I thank them all for their contributions to the
College and its activities, academic, creative, sporting and
social. The alumni, too, have contributed much of my
enjoyment, and some challenges, in my years here, for
which I thank them too.
My predecessor but one, Daphne Park, provided me
with much wise counsel, in what can be a lonely role.
Our great sadness in College at her recent death marks
the personal loss that many of us feel, though marked
with gratitude for all that she did in her distinguished life
of service, not least for Somerville College.

4 | Somerville Magzine
News&People...
Somerville
Telephone
Campaign
raises £127k
Professor Aditi Lahiri Tessa Ross Francesca Kay
Awards and
Achievements
Professor
Aditi Lahiri
receives Prof Sukumar Sen
Memorial Gold Medal.
Aditi Lahiri, Somerville’s Professor of
Linguistics,has been honoured with
a prestigious award for her work in
philology, linguistics and literature.
She travelled to Calcutta in May
2009 to receive the Professor
Sukumar Sen Memorial Gold Medal
at the Annual General Meeting of
the Asiatic Society.
Professor
Rajesh Thakker
awarded ASBMR Louis
V. Avioli Founder’s Award.
May Professor of Medicine,
University of Oxford, and
Professorial Fellow at Somerville,
Professor Rajesh Thakker was
awarded the American Society
of Bone and Mineral Research
(ASBMR) Louis V. Avioli Founder’s
Award in 2009 in recognition of his
fundamental contributions to bone
and mineral basic research.
Professor
Frances Stewart
(Kaldor, 1958, PPE)
honoured with a prestigious lifetime
achievement award from the
UN Development Programme.
Emeritus Fellow, Professor Frances
Stewart, was presented with the
Mahbub ul Haq Award for Excellence
in Human Development at a ceremony
in the Republic of Korea in 2009. The
award, which was named and created
in honour of the pioneering Pakistani
who founded the global Human Development
Report (HDR), recognises
an individual who has demonstrated
outstanding commitment to furthering
the understanding and progress of
human development.
New Year’s
Honour List
Awards
We are delighted to congratulate the
following Somervillians on
appearing in the New Year’s
Honours List 2010.
Rosalind Mary
Marsden
(1968, History) DCMG
Rosalind has served as Ambassador
to Kabul, Consul-General in Basra
and most recently as Ambassador
to the Republic of the Sudan.
Tessa Ross
(1980, Oriental Studies) CBE
Controller of Film and Drama, Channel
4, for services to broadcasting.
Tessa’s recent fi lms have included
The last King of Scotland and
Slumdog Millionaire. See article on
page 24.
Anthea Bell
(1954, English) OBE
For services to literature and literary
translation. Anthea has translated
numerous works, especially
children’s literature, from French,
German, Danish and Polish into
English. She is probably best known
for her translations of the French
Asterix comic books.
News
Dr Molly Scopes
(Bryant, 1954, Chemistry) OBE
Dr Molly Scopes was honoured in
2009 by the award of a Fellowship
of Heythrop College, University of
London, in recognition of her nine
years of service as a Governor there,
since retiring from Queen Mary.
News
Francesca Kay
(1975, English) wins the 2009
Orange Award for New Writers.
Congratulations to Francesca Kay
on winning the 2009 Orange Award
for New Writers for her novel
An Equal Stillness. Mishal Husain,
Chair of Judges said: “Francesca
Kay’s achievement in this astonishing
debut novel is to use her words
as a paintbrush, rendering the art
and life of a brilliant artist, Jennet
Mallow, in vivid colours on the
page.” See article and excerpt from
the novel on page 26.
Professor
Angela Mclean
(1979, Mathematics) becomes a
Fellow of the Royal Society.
The College is delighted to
congratulate Professor Angela
Mclean, Senior Research Fellow
at All Souls College, University of
Oxford, on becoming a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 2009. See article
on page 8.
Julia Koskella
(2007, Human Sciences)
co-founds and directs the
inaugural Oxford Climate Forum.
Former JCR VP/Treasurer and Chair,
Julia Koskella, was cofounder
and director of the
inaugural Oxford Climate Forum
held in February 2010. Speakers at
the Copenhagen-style convention
on climate change, hosted by the
University of Oxford, included
Lord Anthony Giddens, former
Director of the London School of
Economics, and, Professor Dieter
Helm CBE, Professor of Energy
Policy at the University of Oxford.
For further information, visit
www.oxfordclimateforum.org.
We would like to thank everyone
who spoke to our students during
the telephone campaign that took
place between 19 September and
4 October 2009. Extra special thanks
are due to those who gave to our
Annual Fund, either through a
one-off gift or a regular direct debit.
Based in the University offices in
Wellington Square, the 12 current
students phoned over 600 of their
predecessors, letting them know
about college developments and
the critical contribution of the
Annual Fund. The students also
had a chance to speak to the new
Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew
Hamilton, who visited them during
the campaign. Their feedback
was that it was fascinating to chat
with such a broad spectrum of
Somervillians – and that it was a
valuable personal experience as well
as a source of much-needed funds
for the College.
As those who spoke to the students
will know, the Annual Fund provides
vital regular income for student
support, the unique tutorial system of
teaching, new building and ongoing
maintenance. During the Somerville
Campaign (see page 34) all annual
donations count towards the total,
but – quite simply – we rely on
your generosity each year to keep
running the College to our current
high standards and to attract new
students as talented as those who
went before them.This message must
have resonated with the Somervillians
called, as over 55% of them decided
to make a gift – resulting in pledges
of £127,000. The high participation
rate is almost as important as the total
raised, as it helps us immeasurably
in our efforts to fundraise from
foundations and trusts.
In other words, a gift of any size is
important. If you missed our call last
autumn and would like to contribute
to the Annual Fund/the Somerville
Campaign, please contact the
Development Offi ce on 01865
280626. You can also give online
via the Somerville website at:
www.somerville-college.org/donate

Somerville Magzine | 5
Commemorating...
Somervillians who have died (as
of 1 March 2010)
This year Somerville’s
Commemoration Service
will be held in the College
Chapel on Saturday 12 June
at 2.30pm. This is an
important event in the College
calendar, which underlines the
enduring relationship between
Somerville and its former
members.
The service opens with the
traditional words of the College
Bidding Prayer, in which we
commemorate the College’s
founders, governors and major
benefactors; it ends with the
solemn reading of the names
of members of the College
and its staff who have died
in the last year. An address
recalling the lives of those
who have died since the last
Commemoration Service will
be given by Professor
Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Close family and Somervillian
friends of those who have died
are especially invited to the
Service, but all Somervillians
are welcome to attend.
If you know of any Somervillians
who have died recently but
who are not listed, please
contact Liz Cooke at Somerville
College, Woodstock Road,
Oxford OX2 6HD
E: elizabeth.cooke@
some.ox.ac.uk
Sylvia Joan Bevan née Paulin (1954) on 19 July 2009 Aged 73
Carmen Elizabeth Blacker (1948; Honorary Fellow,1991) on 13 July 2009 Aged 85
Gertrude (Trudi) Lillie Blamires née Skilling (1967) on 29 November 2009 Aged 61
Vanessa Carolyn Alexandra Brand née Rodrigues (1965) on 29 September 2009 Aged 63
Margaret Betty Broome née Bliss (1939) on 27 September 2009 Aged about 88
Kathleen Collard
née Sarginson (Lecturer 1942, Fellow and Dean
1947-1955) on 2 June 2009 Aged 93
Mary Dove (Randall MacIver JRF 1969-70) in June 2009 Aged 64
Margaret Eleanor Eastman (1955) on 7 August 2009 Aged 73
Elizabeth Patricia Field née Payne (1944) on 13 February 2010 Aged 83
Elizabeth (Betty) Anne Flexner née Wrey (1936) on 30 December 2009 Aged 92
Margaret Dora Higginson (1937) on 1 September 2009 Aged 90
Jane Kempton Hodge neé Aiken (1935) on 17 July 2009 Aged 91
Kathleen Verona Howarth née Maynard (1936) on 16 December 2008 Aged 91
Muriel Jones née Bentley (1938) on 17 January 2010 Aged 89
Gwenllian Jones-Lewitt née Jones (1980) on 3 September 2009 Aged 52
Constance Cecilia Kessler née Offen (1945) on 7 November 2009 Aged 82
Elena Ruth Lourie (1955) on 29 December 2009 Aged 73
The Hon.Mary Anna Sibell née Sturt (1948) on 18 January 2010 Aged 80
Elizabeth Marten
Marjorie Betty McEwan Reid née Little (1936) on 6 March 2009 Aged 91
Celia Margaret Minchin née Fremlin (1933) on 16 June 2009 Aged 95
Jennifer Anne Morton (1980) on 15 September 2009 Aged 76
Sarah Louise Mulvey (1992) on 28 January 2010 Aged 34
Elizabeth Anne Nichols née Walsh (1982) on 30 January 2010 Aged 47
Margaret Pontin née Leitch (1930) on 1 January 2010 Aged 98
Monique Raffray (1937) on 4 August 2009 Aged 90
Daphne Robinson née Coulthard (1944) on 4 September 2009 Aged 82
Marion Hilda Rose (1943) in 2009 Aged about 84
Halina Sand née Parker (1954) on 16 July 2009 Aged 73
Janet Turner née Dawson (1958) on 4 January 2010 Aged 69
Charlotte Rachel Anwyl Wallace née William-Ellis (1938) on 30 December 2009 Aged 90
Mary Elizabeth Wallace (1932) on 30 January 2009 Aged 98
Jane Frances Wimbury née Cook (1953) on 18 January 2010 Aged 74
Mary Alice Windsor-Clive née Joliffe (1956) in 2009 Aged 71
Olive Mary Wright (1939) on 27 December 2008 Aged 89
T: 01865 270632. It is with great sadness that we announce the death, on Wednesday 24th March 2010, of
Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth, Principal of Somerville from 1980-1989. There will be
a Memorial Service held in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin at 2.30pm on Saturday 29
May, and refreshments afterwards at Somerville. All are most welcome to attend and, if you plan to
attend, it would be very helpful to let Liz Cooke know (elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk).

6 | Somerville Magzine
1959 Golden Anniversary Reunion
& Golden Egg Fund
The 1959 Golden Anniversary Reunion held at
Somerville on 8-10 September 2009 was an innovative
and ambitious project in several respects.
LIZ FINCH
(Gamble, 1959, PPE)
First, there was the length of the event, which was
designed to bring a year group together over three days.
Second, there was the challenge of producing a booklet
of biographies and recent photos to accelerate the mutual
re-acquaintance – and to provide a permanent reference
for us and a career archive for the College. Third, and most
important, we aimed to invent a tradition to benefit
Somerville by making a joint year-group donation or
‘Golden Egg’ to give something back, fifty years on,
to the College which had nurtured us.
With these aims set and the event organised (by a
few members of the year group with support from the
Alumni Offi ce), success depended on an enthusiastic
response from the rest. It was forthcoming: the booklet
contains brief biographies of 55 undergraduates and two
postgraduates. Out of 67 who matriculated in 1959, 60
survive and 41 were able to attend the Reunion, together
with three postgraduates. Above all the response to
the Golden Egg initiative astonished us by its generosity.
As we sipped our welcoming champagne in the sunlit
garden on the first evening, groups were dynamic, changing
shape continuously as others arrived and seemingly
youthful feet tripped across the grass to embrace friends
from fifty years ago. The following morning our key event
took place: we sat in a single large circle exchanging
reflections on our life experiences since Somerville. This
was a truly memorable session, frank and fascinating, and
could have filled any amount of time available! After lunch
– and more conversation – some members of the year led
tours of libraries, museums and art galleries prior to a talk
and video on the life and work of our Principal, Dame Janet
Vaughan, who had influenced and inspired so many of us.
Then followed the Gala Reception and Dinner.
The climax of the Golden Reunion was the announcement
of the total of our Golden Egg Donation, which, notwithstanding
our ambition to assist the College, surprised and
delighted us all by its size – over £31,000 towards the
new student accommodation buildings on the Radcliffe
Observatory Quarter! The following morning, the Principal
joined us for breakfast and a lively question-and-answer
session, and our programme ended with a guided tour of
the tranquil gardens.
The mood as we drank coffee on the lawns was a happy mix
of contentment and, above all, hope. Our greatest hope is
that the Golden Egg tradition has indeed been invented. We
know that the year of 1960 is carrying it on – let us trust that
subsequent years will feel a similar debt to Somerville and a
similar wish to keep up this tangible flow of gratitude.
The 1959 Golden Egg
Committee: (l – r top)
Helen Boon,
Eleanor Arie
(l – r bottom) Liz Finch,
Caroline Barron

Somerville Magzine | 7
On taking the Chair of the
Somerville London Group
SUE ROBSON
(Bodger, 1966, PPP)
Somerville London Group has been
going strong now for over 20 years,
chaired initially by Miranda Villiers
(McKenna, 1954, Classics) and,
more recently, by Ginny Covell
(Hardman Lea, 1973, Modern
Languages). They are both a hard
act to follow and, since taking the
Chair after our AGM on 19 January
2010, I sincerely hope that I can
continue to deliver to their high
standards.
We now have around 1,800
members and we organise between
four and six events each year, with
talks from eminent public figures,
private visits to museums and
galleries, summer lunches, music
events, book launches for Somerville
authors, and more besides.
Our aim is to arrange a variety of
interesting events which are fun
as well as stimulating – and which
allow Somerville alumni to catch
up with old friends and make new
ones. Our financial golden rule is
never to make a loss and to contribute
the small profits that we do
make to the Somerville Campaign.
I read PPP at Somerville and
then developed my career in marketing
and market research. I used
my Psychology to train as a qualitative
researcher, using these skills for
marketing and advertising clients.
I ran my own qualitative research
consultancy for 20 years and have
now downsized to being an independent
consultant, combining this
with some pro-bono work.
While I was busy working full
time and bringing up a family I had
very little time to give to outside
interests such as the Somerville
London Group, but I am now able
to enjoy a greater involvement with
the College generally and the committee
in particular.
I have been on the committee
for over a year now and have been
organising tickets and payments
for events. This has given me an
opportunity to meet some members
but I do hope to meet many more
at the next series of events. We are
planning some interesting events for
2010, starting off with a talk from
Charles Moore, the authorised biographer
of Margaret Thatcher, titled
‘Before she became a Thatcher, the
early life of Margaret Roberts’.
We often manage to use our
Somerville connections to good
effect when setting up events but
are always in need of more ideas
and more contacts. I would be
very interested to hear from any
Somervillian who has ideas or is
interested in joining the committee.
Equally if you do not get our
twice yearly newsletter and are
interested in joining us please do
get in touch. You can contact me
on 020 8997 0848 or suerobson@
btopenworld.com.
A year in the life of the
Lord Mayor of Oxford
SUSANNA PRESSEL
(1965, Modern Languages)
Back in 1996 I was surprised to
find myself an Oxford City councillor,
having fallen into it somewhat
by accident. After 13 wonderful
years had flown by, with no two
days the same, it felt even more
unreal when I found that it was
already my turn to be the Lord
Mayor of Oxford.
I had an unforgettable year, in
which I carried out 626 Lord Mayor
engagements, including dozens
of receptions in the Town Hall and
elsewhere, dinners, performances,
exhibitions and big annual events,
like speaking at Remembrance
Sunday in Oxford and in Leiden,
opening the St Giles Fair, inspecting
the city walls, switching on the
Christmas lights in Oxford, opening
the Christmas market in Bonn, and
leading the Lord Mayor’s Parade.
There were several big one-off
events, for instance, opening Bonn
Square, accepting the handover
of the Olympic flag, visiting 10
Downing Street, and attending the
coronation of a Nigerian chief (in
Oxford). I also had to welcome the
Dalai Lama, the Queen and other
members of the royal family to
Oxford. In addition, the Principal
kindly invited me to several memorable
events at Somerville in
my capacity as Lord Mayor.
In some ways, it was the invitations
from local community groups
that were the most interesting
engagements. They made me
more aware than ever of the quiet
altruism of many of our citizens. It
was good to be able to thank them
on behalf of the city and to invite
some of them to receptions in the
beautiful Lord Mayor’s Parlour,
where I also entertained a very
wide range of foreign visitors.
The civic ‘pomp and circumstance’
can seem irrelevant and
anachronistic, and it amused some
of my friends and family, but there
has been a mayor of Oxford since
1127 (and a Lord Mayor since
1965), which helps to put it all
into perspective. It has been an
enormous privilege to have been
allowed to carry out this role, the
first Somervillian to do so, as far
as we can work out, and I met
many amazing people during my
year as Lord Mayor. Three weeks
after it ended, I was elected to the
County Council as well as staying
on the City Council (with Somerville
College part of my County division),
so I had no time for withdrawal
symptoms. I would encourage any
readers to consider standing for
their local council: it is certainly
one of the most rewarding things
I have ever done.

8 | Somerville Magzine
Four generations
and an FRS
(l – r)
Liz, Angela and Florence Mclean
Congratulations to Angela McLean on becoming a Fellow
of the Royal Society – but also to her family on achieving its
fourth consecutive generation of Somervillians.
Long gone are the days when Mary Somerville, as a
woman, could not be a full and participating member
of the Royal Society. Since then Somerville has
produced a bevy of FRSs to be proud of, ranging
from Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Laureate, and her
pupil, Margaret Thatcher, to more recent members
of Somerville’s Governing Body, Professors Louise
Johnson and Carole Jordan. So there was great delight
in College when the most recent Somervillian election
to Fellowship of the Royal Society, Professor Angela
Mclean, was announced in May 2009.
Angela came up to read Mathematics at Somerville in
1979 and her current work in epidemiology includes
producing the fi rst mathematical models of the
evolution and emergence of vaccine-resistant strains
of infectious agents.
Angela works in the Zoology Department and at All
Souls, where she is Senior Fellow in Theoretical Life
Sciences. Her work focuses on the spread and evolution
of infectious diseases. In Zoology she is one of the
two directors of the Institute for Emerging Infections,
a founding Institute of the University’s James Martin
21st Century School. The mission of the Institute is to
understand the underlying processes that drive the
emergence and spread of novel human infectious
diseases. The institute is staffed by a multi-disciplinary
team of biologists, mathematicians and clinicians who
are studying recently emerged infections and using the
knowledge thus gained to anticipate challenges that
will be posed by novel emerging infections in the 21st
century. In order to understand how infections change
as they spread the research simultaneously considers
events inside infected people and transmission
between people. This makes it different from most
research in infectious disease, which is either about
infected individuals (immunology and virology) or about
infections in communities (epidemiology).
Angela is also involved in giving scientifi c advice to
the UK government. She sits on advisory boards at the
Department of Health and at Defra where she is able
to share her expertise in infections, risk and
mathematical modelling.
Angela’s arrival as a fresher in 1979 was by no means
her first introduction to Somerville; she comes from a
Somervillian dynasty. With the arrival in October 2009 of
her niece, Florence McLean, to read Medicine, her family
can claim four consecutive generations of Somervillians.
First of the family group was Angela’s grandmother,
Mathilde Hunter (née Bugnion), universally known
as “Thilo”, who came up from Switzerland in 1917 at
the age of 21. Her year included Cicely Williams and
Winifred Holtby. Janet Vaughan FRS, though not in
this intake, overlapped them forming a strong cohort
of medics. At this time Somerville was evacuated to
Oriel, the Somerville buildings being taken over by
the Radcliffe Infi rmary for War wounded. Young lady
undergraduates went chaperoned to tutorials with male
tutors. They asked permission of each other before
addressing a new acquaintance by her Christian name.
Thilo, who had attended an English sixth form before
starting university studies in Switzerland spoke English
with extreme fl uency, but some of the nuances still
escaped her, as, when, confronted by a beetroot salad
in Hall, she innocently enquired, “What is this bloody
mess?” Having left professional life on the arrival of
her third child in the 1930s, she was then catapulted
in 1940 into the position of Head of Clinical Chemistry
at the University Hospital of McGill in Montreal, a
position which she held throughout the war. There
she (a native French speaker) presided over a team
of French Canadian technicians who would not speak
French to her because, being a “boss”, she merited
communication only in English. Such, at that time, was
the gulf between the social classes in French Canada.
ANGELA MCLEAN
(1979, Mathematics,)
and LIZ MCLEAN
(Hunter, 1950,
Physiology)
to understand
how infections
change as they
spread

Somerville Magzine | 9
When Thilo’s daughter, Elizabeth McLean (née Hunter) came up in 1950, Dame
Janet was in the Principal’s Chair and Jean Banister just starting her long and
infl uential tenure as Physiology Tutor. Jean had been allowed a large group (fi ve)
for Somerville from the then quota of women entrants to Medicine, a group that
included Shirley Summerskill, later a minister in the Labour Government, 1974–9.
Liz went on to two half-careers, the fi rst during her childrens’ early years in Pathology
research, the second in NHS Psychiatry where, as Medical Director of the Victorian
Asylum housing the inpatients of St George’s Hospital Medical School, she laboured to
accustom staff and patients (alike heavily institutionalised) to the potential advantages
of the new policy of Community Care. Later she led one of the earlier Community
Psychiatric Teams in Inner London. This team, after taking a hard look at its patient
base, set itself a principal aim of prioritising care to those patients with long-term
mental health problems. To this end they devised a simple, clinical-based checklist
designed to defi ne the “long-term” patient and to separate such from the “others”.
With this tool they were able to audit their success or failure vis-à-vis their chosen
aim. To graduates working in other clinical specialities, this device must appear
so elementary as to be hardly worth mentioning. Psychiatrists and administrators,
however, will recognise that it represents a level of accountability in mental health
service delivery which is too rarely achieved.
Angela’s imaginative application of the Mathematical training she got from Somerville
is described above. As for Florence, not yet half way through her second year, history
awaits. To date it can be said that she takes seriously the need to organise a social
side to College life. She was an animating spirit of Somerville Freshers’ Week 2009,
and continues as an active member of the Bop Committee.
Other current
Somervillian FRSs
Professor Dame Kay Davies
(Partridge, 1969, Chemistry)
Professor Dame Julia Higgins
(Stretton Downes, 1961, Physics)
Professor Judith Howard
(Duckworth, 1966, Physical Science)
Professor Dame Louise Johnson
Hon. Fellow
Professor Dame Carole Jordan
Emeritus Fellow
Professor Anne Treisman
(Taylor, 1957, Psychology)
Baroness Margaret Thatcher
(Roberts, 1943, Chemistry)
Fellow
Profile:
PROFESSOR
KATHERINE
DUNCAN-JONES
Senior Research
Fellow
Professor
Fiona Stafford
Professor Fiona Stafford was elected to a Tutorial
Fellowship in English Literature in 1992. She came
to Somerville from Lincoln College, where she wrote a
doctoral thesis on James Macpherson and The Poems
of Ossian, subsequently published as The Sublime
Savage, and held a British Academy Post-Doctoral
Junior Research Fellowship. In 2008, her scholarly
distinction was recognised by the University with the
award of a titular Professorship. In 2006, she was
elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Fiona has written extensively on Scottish, Irish and
English poetry from the eighteenth century to the
present day, as well as on the novels of Jane Austen.
In her current project, Local Attachments: The Province
of Poetry, to be published in July 2010 by Oxford
University Press, she studies connections between
poems and places and considers the crucial role of
poetry in society.
Fiona has always been an extremely active teaching
member of the English Faculty, supervising large
numbers of graduate students both at Master’s
and Doctoral level, as well as of the College. She very
much enjoys teaching undergraduates in Somerville,
and for other Colleges, and appreciates the variety
of life as a Fellow.
In 2008/09 she performed a key role for Somerville
in chairing the committee appointed to elect a new
Principal in succession to Dame Fiona Caldicott.
She has also served as Tutor for Admissions, Tutor for
Graduates and Secretary to the SCR, and was actively
involved with managing the College Nursery, where both
her children were cared for before they went to school.
She has also been actively involved in alumni events,
and – as a tutor for seventeen years in the always
populous English school – she has many former
pupils of her own. She is one of two Fellows sitting on
the Somerville Association Committee as representatives
of Somerville’s Governing Body.

10 | Somerville Magzine
Somerville ‘Formal
in London’ dinner
FERDINAND LOVETT
Somerville Association
(1999, Classics)
A record-breaking 160 Somervillians and their guests
attended the fourth Somerville Formal in London on 31
October 2009. Held in the arches underneath Cannon
Street Station, the event was a great success. Every
matriculation year from 1994 to 2006 was represented
and revelers enjoyed a ‘formal-hall-style’ dinner and some
unexpected Halloween pranks before filling the dance
floor until well after 2 am! It was an excellent warm-up
for this year’s Gaudy and many Somerville Formal in
London dinners to come. To find out more, visit www.
somervilleformal.com.
Somerville Gaudy 1986 –1995
Somerville welcomed back years 1986 – 1995 for the Gaudy held on 19 – 20th September 2009. Thank you to
Somervillians and their families, Fellows and friends for joining us to celebrate a most enjoyable reunion.

Somerville Magzine | 11
Val Malone
31 Years of
Somerville service
Val Malone retired on 31 August 2009 after more
than three decades of service to College. She
always got on well with the students and Fellows
and enjoyed getting to know them. Everyone at Somerville
wishes Val the very best for the future – and we thank her
most warmly for her dedicated service over many years.
However, Val is all the more special, as four generations
of her family have worked for the College. Her mother
Audrey was the fi rst member of the family to serve
Somerville – as a scout in Vaughan. Audrey worked for
the College for 21 years. Val’s father also worked part
time in the lodge and kitchen for four years, but sadly
died shortly after leaving.
Next came Val herself. She started as a scout in Vaughan
and worked there for approximately three years before
leaving to have one of her children. When her son started
school she came back to Somerville and worked in
different buildings as a floating member of staff for 11
months before getting a permanent position as a scout on
the top floor of Penrose. Val was responsible for ten rooms
and one tutor’s flat. When she first started in Penrose, she
worked for Jean Banister for three years, then for medic
John Walker, followed by Gráinne de Burca, a Law Fellow,
who moved to Italy but always kept in touch with Val.
Professor Stephen Weatherill was the next occupant of the
flat, followed by Frances Stewart for a couple of years.
Moving on to the third generation, Val’s son Peter was
the fi rst to join the College. He started in the pantry,
then worked in the kitchen – and Somerville paid for
him to train as a chef. He is currently a chef at New
College. Peter’s sister Sarah and husband John Malone
also worked in the pantry.
Although Val’s eldest grandson David left to become
a chef after working in the pantry for a couple of years,
her grandson Martin Brain has been a kitchen porter
at Somerville for four and a half years now. He thus
represents the fourth generation of the Malone family
in Somerville.
Antoinette Finnegan, Annual Fund & Alumni Relations Officer
A tribute from Gráinne de Burca (Law Fellow, 1989–98)
I have very fond memories of Val from my time at Somerville. My offi ce was in Penrose (next to a bedroom, where I
also lived for a year from 1990 to 1991), and Val and I used to enjoy chatting each day when she came to clean the
room. We became friends, and occasionally we went out for tea together. I particularly remember enjoying tea at the
Old Parsonage, just across the road from Somerville. Val is a very kind and incredibly generous person – I used to
worry that she was spending more on Christmas presents for me than she earned in a week! Her warm character and
open personality won her good friends amongst the students too. I remember on one occasion that she went to Poland
at the invitation of one of the students to whom she had grown close. She has a great curiosity about the world, and I
think that, had the circumstances of her life been different, she would have loved to travel more. We continued to write
to one another and to exchange postcards for years after I left Somerville – she was one of my best correspondents!.

12 | Somerville Magzine
Of Witchcraft
In the last couple of years, college travel grants have enabled
students to reach far-flung destinations, such as Australia,
CATHERINE BORG
(2008, Human Sciences)
Medical mysteries in Malawi
A fantastic insight
into the reality of
anthropological
research in a
place with such a
different culture
from our own.
Why do so many Malawians turn first to traditional
healers when they are ill? Is western medicine less trusted
because it lacks a spiritual dimension? These were the
questions that the Wilma Crowther travel fund helped me
attempt to answer in July and August 2009.
I fi rst found myself asking the questions during my gap
year, when I taught English in one of the most rural and
untouched areas of Malawi, the Lower Shire Valley. Last
summer I returned with Rosalie Lear, a fellow Human
Scientist from Keble. We stayed in a Catholic mission
in the village of Mitumbiri and, with the help of a local
translator, arranged several interviews with people from
the surrounding Namitembo parish.
We questioned a diverse cross-section of people of
varying ages and levels of education, living within
different distances from the nearest western-style health
clinic, as well as religious leaders, nurses and doctors,
and most importantly, “a’singanga” – traditional healers.
The interviews were very broad to begin with, as Rosalie
and I began to understand who uses traditional healers,
who uses western medicine and who uses both, in
which situations and for which reasons. As we spoke to
more and more people, we gained a greater insight into
the methods used to treat various illnesses.
Most interesting of all perhaps was the response to
HIV/AIDS and the methods chosen to work alongside
antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to prevent its progression.
Whilst there was a general consensus that HIV is an
incurable disease, a wide range of remedies were
used by the different healers – including the Moringa
tree. It turned out that Western doctors and nurses
also advocated its use, thanks to its immune-boosting
properties. This is certainly something I would like to
follow up to fi nd out whether the tree is ever used in
European medicine.
We also learnt about the great importance to healing
of “ufi ti” – that is, witchcraft – something we hadn’t
anticipated. The experience was a fantastic insight into
the reality of anthropological research in a place with
such a different culture from our own, the diffi culties
that come with it, and the need for a great variety of
techniques to get accurate and useful information.
The opportunity to experience both the biological and
anthropological aspects of my course in the fi eld helped
me put into practice what I learnt and read about in
my fi rst year at Oxford. I am confi dent it will help me
through the rest of my degree too. I am very grateful
indeed to Somerville and to the donors of the fund. One
day I hope to return to Malawi and further my research
into its ethnographies, particularly the “a’singanga”.
Photo: Rosalie and myself (from I – r) learning to make the staple “nsima” in front of a crowd of interested villagers

Somerville Magzine | 13
& War Crimes
Japan, Syria and Zambia. But they took two Somervillians to
places the rest of us can only imagine…
Trial Chamber III, The Hague
Kubo (centre) with
ICTY colleages
I spent the summer of 2008 in court – at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) in The Hague to be precise. My internship in this
unique environment was unpaid, so the Edith Haynes
Award that I received was invaluable.
For the whole duration of my internship, I worked in
Trial Chamber III on the Milutinovic et al case. Six senior
Serbian political, military and police offi cials – including
Milan Milutinovic, former president of Serbia – were
accused of an alleged campaign of terror and violence
directed against Kosovo Albanians and other non-Serbs
in Kosovo during 1999. I was responsible for assisting
the judges in the preparation of the judgement and a
great variety of legal tasks.
As the case was in the fi nal stage of trial proceedings,
I had the benefi t of access to a complete fi le comprising
thousands of exhibits and tens of thousands of
pages of transcripts. The experience provided me
with an incredible insight into the way international
jurisprudence is created in practice. It was a vital
addition to the toolkit of legal skills and knowledge
I had acquired during the course of my studies at
Oxford and, prior to that, back home in the Czech
Republic at the Charles University in Prague.
Now, after a year away, I am back at Somerville doing
research into humanitarian and criminal law.
International humanitarian law applies in times of war
(such as during the confl ict in the former Yugoslavia)
and prescribes limits on the way wars are waged, while
international criminal law deals with serious violations of
international law – including war crimes, crimes against
humanity and the crime of genocide.
The experience in The Hague is defi nitely facilitating
my work and I hope I can use it to contribute to
the wider Oxford academic community. In the long
run, the internship will probably be a stepping
stone towards a career as a lecturer in international
law or a practitioner at one of the international or
internationalised criminal tribunals.
As for Milan Milutinovic, he was was acquitted of all
charges in February 2009. His fi ve co-defendants
received sentences ranging from 15 to 22 years.
JAKUB ‘KUBO’
MACÁK`
(2007, MJur Law)
The experience
in The Hague
is definitely
facilitating my
work and I hope to
use it to contribute
to the wider
Oxford academic
community.

14 | Somerville Magzine
Fighting China’s
Grim Reaper
A Somervillian is leading the World Health Organization’s battle
against tobacco in China. But it is also a personal crusade…
DR SARAH ENGLAND
(1986, Medicine)
The government
is the sole
shareholder
of the biggest
tobacco company
on the planet.
Why don’t you pick a more achievable goal,
like changing the orbit of Jupiter?” This is
the kind of incredulous response I get when
I tell people that my job at the World Health Organization
is tobacco control in China. I never tell them about my
saddest day at Somerville. That was the day I passed
my DPhil thesis defence and the day my father died of
heart disease. He had his first heart attack at 47. He was
a smoker who tried over and over to quit and ultimately
suffered the tragic consequences of a lifelong addiction.
So, though the task is daunting, the potential to save
some of the millions of lives lost to tobacco every year is
as big as the Jovian challenge.
While a graduate student at Somerville, I studied human
genetics under the guidance of Somervillian, Kay Davies
(now Dame and Professor), hoping to find a treatment
for disease, or a way to prevent illness. In the place of
genetic change, my work now is aiming at using policy
change to do the same thing. Through population-based
approaches, we can stretch public health funding to its
greatest efficiency – prevent suffering and premature
death, increase productivity and save money.
In China, the scale is massive and so the tobacco stakes
are huge. The government is the sole shareholder of the
biggest tobacco company on the planet, run by the State
Tobacco Monopoly Administration, and China is home to
a third of the world’s smokers. China has more smokers
than there are people in the United States, and the death
toll attributable to tobacco is a million a year and rising.
The World Health Organization Global Tobacco Control
Report 2008 stated that tobacco, the biggest agent of
death on earth, will claim a billion deaths this century
if trends continue, mostly in middle- and low-income
countries, where the epidemic continues to grow.
What policy makers are just beginning to realise is that
tobacco is not only a public health issue. The 2009
Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum
identified chronic disease as the third and fourth greatest
threat to the global economy in terms of likelihood
and severity of risk, respectively. The risk level is in
the hundreds of billions of US dollars. Tobacco is an
important factor in many chronic diseases and is
therefore a key component of this important threat to the
global economy.
Luckily, as UK residents know, there are proven
interventions that can stop the tobacco epidemic, and
my job is to advocate with the Chinese national and
municipal governments for such measures as smokefree
environments, graphic warning labels on cigarettes,
higher taxes and prices, smoking cessation services,
hard-hitting public education campaigns, and bans
on tobacco advertising promotion and sponsorship.
This is in the context of technical support to China’s
implementation of the World Health Organization
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Similar
in concept to the Climate Change Convention, this
international public health treaty has been ratified by
more than 165 parties including China. It calls for a
number of measures to be taken to address the global
threat of tobacco. In China, however, despite the fact
that the Convention is binding law, the tobacco industry
has openly published its counter-strategy and it is a
formidable opponent.
Enter the heroes of the story, Bloomberg Philanthropies,
the Gates Foundation and the sister organisations of
a global partnership to fight tobacco. Mayor Michael
Bloomberg together with his health commissioner Tom
Frieden (now head of the USA Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention) made New York smoke free.
No one thought they could ban smoking in New York
bars, but they did, and New Yorkers approved. The city
raised tobacco taxes – people liked the way the tax funds
were used. It was a popular tax! The city implemented
an emotional anti-smoking campaign, gave out nicotine
patches and New Yorkers quit smoking. The Mayor put
his personal philanthropy behind spreading the New
York experience around the globe and we have amazing
success stories as a result – even in China.
Last year’s Beijing Olympics were tobacco-free, with
no smoking in the stands or competition areas – even
outdoors – and no tobacco advertising in host cities.
The legacy of the Olympics is a Beijing directive banning
smoking in many locations, a greater understanding of
the harms of smoking among citizens, and a home-grown
movement of tobacco control activists. The Olympic Games
were proof of concept that smoke-free environments can
work in China. Other cities are starting to follow suit and the
Guangzhou 2010 Asia Games have been declared smoke
free. There is a global tobacco control movement and it is
coming to China. I think my father would approve. ■

Inset: Sarah at the Great Wall of China
Somerville Magzine | 15

16 | Somerville Magzine
Powers of Observation
SUSAN LOURENÇO
(Loewenthal,
1954, History)
Humiliation and
harrassment
at the hands of
conscript soliders
the age of our
grandsons.
Sunset at A Ras
seen through razor wire
An Israeli citizen describes her
involvement in an extraordinary
group of women who are upholding
the human rights of Palestinians –
simply by watching.
Throughout my career as a university
administrator, I had little time or inclination to
volunteer for anything unconnected with my work,
much of which dealt with social justice and outreach to
Chicago’s African American and Hispanic minorities.
My passion for equity and justice led me to continue
the struggle for human dignity when I moved to Israel.
I agreed, when approached by an Israeli NGO ‘A New
Way’, to serve as their chair in bringing together Jewish
and Palestinian-Israeli children in Jaffa where I live. And
a member of A New Way took me the next step – to
MachsomWatch.
In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank
and Gaza. Years went by, but voices raised in Israel and
abroad against Israel’s occupation went unheeded. Jewish
settlements grew like mushrooms, while international laws
on the occupier’s obligations were ignored. The results
were two Palestinian Intifadas – popular uprisings, the
second of which began in autumn 2000. Early in 2001,
a group of Israeli women began to check rumours
circulating in Jerusalem about violation of human rights
at newly created checkpoints around the city. They drove
out to these checkpoints (machsomim), stood there,
monitored and reported what they saw.
Today, from these unassuming beginnings, 250 to
300 Israeli women observe and report, day in day out
throughout the year, in words and pictures, protesting
the checkpoints, mounds and ditches that hamper daily
life across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). We
document conduct of the Israel Defense Forces soldiers,
Border Police and Israel Police (and violence-prone
settlers), protect the human rights of Palestinians and
assist them wherever possible.
I joined MachsomWatch five and a half years ago, after
becoming an Israeli citizen. Though I had worked for civil
rights in the US, I had never been involved in a conflict
arena, or engaged in human rights – certainly not one as
basic as freedom of movement.
MachsomWatch is entirely volunteer-run, a grass roots
organisation, no membership fees, no formal hierarchy.
Women drive deep into the West Bank, around Jenin
in the north, Hebron in the south, the cities of Qalqilya,
Tulkarm and Nablus in the centre and around Jerusalem:
a minimum two women to a shift, morning and afternoon,
and before dawn to monitor the newly privatised access
‘terminals’ to Israel proper, where thousands of Palestinian
men and women lucky enough to get work permits line up
at 3 am hoping to reach their jobs in Israel.
A report written after each shift, in English or Hebrew,
translated by volunteers into the other language, is posted
on www.machsomwatch.org. We have no office, just an
official address. When MachsomWatch became a legal
‘charity’, just about when I joined, I offered to write funding
proposals and liaise with embassies and foundations.
When not driving to checkpoints and writing reports, I’m
busy seeking funds to carry on (we spend over £90,000
a year on transportation alone: some women won’t drive
in the OPT, so a Palestinian Israeli driver ferries them). I
drive about 130 miles a shift, once a week, in summer
heat and winter rain, frequently with visitors – mostly
from abroad – who invariably find it hard to digest what
they see: thousands of lives disrupted by humiliation and
harassment at the hands of conscript soldiers the age
of our grandsons, withholding of permits (to work, trade,
study, get medical treatment or attend family celebrations)
– with a sickening callousness. A Palestinian friend, owner
of a ‘seam line’ plant nursery between the 1949 armistice
Green Line and the newly built Separation Wall (a land
grab rather than a security need) told me recently that
a young soldier made his 77-year-old father take off his
shoes and walk barefoot through a muddy checkpoint.
Over the years, we’ve done what we can on behalf
of our Palestinian friends, people met on our forays,
at the checkpoints or along the way. We tried to prevent
the cutting down of olive trees to build a ‘security’ road
around a settlement; we’ve picked olives with a family,
joined in happy events like weddings or the birth of a baby,
made endless phone calls to the army and its so-called
‘humanitarian centre’, often to no avail, but with occasional
success in our attempts to ease life under occupation.
The Palestinian landscape is dotted with roadblocks,
apartheid roads, Separation Wall, military lookout towers,
razor wire and ‘rolling’ checkpoints – a military jeep or
Hummer suddenly across the middle of a road. The
occupation is often mindless in its unpredictability.
Checkpoints and barricades are put up, taken down;
checkpoints are manned one day, unmanned the next.
Added to this, the occupation’s bureaucracy has created
a system, connected to ‘security’, overseen by the secret
service which ‘blacklists’ people trying to get permits to
work in Israel, to visit an ailing relative, to go to a hospital
in another West Bank city, etc., who refuse to become
informers. No wonder Palestinian society is disintegrating;
no wonder the Palestinians are dependent on the
subjugator: there is little work within the West Bank itself.
In brief, much of what we see, and report, has little to
do with security or a path to peace, but much to do with
man’s inhumanity to man.

Somerville Magzine | 17
A quick step in
Ethiopia’s slow lane
NICK MARTLEW
(2002, PPE)
Oxfam’s humanitarian policy advisor in Ethiopia describes his
patient, painstaking struggle against the urgencies of poverty.
I’ve only just
begun to
understand
this huge, ancient,
devastatingly
complex country
It was in one of the regular one-on-one meetings
with the Principal that I said it. Dame Fi (as we called
her – affectionately, of course) was quite struck by the
phrase: ‘how time can move both fast and slow amazes
me.’ I didn’t tell her it was robbed from a song.
My point back then was that an afternoon in the library
could feel like an endurance test, while an eight-week
term would be over before you could say ‘reading list’.
Fast and slow at the same time. It’s a paradox that I’m
still grappling with.
These days I’m the humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam
in Ethiopia. To decode that, I take the lessons from
Oxfam’s work with livestock or water with half a million
or so Ethiopians and try to persuade the people who
matter – local government, the United Nations, Western
governments – to put these lessons into practice for the
millions that our programmes can’t reach.
In my work, the quick-slow conundrum is at times painfully
obvious. Oxfam, like other agencies and the Ethiopian
government, has to react as fast as humanly possible to
outbreaks of disease or reports of extreme water or food
shortages. That is the fast. The slow is the change that is
needed to stop these emergencies from happening in the
first place. Disasters here are mainly a function of poverty
(in all its dimensions), not of some external shock like a
tsunami or earthquake. Poverty won’t be eradicated here
quickly, so disasters will keep on happening. Put simply,
we have to work at the speed of the hare and the tortoise
at the same time.
Looking at this from a more personal perspective, I’ve
been in this job since March 2009 and the months have
poured away. Yet I feel as though I’ve only just begun to
understand this huge, ancient, devastatingly complex
country. It’s a luxury to have an opportunity like this –
to pause from the frenetic working life and reframe the
fast-slow conundrum in a positive way: small decisions
made in the rush of the day-to-day can have a truly
lasting impact.
A personal example: in the heady days of my first year at
Somerville, I decided to apply to join a small HIV and AIDS
project in Kenya. I was accepted and was able to take this
first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa thanks to a travel grant from
the College. That started a journey that has taken me here
to Ethiopia, via the Sub-Saharan African politics paper
as part of PPE, an MA course in International Politics at
Sheffield, a hard slog up the ladder at Oxfam, and a year in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 1984, a spark burst into the daily life of Bob Geldof,
ignited by Michael Buerk’s report from the famine in
Ethiopia. Twenty-five years on, I chaperoned Sir Bob around
Ethiopia. I had been 18 months old when that spark was
struck. Now Geldof wanted to see the Ethiopia of the
21st century. Among Bob’s entourage were a couple of
hedge fund managers. Though they saw the hunger and
immediate suffering, they seized on the change of the last
25 years as well as the long term prospects for change:
futures markets, commodity exchanges, communities being
given the support to build their own visions of the future.
Change, development, progress – it takes time. But we
only get there by moving through the pressing, immediate
decisions, taking – and giving – opportunities whenever
and however we can. While visiting Oxfam’s work with
honey farmers in central Ethiopia, one of the visiting hedge
fund managers promised them computers so they could
better link in with the private sector. Years ago, I was given
a bursary by Somerville that allowed me to concentrate
on studies rather than worry about money. Whatever the
circumstance, opportunities grasped or given in time’s fast
lane can show their value only with the passage of time –
patient, slow time.

18 | Somerville Magzine
Helicopters over
the Turquoise
Two Somervillians share two very different perspectives of Afghanistan
(l – r) The team I ran in Afghanistan, The project in Istalif - Museum, workshop and garden, Thomas Wide and Ustad Honaryar (Head of Ceramics) at the Qala Noh-e Burj Fort Kabul

Somerville Magzine | 19
Mountains
Pottery in the Hindu Kush foothills
THOMAS WIDE
(2003, Classics) Afghanistan was never far from my mind while
I was a student at Somerville. I arrived at
Oxford in 2003, two years after the invasion of
Afghanistan by American and coalition forces, and could
not ignore the stream of parallels between my studies
in Classics and Arabic and the war there. My degree
confronted me with exchange and resistance between
what was traditionally considered ‘East’ and ‘West’:
Greeks and Trojans, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy,
At night, I would
sleep on the floor
of the office, and
wake at sunrise to
eat a bowl of
bread and cream
with our guard,
Dawoud.
Alexander the Great and Darius. The reports and
debates about Afghanistan seemed prone to the same
stereotypes and confused oppositions as those two
thousand years before. I knew that when I left Oxford I
wanted to go and work there to try to understand better.
In 2007, Somerville generously gave me a Horsman
Travelling Fellowship to fund learning Dari (a dialect
of Persian) and Pashto; I spent a summer in Kilburn
drinking tea with Afghan immigrants running
unsuccessful rug shops and selling mobile phones
on high streets, while talking of the great Kings of
Afghanistan and the poetry of Rumi. I fl ew to Kabul in
August, a trip broken by a night at Dubai’s Terminal
3 – known as the ‘Axis of Evil’, as the only fl ights that
left there headed for Mogadishu, Baghdad, and Kabul
– surrounded by Pashtuns with all their possessions
wrapped up with twine in cotton sheets, and Texan
private contractors with gargantuan biceps and wraparound
Oakley sunglasses.
I spent a year working for Turquoise Mountain, a Non-
Government Organisation, set up by the diplomat and
writer Rory Stewart, based in Kabul. Its aim was to revive
Afghanistan’s traditional crafts, and to regenerate Murad
Khane, a historic area of Kabul’s old city, known for its
rich cultural heritage. I ran two programmes, one based
in a Shi’ite district of Kabul, another in a predominantly
Tajik community in Istalif, a village in the foothills of the
Hindu Kush in Central Afghanistan. Istalif was renowned
for its beautiful turquoise pottery, but had been burnt to
the ground by the Taliban in 1996, and villagers had only
recently returned to try and rebuild their shattered homes.
Our project worked in tandem with the Istalifi potters to
improve the quality of their ceramics, provide material and
teaching resources, and find new markets, both national
and international. We also set up a museum and prototype
eco-lodge, using traditional materials and in the vernacular
style, complete with composting toilets, solar panels, fruit
gardens and bee-hives. It was a place of great hardship,
but also of great beauty. Long days of work in difficult
conditions were matched by weekends of fishing trips
along the river and hikes up into the mountains. At night,
I would sleep on the floor of the office, and wake at sunrise
to eat a bowl of bread and cream with our guard Dawoud.
By chance, our small team of internationals contained
another Somervillian, Anna Morgan, who came to
us on loan from the UK Department for International
Development (DFID) in order to run all our operations.
When in Kabul, we all lived together in a 19th century
fort on the outskirts of the city, which was repaired and
restored as part of the regeneration project. It was a
ramshackle structure, made of thick blocks of mud earth
that provided a perfect home both for us and sicklylooking,
translucent scorpions that held quite a sting.
Looking back on that experience from the uncomfortably
comfortable environs of Harvard (supported by a
generous Margaret Watson Postgraduate Award from
Somerville), I am racked with what I did wrong as much
as what I got right. Much of that was inevitable – the
delicately-balanced power relations of a rural village
could not but be irrevocably changed by a rapid infl ow
of money and by our presence there – but much
was not. I know I made many mistakes – backing
the wrong man, spending money on a lost cause,
misunderstanding the subtle currents that fl owed
between people – and I know that anything that seemed
to be a right decision may well turn out in the long-term
to have been extremely counter-productive.
And yet I know that, in the end, I was working with
communities of several hundred, rather than several
million, and that I would not have had it any other way;
I wanted granular knowledge of how a village worked,
what it wanted, and how we could help it achieve that,
not grand ideas of how we might like a model country to
look. This cannot help but make me extremely sceptical
of the state-building projects of the last eight years: if we
struggled and struggled to understand a village, how can
we ever hope to understand a country?

20 | Somerville Magzine
(l – r) The missing registration staff home at last, The Provincial Reconstruction Team’s gardener, Tom Norton with Mohammed Nazir.
British Forces Headquarters
in Lashkar Gah
TOM NORTON
(1997, Ancient and
Modern History)
I enjoyed a
round of Auld
Lang Syne with
the Provincial
Governor, Gulab
Mangal, and his
Chief of Police on
Hogmanay.
I was taken aback. Four months into my tour of
Afghanistan as a Royal Marines planning offi cer in the
winter of 2008/09, I was in the comfort of the airconditioned
offi ce that I shared with thirteen others:
military, British Foreign and Commonwealth Offi ce
(FCO), DFID and other experts contracted through the
Stabilisation Unit. The visitors I expected to receive
would always arrive directly into the camp accompanied
by the thumping sound of helicopter blades, rather than
emerge from the bustling centre of Lashkar Gah.
At the gate was the gigantic Nazir, an ox-like man who
welcomed me with a large smile and a hand-shake
which almost tore my arm off. I recognised him – I
had put him on a fl ight some weeks before to the
far-off district of Kajaki, where he was responsible for
enabling voter registration prior to the presidential
elections. That process was now complete – with
success almost everywhere apart from Kajaki where
the Taliban had signifi cant infl uence. He apologised
for troubling me, but two of his team were still in
Kajaki, having failed to get on the helicopter we had
arranged for them. One of them was due back in
Kabul for the new university term, and his parents
were nagging him. A week had passed since the rest
of his team had arrived; no doubt we would have
complained sooner. Day after day we booked fl ight
after fl ight, but each was reallocated to more essential
tasks. Eventually, and after frantic telephone calls
through interpreters, we recovered the errant pair –
much to the glee of my now regular visitor.
I learnt to greatly admire the people; proud,
determined and with a mutually compatible sense of
humour. Many travelled into our camp daily to work
the laundrette, cut hair or to serve as interpreters.
And yet, almost weekly, we formed up in regimented
lines to remember the fallen – the Afghan pride and
determination dragging on indefi nitely their effective
insurgency campaign. In our headquarters, long hours
of work were still interspersed by good meals and the
odd game of volleyball, but we knew that in the forward
operating bases our troops were eating from ration
packs, sleeping on the fl oor and wondering whether
they would all return from their next patrol.
The public are questioning whether any lasting positive
changes will arise from the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) intervention in Afghanistan.
My experiences convinced me that we were playing
an important and valued role in assisting with the
stabilisation of the country. The Afghan people had
hope – after three decades of war they seek a return to
peace and some believe it possible, not least those who
risked their lives to work with us in search of progress.
However much has changed since I formed my opinion,
on one hand the elections were disastrous and Karzai’s
political power has rapidly waned, but on the other
the US and, more limited, UK troop increases have
brought security to a much wider tranche of the Afghan
population. This is essential – unless they feel safe, few
will publicly back the government and reject the Taliban,
a prerequisite for a successful counter-insurgency. ■
This was just one example of the interaction conducted
daily between the British civilian and military mission
to Helmand and the local Afghan leaders. I met with
the Helmand disaster relief committee; I had frequent
meetings with the delightful but oft-threatened Elections
Offi cer, Engineer Hadi. I enjoyed a round of Auld Lang
Syne with the Provincial Governor, Gulab Mangal,
and his Chief of Police on Hogmanay. I dined with the
Afghan General responsible for the south of the country.
Tom Norton returned to Afghanistan in the summer of
2009, whilst seconded to the government’s Stabilisation
Unit, in order to develop a methodology for measuring
the effect of the civil/military operation. During his fi rst
trip, he was pleasantly surprised when Anna Morgan
(1997, Modern History) – the same Somervillian who
had worked with Thomas Wide – arrived in Lashkar Gah
to brief on her work for DFID in the country. Thus two
very different perspectives are brought together by a
single College connection.

Somerville Magzine | 21
Earning from history
SARAH WYLES
(Ryle, 1987,
Modern History)
Noah Bulkin never imagined that studying
history at Somerville would lead to success
in the fast-paced world of investment banking,
so what changed his thinking?
It is rare these days to read ‘investment
banking’ and ‘rising star’ in the same
sentence. Finance’s high-fl yers are more
inclined than ever to seek a low profi le. Noah
Bulkin (1995, Modern History), recently
promoted to Managing Director of Investment
Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch,
and selected both as one of Financial News’
top 100 Rising Stars and Investment Dealers’
Digest “Forty Under Forty” list of the 40 most
promising fi nance professionals under 40
years old in the industry, knows that many
blame all bankers for the economic crisis.
“It has been a very turbulent environment for
our industry. Having been in this business now
for about 12 years I have been through a lot of
changes and a couple of difficult cycles. I have
learned to keep focused on what I’m doing
and maintain a long-term perspective. I am
not in the part of the business where people
risked large amounts of capital. I am primarily
an adviser to companies on mergers &
acquisitions. We are, however, part of the same
organisation as those who did take big risks.”
I thought it would be all sitting
at a desk number - crunching
and not for me
But he has remained loyal to Bank of America
Merrill Lynch – the company he joined as a
young graduate of Somerville – and explains
what it is about investment banking that
inspires him.
“When I joined the business I felt the pace of
learning I was exposed to was not available
anywhere else. That level of responsibility –
decisions that affect hundreds of thousands
of people – as well as being surrounded by
the calibre of people that I was, as clients and
colleagues, is incredibly rewarding.”
He has worked on corporate deals involving
large, household-name companies such as
Asda, Burberry, Hard Rock, lastminute.com and
WPP, and more recently has also been working
on renewable energy deals, such as EDF’s
acquisition of British Energy, fundraising for a
major offshore wind farm, and the acquisition of a
wind energy business called Novera by the UK’s
largest purely renewable energy provider Infinis.
It was not always his plan to go into fi nance.
“I was going to be a lawyer. I hadn’t even
heard of investment banking. Someone
suggested that I look at it. I thought it would
be all sitting at a desk number-crunching
and not for me. But I met with some people
at Merrill Lynch and they were extremely
impressive and seemed to have really
interesting day to day experiences.”
And it was not the fi rst time that life took
a different direction from the course Noah
envisaged. Somerville had only recently begun
to admit men when Noah applied to Oxford
and the College was not where he initially
expected to end up. First choice or not, Noah
enjoyed his time there.
“Beyond the rich experience of tutorials with
some brilliant academics, I also got a lot out of
Oxford in terms of friendships and sport, but
I could certainly have attended more lectures
and done more reading.”
Given that Noah had not even thought of
going into investment banking, he has found
his Modern History degree remarkably wellsuited
to his chosen profession. He was taught
at Somerville by Benjamin Thompson and
Joanna Innes and opted for European and
North American papers, recalling tutorials with
Clive Holmes at LMH.
“It was a way of thinking. Reading history
at Oxford, you are set a question or a
problem to consider and the fi rst task is to
fi gure out why it’s an interesting question
and what is the essence of what is being
asked. You then review a series of sources
and gather evidence to prepare your
arguments. You consider the problem from
every possible perspective because you
must be prepared to talk to a world expert
on the subject who may take the exact
opposite position from that which you are
proposing. Then you present your views
and in a cohesive and hopefully interesting
way, and try to persuade someone that you
have a compelling argument. That is exactly
what I do now in my work.”
Though Noah has found his career very
rewarding, he acknowledges that graduates
who choose similar paths have to expect
to make sacrifi ces. “With mergers and
acquisitions, there is effectively an infi nite
amount of work – there are always new
deals to think about. There is not much
defi nition between work and a social life.
You are on call 24 hours a day. I have made
real sacrifi ces and, particularly in the early
years of my career, worked an extraordinary
number of 120-hour weeks. I have not
started my own family yet and I’d like to.
A lot of people in this business face a
challenge keeping healthy and fi t because
of the lack of time. But if you are suffi ciently
motivated by the experiences and
opportunities you can have in this industry,
the sacrifi ces are all worth it.” ■
Sarah Wyles manages consumer PR for
Tesco and was formerly a business journalist
at The Observer and Guardian newspapers.

22 | Somerville Magzine
From Somerville
to Columbia
Through the glass ceiling
TONI COFFEE
Michele Moody-Adams, new Dean of
Columbia College and old member of
Somerville, is a role model for women,
ethnic minorities… and philosophers.
If you thought you heard a tinkling sound in the
distance last summer, it was probably caused by the
shattering of yet another glass ceiling when Michele
Moody-Adams (Moody, PPE, 1978) became the Dean
of Columbia College, the primary undergraduate
division of Columbia University in New York. Founded
in 1754, the college is one of the oldest in the US and
it has been fully co-educational since 1983 but this
is the fi rst time it has been headed by a woman, and
by an African American. She is also the fi rst holder
of a new title in the university administration, as Vice
President for Undergraduate Education.
Michele Moody-Adams is a scholar, a teacher, and an
administrator and her experience in all of these areas
will be crucial in her new position. She grew up in
Chicago at a time when racial, economic, and gender
barriers could easily have limited her aspirations as well
as her achievements but her parents, both educators in
the Chicago public schools, taught her that she could do
“anything I put my mind to” and she has set high goals
for herself from the start.
She came to Oxford as a Marshall scholar after
completing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wellesley
College, then as now one of the leading women’s colleges
in the US. She chose Somerville, she says, because she
had had a wonderful experience in a single-sex institution
at Wellesley and was curious to see what it would be like
in the British context. She was not disappointed. She
particularly enjoyed the intellectual independence that
was encouraged by the tutorial system, and in PPE she
gained a different perspective on her subject.
Our students need to understand that
the world can look very different when
not filtered through an American lens.
Photograph by Eileen Barroso

Somerville Magzine | 23
A philosopher whose major work deals with moral
relativism, she tends to resist single-value responses
to questions about the best or the most important
aspect of her experiences. One that stands out from
her two years at Oxford, however, was the affi rmation
of her belief that she should pursue a career in the
academy. “Philosophy was and is still a discipline that
is relatively unfriendly to women but Somerville had
this tradition of wonderful academics, from Philippa
Foot to Elizabeth Anscombe” and continued by
younger women like her own tutor, Julie Jack.
“It confi rmed that it was the right thing for me.”
Another, not insignifi cant, benefi t of her years at
Somerville is that she met the man who would become
her husband. James Eli Adams was a Rhodes Scholar
at Exeter College and is now a Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia. They are
the parents of a daughter, Katherine, age 14.
She had been accepted for graduate work at Harvard
before leaving for Oxford and returned there for her
master’s and doctoral degrees. She then taught at
Wellesley and other colleges; at Cornell University
she held a chair in philosophy and for the past four
years served also as Vice Provost for Undergraduate
Education. This combination of scholarship and
administrative experience made her the ideal candidate
for her new position, which resembles that of the
principal of an Oxford college in terms of responsibility
for the overall student experience and also for
institutional relationships within the university.
As someone who cares about the life of the mind as
much as the life of the meeting, this combination
appealed to Moody-Adams, but she was particularly
drawn by Columbia’s commitment to the values of
the liberal arts as embodied in its unique “core
curriculum.” Established more than fi fty years ago,
this is a set of courses which cover the history of moral
and political thought from Plato to the present – as
well as masterpieces of Western literature, art and
music, and a new section on science.
The importance of the ‘core’, she believes, lies in its
capacity to stimulate and celebrate students’ intellectual
curiosity while also providing a common intellectual
experience that helps shape their lives throughout
and beyond their college years. Classes are small
and intensive, requiring a major investment of faculty
time and fi nancial resources, and there is perpetual
controversy over the works to be included but Moody-
Adams intends to give it her full support. “We must
continue tweaking to keep the tradition healthy but
we know the texts in the core continue to be valuable
because they constantly challenge us to ask different
questions.” On the other hand, choices must be made;
as much as she loves Plato, she knows that “you can’t
read every work of Plato every year.”
She also believes that in this increasingly complex world
all students should have some form of international
experience. “Our students need to understand that the
world can look very different when not fi ltered through
an American lens.”
In a college of more than 4,000 students, it is not
possible for the dean to get to know more than a
fraction of the whole but she is eager to meet as many
as possible by holding regular informal gatherings with
small groups. She knows that she is a role model for
many of the women students who hope to combine a
career with family and is pleased when student events
can also involve her husband and daughter.
When asked to describe her strengths as an
administrator, Moody-Adams speaks fi rst about
leadership. “I get things done,” she says. “I like to
set goals in collaboration with other people, and
then we can work together to determine how to
accomplish them.” Faculty governance inevitably
involves committees and she likes to listen to
intelligent ideas, not to rush discussion to early
closure, but she needs to know that the expenditure
of time is making a difference.
She is also wary of those who display the “hubris of
expertise,” people who see themselves as experts in
a particular fi eld and refuse to accept that they might
learn something from others. “We all need to be open
at least to refl ection from others; I try to live like that,
as a human being and as a scholar, and I hope others
would, too.”
The quasi-cloistered life of the scholar still holds
some appeal for Moody-Adams, and she would also
like to spend time in the classroom but she knows
that “to try to do everything would be shortchanging
everybody.” After a few short months in the Dean’s
chair, she was still working out the balance among
all the demands on her time but one has the feeling
that she will make careful choices and continue
the pattern of success that has been the hallmark
of her career. ■
Somerville is delighted to announce at the time of
printing that Michele Moody-Adams has been named
an Honorary Fellow of Somerville.
Toni Coffee has been a regular contributor to
Somerville publications for fi fteen years. She divides
her time between Oxford and New York City and is
a graduate of Barnard, the women’s undergraduate
college at Columbia University, where she is a former
editor of the alumnae magazine.

24 | Somerville Magzine
The Invisible
Film Star
Tessa Ross (1980, Oriental Studies), Controller Film and
Drama, Channel 4 – and now CBE, has had a hand in
most notable British films of recent years, including The
Last King of Scotland and Slumdog Millionaire. Though
she herself avoids the limelight, the woman dubbed
‘the godmother of British film’ was delighted to answer
Somerville Magazine’s questions…

Somerville Magzine | 25
by SARA KALIM
(1990, Classics)
What went through your
head when you first heard you
were receiving your CBE?
I had to hide the letter because I thought
someone was playing a joke on me. When I
started to believe in it, I decided it was like
being made a school monitor. I thought, “Oh
good, they think I’m good enough!”
What memories do you have
of your time at Somerville and
at Oxford?
I came up as a Classicist and changed to
Chinese. I remember the Principal at the time,
Daphne Park, whom I really admired, asking
me to join her to meet a Chinese Delegation.
My Chinese was rubbish, but they were
typically polite and told her how good it was.
I felt like a fraud.
I was a theatre buff so I went to theatre every
night, directed plays and ran OUDS. I left
Oxford having learnt a lot of things, though
maybe not enough Chinese! To learn what
you love is a brilliant first step, isn’t it? I
knew I wanted to be involved in writing and
storytelling.
At what point did you decide to
pursue a career in film?
I worked in a literary agency where I was given
pretty much free rein to train and fi nd writing
talent. What I loved was sitting on the fl oor
with the writers, working on scripts. I wasn’t a
deal maker, I was a script editor.
You are Channel 4’s Controller
of Film and Drama. What does
that entail?
‘Anti-controller’ is probably the right term
for me. I’m not interested in stopping other
people making what they want. I spend a
lot of my time meeting writers and directors
and working with a tiny team, so I can do
eight fi lms at any one time. I engage
in whatever creative conversations and
processes are needed to create the right
team for each project.
What film commission for
Film4 are you proudest of?
I’m proud of them all but can only talk about
the ones people know: working with Shane
Meadows on This Is England and with Kevin
Macdonald on The Last King of Scotland, now
on The Eagle of the Ninth. Kevin combines
huge integrity with an appetite for a huge
audience. Working on Slumdog Millionaire
with Danny Boyle: he was both hugely
intellectual and big-hearted – a hero. Miranda
July, who made Me and You and Everyone We
Know: her detailed, feminine, incredibly astute
view of the world is very unusual.
And has there ever been a project
that you regret turning down?
Red Road by Andrea Arnold. We’d made
Wasp, her short fi lm that won an Oscar. We
turned down Red Road on the basis of a
diffi cult script. It’s taken me until now to work
with her again. She’s directing Wuthering
Heights this spring, and has made Film4 her
home for now – and I hope for the future.
How would an aspiring
screenwriter get his or her
script on your desk?
It’s difficult. We never look at unsolicited
manuscripts. But I work lots with young theatre
writers to develop new screenplays. It’s about
finding your voice. I’m not sure to what extent
the film writer is in control. Martin McDonagh
has control because he’s a successful enough
playwright to direct a movie (In Bruges). If
you’re a writer and you’re interested in the film
industry because you’re excited by the way
directors work then it’s about how technical
you can be, how adaptable, and you need
a producer to understand that. Finding your
voice is possibly better done in other ways in
the early stages.
It seems to be true that, while
women are television directors
and producers, they are underrepresented
in features. Do you
have an insight into why that is?
The fi lm world is still hugely chauvinistic and
the systems in place are very male-skewed.
Making a fi lm is like leading an army. The
brilliant directors are obsessed to the point
where they see nothing other than how good
their fi lm can be. It’s a diffi cult thing to direct
a fi lm.
And what do you predict for
the British film industry in
the coming years?
We need to protect our public service telly,
at Channel 4 and the BBC, where we can
still fight for quality above all else. If this
ecology is sustained within the broadcasting
industry, then the small investment in film
from both will continue to reflect the priorities
of both – different yet complementary. We
need to continue to protect talent, support
new and unknown voices and be led by the
ideas of those we trust and admire rather than
prescribing where it is we want to go. This is a
time of great change – hence an opportunity
to tell stories differently, at a different cost. Our
greatest successes have always come from the
most surprising and least derivative ideas.
If you had the chance to go back
and talk to yourself as a young
undergraduate, what golden
advice would you give yourself?
I would say to myself, what I say to young
people now, that the more true to ourselves
we are – particularly as women – the more we
can go to bed and sleep easy at night. If we’re
good at being ourselves, then we’re better at
what we do. ■
Sara Kalim originally trained as an actress but then went behind the camera to work in
television documentaries and current affairs. She started in BBC Documentaries and moved
on to the independent sector to work as Head of Development at Landmark Films and at
Quicksilver Media. She lives in Oxford with her husband and two children.

26 | Somerville Magzine
A Creative Corner
that is forever Somerville
The latest in Somerville’s long line of novelists talks about
her prestigious Orange Award for New Writers – and offers an
extract from the prizewinning novel, An Equal Stillness.
FRANCESCA KAY
(1975, English)
A Somerville
tradition
– boosting
confidence where
it may be needed,
international,
receptive to the
world.
The line of Somervillian novelists is so illustrious – Ivy
Compton-Burnett, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald to name only a
few – that to append oneself to it feels like an act of
lèse-majesté almost, or hubris. But in fact that’s what
I am, if only as someone who writes fi ction and was at
Somerville, and it gives me pride to say so.
What might it mean though, to be a Somervillian
novelist in anything other than bare fact? The roll-call
shows that more distinguishes the individual writer
than binds them as a group but I imagine that each
of them kept a corner of their creative minds that was
forever Somerville because of all that they acquired
while they were there and the confi dence it gave them
later to make their voices heard in a world where
women otherwise too often felt they must keep silent.
Like them, the main character in my novel, An Equal
Stillness, is a woman of the last century, whose great
gifts contend with life’s demands to fi nd their true
expression. She is a painter, a wife, a daughter and a
mother; there are pressures on her that there would not
be on a man.
The award I won last June is restricted to women
and therefore contentious. It is, however, available to
women writing in English anywhere, unlike most prizes,
which are restricted by geography. That seems to fi t a
Somerville tradition – boosting confi dence where it may
be needed, international, receptive to the world.
Francesca Kay grew up in South-east Asia and India
and has subsequently lived in Jamaica, the United
States, Germany and Ireland. She now lives in Oxford
with her family and works in British-Irish relations.
An Equal Stillness featured as BBC Radio 4’s Book at
Bedtime in February 2009 and has been nominated
for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize South Asia and
Europe Best First Book.
From
An Equal Stillness
by FRANCESCA KAY
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group,
London), p. 222-224, © Francesca Kay 2009
And for hour on hour she looked out of the
windows. From where she lay she could see nothing
through them but the sky. She watched as it changed
from moment to moment, as clouds drifted across it,
or birds flew, darkly silhouetted, made emblematic
through the loss of detail. In the mornings and the
evenings, a skein of clacking geese.
All her life Jennet Mallow had thought about the
sky. Thought about the colours in it and the shapes
of clouds, about the words that might describe the
colours, and the paints to show them. But this long,
unbroken contemplation of the sky was different.
On her sickbed she still wondered at the range and
richness of sky colours, from the first flickerings
of sunrise to the sunset, from palest rose to violet
through scarlet, turquoise, cobalt and vermilion,
from the cold black of a moonless night to the
streaked charcoal of an overcast one, or the ghostly
greys of the hour before dawn. When it was full,
the moon would wake her with its harsh light,
and she envisaged frightened animals caught in
its uncompromising glare. She watched the stars,
unobscured by city lights; she noticed how they
seemed to dance and fall. She watched the rain slide
over glass like beads of melting silver, she saw how
the air shimmered after rain, how clouds drooped
with the freight of water, how hazy light outlined
them with gold.
These were old observations, although she saw
them now with a new eye. An eye whose focus was
adjusted by a new sense of the finite, and with that
new sense came new perception of the converse,
of the sky’s boundlessness. There were whole days
towards the end of Jennet’s convalescence

Somerville Magzine | 27
in a prematurely wintry October when the sky
stayed stubbornly unchanging, as if tired of putting
on a perpetual show. Whole days of no colour, of
a curious static whiteness without variegation, as if
the sky were dead.
Staring out at an unchanging sky alone for hours in
a quiet house brought Jennet an epiphany. Long ago
she’d understood the beauty of finitude. She had
steadied herself to face it by renouncing pleasure,
love, by filling the expanses of her pictures with
pure whiteness. She had chosen loneliness and
told herself she must endure it as a condition of her
art. Like a hermit in a desert she had renounced
distraction, closed her eyes to the seduction of
a shifting surface with its play of movement and
colour. Now she wanted movement back.
The sky’s unending blankness was oppressive.
When Jennet closed her eyes against it, exchanging
the view out of her windows for the thin screen of
her eyelids, she watched the shapes and colours that
danced there with relief. She found that if she stared
unblinking at the windows and then closed her
eyes, their after-image would form almost at once.
Three rectangles with gentle edges, dark against a
lesser darkness; a darkness which she could change
at will by screwing her eyes tighter, or which was
changed beyond her own control by the different
intensities of light. At the brightest times the
rectangles were not dark at all but began as blocks
of light divided by a central bar. She would watch
as they developed: from fiery orange first with the
horizontal green, to a maroon, to darkest red, until
eventually the edges blurred and the blocks turned
black before they vanished.
Jennet knew that these were tricks of eye and light,
not insight. But at the same time, these colours were
consoling. They had inevitability, rightness, and
a profoundness that she could recognise but not
explain. Something about the proportions of the
image and the depth of colour. In Jennet’s extreme
lassitude they were like messages from God.

28 | Somerville Magzine
Principal’s retirement
There is
nothing like a
Dame
Fiona
As readers of this magazine will
be aware, Fiona Caldicott
steps down this year after 14
years as Principal. She has also
worked tirelessly at a university
level. Two colleagues pay
tribute to her work.

Somerville Magzine | 29
the electricity
that seems to
crackle through
the Hall when
Fiona stands up
With thanks from Somerville
by JOANNA INNES
Fiona Caldicott took over the leadership of a college
still adjusting to its new role as a mixed institution;
she leaves it a more settled and fl ourishing institution,
in good heart for the challenges of our times.
Perhaps Fiona’s resilience is her most remarkable
feature, so essential to all that she has done, and so
easily taken for granted in anyone who displays it.
She has coped with a multitude of commitments with
consistent seriousness and unfl agging determination.
But the fact that, despite all the pressures upon her,
she is always collected, always ready to reason her way
through diffi culties, and always – in my experience of
talking many things over with her – ready to laugh, if
often rather ruefully, shouldn’t be taken for granted; on
the contrary, one has to wonder how she manages it.
Five other things stand out for me about Fiona
Caldicott’s principalship. These are, fi rst, her
commitment to and interest in students, generally as
young people, but also especially as students, who
have assumed academic responsibilities which she
encourages them to take very seriously. Second, her
commitment to supporting the academic work of
Fellows, and to fi nding effective ways for the College
to function as an academic institution in a changing
local, national and international environment. Third,
her professionalism, and desire to see the College’s
fi nancial, material and administrative infrastructure
maintained and managed to high professional
standards. Fourth, her highly developed sense of the
duties of her position, and her tireless engagement
with the many and varied practical and sociable
responsibilities the principalship entails. Fifth, the
high-profi le and demanding roles she has willingly
taken on within the university.
Space doesn’t allow me to develop these themes by
more than a few vignettes. I think of the electricity that
seems to crackle through the Hall when Fiona stands
up to address, tease and adjure a packed crowd of
dining students. I think of what all tutors know is her
unstinting willingness to grapple with the problems,
academic and personal, that some students encounter:
to make time for both tutors and students in these
cases, sometimes at very short notice. She has been
consistently supportive of all efforts to disburden fellows
and tutors of tasks that can more effectively be done by
others (despite her dislike of the rhetoric of ‘burdens’:
‘burdens!’ she says; ‘these are your jobs’). She makes
it plain that she values fellows’ academic achievements,
and that she sees a role for the College in facilitating and
encouraging these. She has worked consistently over
the years with key administrative staff to develop clear
and rigorous procedures and systems of reporting, and
to promote strategic thinking about all aspects of the
College’s activities. Among her most effective moments
have been moments of crisis: it is evident how carefully
and thoroughly she thinks through the challenges that
such moments present, and how assiduous she is in
making sure that lines of action agreed are followed
through. She never hesitates to take a bull by the horns.
The university duties she has taken on could have been
a distraction, but she has never thought that there is any
part of the Principal’s job that she can properly devolve.
Her engagement with the University has enhanced her
understanding of the wider environment within which
academics and students move; we hope and believe
that what she has learned about the daily realities of life
in the university from her close knowledge of the college
setting has informed her university work generally, and
most specifi cally her work heading the Task Force on
Academic Employment. Most recently, the network of
contacts she’s developed within the governing councils
of the University and in university administration have
helped the College collaborate effectively with these
bodies in relation to our new building project on the
Radcliffe Observatory site.
It’s characteristic of Fiona that, as she prepares to
complete her term as Principal, she should have
taken on a major new challenge in the National Health
Service. Never could it be said of her that she relishes
an easy life. Nonetheless, she’s not incapable of
relaxing. Let’s hope that the future will provide her with
pleasures both at work and at play.
With thanks from Oxford
by STEPHEN GOSS
To begin at the beginning, I fi rst met Dame Fiona
at one of the College’s annual suppers for its out-ofcollege
tutors. I had been giving tutorials to Somerville
medics, as I had to medics at many other colleges,
and I was pleasantly surprised to be invited: other
colleges had never made the gesture. I was also
delighted to discover just how well informed the
Principal was about developments in the Medical
School (I suspect I need not add that I found her well
informed too about the individual progress of each
of the College’s medical students!).
This was a time when a new divisional structure
was being proposed for the University and there was
much discussion about the possible integration of
the Department of Experimental Psychology into what
would become the new Medical Sciences Division.
Given her background and the GMC’s concern that
prospective doctors should be taught the psychology
relevant to medical practice, it will be no surprise that
Dame Fiona supported the possibility. It was not much

30 | Somerville Magzine
later, when the Divisions were set up, that the colleges
had collectively to nominate a representative to each
new divisional board. Dame Fiona was the candidate
of choice as representative to Medical Sciences, an
excellent outcome. Wearing my college hat, I could see
that she understood and would defend the interests of
colleges, and looking from the Medical School, it was
equally clear that she understood the requirements of
education for the profession.
In no time at all, the division sought to make best use
of Dame Fiona’s knowledge and expertise by asking
her to take on the chairmanship of its Education
Committee. This followed immediately on a period of
massive expansion in the intake to the conventional
medical course, and the new ‘fast-track’ course by
which graduates could qualify as doctors was being
introduced. At the time, I was Director of Pre-clinical
Studies for the Medical School, and I could not have
hoped for a better source of support and political
wisdom. She was always open to new ideas in
education, she expected them to be properly backedup
with argument and documentation, and she always
kept a close eye on what change might mean for the
students and the staff as individuals.
I could not have hoped for a better
source of support and political wisdom
The creation of the Divisions in 2000 brought also the
establishment of a new senior committee, with a wide
remit referring to the employment and development
of all university staff, the Personnel Committee. Dame
Fiona was asked to chair it. The Personnel Committee
rapidly began to play an increasingly central role in the
University’s planning and management, a change which
was acknowledged in 2005, when Dame Fiona was
made Pro-Vice Chancellor for Personnel.
Dame Fiona had a considerable command of personnel
issues from her time in the Health Service, and her
experience at Somerville and in the Medical Division.
She was excellently placed then to lead the ‘Task
Force on Academic Employment’, a review body that
has examined academic employment in the collegiate
university with great care over a period of fi ve years.
This is an area of some sensitivity: it can only be said
that Dame Fiona’s considerable judgment and skill
have been essential in charting a passage through
deep and sometimes turbulent waters. Her approach,
characterised by patient, consultative working aimed at
fi nding consensus has earned her widespread respect.
The proper care of research staff, who are often
employed on relatively short contracts, has been
another major concern for Dame Fiona in her role
as Pro-Vice Chancellor. Under her guidance, a new
Code of Practice was developed last year and is now
being introduced. Equally, our non-academic staff
have received her attention: the University depends
heavily on its administrative and support staff, its
librarians, technicians and IT staff, its fi nancial
experts and lawyers, its maintenance and estates
staff, its secretaries, and so on. Dame Fiona and the
Personnel Committee have overseen the introduction
of new pay and grading scales, and the creation
and implementation of the University’s fi rst Human
Resources Policy.
Increasingly, she has focused on promoting equality
and diversity in all areas, a development in her role
that was recognised in 2008 by renaming her portfolio
(she became Pro-Vice Chancellor for Personnel and
Equality). In this context, she has been a strong
supporter of the consideration of gender issues and
an enthusiastic promoter of training programmes
aimed at helping women to develop the confi dence
to move to positions of greater responsibility. I have
seen all this at fi rst hand since standing down from
my position in the pre-clinical school and joining the
Personnel Committee fi rst as Proctor and then as
Director of the Learning Institute.
As I write, we have come to Dame Fiona’s fi nal year
as Principal of Somerville. In Michalemas Term,
2009, she chaired her last meeting of the Personnel
Committee having resigned as Pro-Vice Chancellor
in order to take on the chairmanship of the Oxford
Radcliffe Hospitals Trust. The word ‘retirement’ does
not fi gure anywhere, and, as she moves on, the
University’s loss will be the hospitals’ gain.
Her work for the University has been undertaken with
sensitivity, a willingness to listen, and a keenness to
understand the position that other people are taking –
all these I see as manifestations of the humanity that
she has brought to her work. It is clear that she has
given the University exceptional service through her
energy and hard work, through her wisdom and clarity
of thought and her sense of purpose, but I think that,
above all it is this humanity which has been the key.
And for all this, the University is greatly in her debt.
Joanna Innes this year completes her 28th year as
a history tutor in the College: Dame Fiona has been
Principal during half her years at Somerville. Joanna is
currently serving as Vice Principal, and working closely
with the Principal in that role. Dr Stephen Goss is
Director of the Oxford Learning Institute.

Somerville Magzine | 31
The Caldicott Appeal
Help us to continue a tradition
of medical excellence at Somerville
In order to mark our appreciation and admiration for Dame Fiona
Caldicott on the eve of her departure from Somerville, we would like
to invite you to contribute to a project named in her honour.
This project, which is dear to Fiona’s heart, is a Caldicott Bursary for
the support of Clinical Medical Students at Somerville.
Medicine has been transformed at Somerville
since Dame Fiona took up her post in
1996. Whilst Somerville has always had a rich
scientific and medical tradition, the last 14 years have
seen a transformation in the way medical students are
selected, taught and trained within a highly stimulating,
professional collegiate environment. As a result,
Somerville is one of the three leading Oxford colleges for
medicine and for clinical medicine in particular, as our
outstanding students and recent results testify.
Medicine is a long and demanding course, and in
particular it is financially demanding for all our clinical
students who have already completed undergraduate
degrees. In order to attract the very best students,
irrespective of background and financial resources, it is
essential to offer financial support. If we are able to raise
£50,000 for a Caldicott Bursary, this would enable us to
give substantial help to one medical student every year.
Two major developments have allowed Somerville to
expand the numbers of clinical students in College under
Fiona’s leadership – allowing us to retain many of our
excellent undergraduates. The first, was the association of
the new May Professorship of Medicine with Somerville,
and the appointment of Professor Rajesh Thakker to
this Chair to lead the development of clinical medicine
at Somerville. The second, was the College’s pioneering
commitment to expanding access to medicine to as wide
a range of students as possible through the accelerated
4 year graduate entry course which is now in its 8th
very successful year. Dame Fiona has been a vigorous
supporter of the fundraising efforts required to sustain
and develop this very active college community which
now numbers some 36 medical students, four Fellows
and numerous preclinical and clinical tutors. There is
no doubt that very little of the above could have been
achieved in such a short time without Dame Fiona’s
vision, energy and support.
With the establishment of at Caldicott Bursary, we would
like to honor Dame Fiona’s tremendous contributions to
medical education by supporting talented medical students
in financial need. About 50% of students applying to
Somerville come from state schools and the College is
keen to ensure that we can maintain and even increase
this proportion. Somerville supports one in four of its
students with some form of financial aid, making it one
of the leading colleges in Oxford to offer this level of help.
However, the need for bursaries for medical students is
great and there are many more talented applicants in
financial need than we can currently support.
In light of the future demands for medical graduates in the
clinical areas we are asking you to support the Caldicott
Bursary Fund. The establishment of a Caldicott Bursary
would enable the College to continue our visionary strategy
for offering outstanding students access to a world leading
education in clinical medicine on a needs-blind basis.
We are delighted to honour Dame Fiona’s distinguished
medical career in this way and to mark our appreciation
of her achievements as she retires as Principal of
Somerville this year. We hope you will help to support
clinical students at Somerville by making a gift on the
enclosed gift form. Your gift and the support that it
conveys will be greatly appreciated by all at Somerville.
With warm wishes,
Harriet Maunsell (Dawes, 1962, PPE)
Chair, Somerville Development Board
Jenny Wright (Allan, 1968, History)
Chair, Somerville Medics’ Committee

32 | Somerville Magzine
Rooms
ROBERT
with a view
FRANKLIN
The new buildings are poised to have a
transformational effect on College. Meet Niall
McLaughlin, the architect of Somerville’s future…
by Robert Franklin
Image of the proposed new
Student Accommodation Buildings,
as seen from the East West Link
by Niall McLaughlin Architects.
Inset: Niall McLaughlin

Somerville Magzine | 33
There has, naturally, been a
great deal of interest in the new
buildings which are to be erected on
the Northern boundary of the College, which
is the Southern perimeter of the Radcliffe
Observatory Quarter (the ROQ). So, in early
November, I talked to Niall McLaughlin about
them, in order to gain a clearer idea of their
form, their purpose, and the architectural
thinking behind them.
There will be two residential buildings,
providing accommodation for students and
academics, and a third which will contain
teaching rooms and an extension to the
Library. Niall explained that his brief was to
fi nd a form for them which would extend the
College outwards, joining it to what will be a
very important new entity within the City of
Oxford, and at the same time link back fi rmly
to the existing College buildings.
Although the exact form of the buildings
on the ROQ site is not yet known, Niall has
made sensible guesses about it, and has
also taken his cue from a number of existing
listed buildings along the line of the east-west
route which will run immediately to the north
of the new Somerville building, including the
Outpatients’ Building and the main block of
the old Infi rmary Building, and the portico of
the Oxford University Press to the West. He
has aimed to give the new route what he calls
an episodic, accretive structure. This will echo
older street patterns in Oxford, where narrow
vistas are closed by a gable or a minor point of
interest, but the street direction changes when
that point is reached, leading the spectator
on and unfolding like a dramatic narrative.
In particular, the stair towers of the new
residential buildings will refl ect the typology
which he perceives in very many Oxford
quadrangles, of basically horizontal buildings
interrupted by vertical accents, not necessarily
at their extremities. As he says “Looking at
the city and what it’s giving us, we made a
grammar of vertical projections, beginning
with the most modest and going right up to
the spires, and tried to understand where
what we’re doing sits within that”.
Also, he is very eager to integrate the new
buildings with the seam of brickwork which
crosses north Oxford. The wall at the lower
level will have a feeling of real substance
about it, and will lead the eye both along
the route and back into the main spaces
of the College. It will bind together other
elements of the buildings which are expressed
structurally. Niall likes the “little shifts and
shimmies” which this kind of design creates,
and looks forward to lovely diagonal views of
the Radcliffe Observatory itself and the Press.
In many ways his taste for unexpected views
and spaces is reminiscent of Hawksmoor, one
of the greatest architects who have worked in
Oxford and one of Niall’s heroes.
He has put a very great deal of thought into
the form of the residential rooms themselves.
The exigencies of the site require them all to
be north-facing, and, at first sight, that might
present a problem. But, as Niall points out, the
expectation that such rooms will be southfacing
is a relatively modern one. In Victorian
architecture views of sunlight seen from the
shade were valued as much as views of shade
seen from sunlit rooms. In any case, by giving
the rooms projecting windows Niall has ensured
they will catch as much sun as possible,
especially in the morning and evening.
It’s as though the College
was a room that’s making
a new window.
The projecting window embrasures will also
have aesthetic advantages, from two distinct
points of view. They are one of the features of
the new buildings which will link back towards
the existing College buildings, especially
Wolfson and Park. The building will be, as Niall
says, “...something like a chest of drawers,
where each room is expressed very clearly and
given its own identity”. Also, they will be given
solid and well-carpentered bespoke timber
frames, which will be beautiful in themselves,
and also provide variety of texture for the
buildings as a whole. Niall claims Louis Kahn
as one of his principal inspirations and rejoices
in bringing back to England the delight in fine
timbering which Kahn gained from his visits to
this country. The stair-towers, too, will have oak
ceilings in their glazed upper storeys, creating
warmly-lit features when seen from without.
The plan of the rooms has been equally
carefully calculated, as well as their disposition
within the buildings. Each room will, effectively,
have two different areas. The window area will
allow students to look out, and, in a sense, take
part in the life of the street below. But behind
that there will be an area with a deep reveal,
almost a withdrawing room in the true sense of
the word, which will offer a greater degree of
privacy. The main entrance to the residential
rooms is going to be from the gateway, which
opens out on to the North-South route. So
they will be entered from within the College.
However, this entails quite long corridors –
these will be broken up into slightly smaller
ranges by kitchens, common-rooms, and other
non-residential spaces.
Provision has been made for disabled students
by having level access from the remainder of
the College, and by specific design features
in a designated set of accessible rooms,
which have been kept close to the lift. As the
number of disabled students in the University
is increasing steadily, and their needs are often
complex, this is a particularly valuable feature
of the project, though the need for level access
does mean that the roofline of the new building
will be visible above the library from the main
path in the quad.
Inevitably, in times of stringency, there has
been a need for economy. As Niall says “Cost
is always important, and in a good project the
conversation with the client about cost is a
reasonable one, which it has been here. There
are relatively scarce means, but people want to
do a very good job. We’ve been careful about
cost where necessary, but when it’s appropriate,
we’ve spent money on decent things.”
His aim has been to design not “look at me”
buildings, but buildings which are “quiet in a
positive way, and substantial, and which speak
in a very simple way about what they do, which
is that they’re rooms and windows overlooking
streets in the City.” The windows have a broader
meaning. “The important thing about this
building, more than anything else, is that it’s going
to open Somerville College out, to what will be a
very important new part of the City of Oxford, and
it’s going to put Somerville College effectively at
the centre. It’s almost making a new window, it’s
as though the College was a room that’s making
a new window, a window that’s overlooking a very
important part of the City.”
Niall is a thoughtful architect, and these are
thoughtful buildings.
Robert Franklin is a lecturer in
Architectural History at the Oxford
University Department of Continuing
Education. He is married to Pauline
Adams (1962, History), Emeritus Fellow
and former librarian at Somerville.

34 | Somerville Magzine
The Somerville Campaign:
Your chance to make a difference
In the summer of 2009, Somerville College launched an ambitious £25 million
fundraising campaign to secure the future of a pioneering institution. The response
from alumni and friends has been overwhelming…but there is still a long way to go.
Artists impression of a
corridor in one of the new
Student Accommodation
Blocks, with Donor Plaque
outside each bedroom door by
Niall McLaughlin Architects
JULIE HAGE
Head of Development
Julie Hage became
Somerville’s Head of
Development in September
2009. She studied the
history of ideas at
universities in Denmark
and France, and has an
MA from the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. She has
previously worked in
policy development and
fundraising at UNESCO’s
World Heritage Centre in
Paris, the Danish Ministry
for Culture and the
National Museum of
Denmark. Most recently
she worked for the
University of Aberdeen’s
£150 million campaign.
If you would like to hear
more about the Campaign,
please contact Julie on
julie.hage@some.ox.ac.uk
or 01865 280596.
gifts of all sizes
from Somervillians
of all ages have
a great impact
Somerville may have some exceptional alumni – like
Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi and Dorothy
Hodgkin. Yet what really makes this place special is
less the exception than the rule: the ‘ordinary’ Somervillians
who have given the College such extraordinary support over
the years. It was this long tradition of support from alumni
and friends that gave Somerville the confi dence to launch a
major new campaign last year.
The simple fact is that Oxford’s unique tutorial system and
collegiate structure are expensive to maintain. No college
can rely on state funding, combined with fees, to balance its
books every year – let alone for capital projects. And, while
other Oxford colleges have vast endowment funds swelled
by several hundred years of investment, Somerville relies
on the generosity of its former students, supplemented by
income from a modest endowment.
The Somerville Campaign has three vital priorities. First, there
is student support. We are proud that the College has one of
Oxford’s highest percentages of students receiving bursaries
(26% in 2008–09). However, if we are to continue to compete
for talent in these times of increasing student hardship,
funding must increase. Second there are academic and
teaching posts. The shortfall in Fellowship funding currently
stands at over £500,000 a year, the equivalent of income from
a £15 million endowment. Support for fellowships is therefore
vital to the College’s future. Third – and most pressing – are
our plans for new student accommodation on the Radcliffe
Observatory Quarter (ROQ) site, which will become the hub of
Campaign figures
Overall Target
Total reached to date
Target for new buildings
£25 million
£13 million
£2 million by
September 2011
Total raised for new buildings £550,000
Total number of donors
to the Campaign
1500
the University of Oxford, with new central offices and buildings
for Humanities and Mathematics. We are fortunate that it is
right next door to Somerville.
With our two new buildings (see page 32), Somerville will be
able to house all of its undergraduates throughout their studies.
On an individual level, the new facilities will ease financial
burdens and enable resident students to feel part of a thriving
academic community. On a College level, the accommodation
will help us to attract students and raise academic standards
yet further – while the 68 new en-suite rooms will bring in vital
income from conferences during vacations.
The total project cost of £11 million will be partially met
through loans and by selling property, but at least £2 million
needs to be raised from philanthropy by the end of the next
academic year. Alumni and friends have already responded
with generous contributions, and more than £550,000 has
been raised for the new buildings. We hope our innovative
designs for donor recognition will inspire many other
individuals and groups to give generously, following the
example of the class of 1959 (see page 6).
Currently, around 13% of Somervillians give to their former
College. This is very respectable in UK terms. However,
in certain US institutions more than 60% of alumni give
regular support. So Somerville still has great potential to
improve. As the recent telephone appeal showed (see page
4), gifts of all sizes from Somervillians of all ages have a
great impact. Two graduates of 1989 and 1990 have also
shown great initiative in producing a recent Campaign
mailing to enlist support for the new buildings.
So far, our total is over half way to the overall target. The
£13 million raised to date is the result of more than 1,500
donations from alumni and friends. It tells a very important
story about a dedicated community of donors and a highly
developed culture of giving. Yet there is a long way to go.
Every week, the newspaper headlines about falling university
funding make our endeavour seem all the more urgent.
Ultimately, to secure Somerville’s future, it will be necessary
to reach out to alumni of all ages to engage them in support
of College priorities. The fi nal goal is thus not just to exceed
the target of £25 million, but to build a culture of giving
which will secure the College’s future for decades to come.

Somerville Magzine | 35
The gift of education
Inspired by Margaret Thatcher, an entrepreneur with no
previous Somerville connection is generously funding graduate
scholarships at Somerville.
“S
he stood by her beliefs, carrying her
decisions all the way through” says Lord
Harris of Peckham admiringly of Baroness
Thatcher. This typically Somervillian trait could equally
be ascribed to Lord Harris, a dyslexic south London
schoolboy turned multimillionaire benefactor. Instead
of completing his education, he took over the family
business when his father died, giving up his dream of
becoming a professional footballer. Over half a century
later he is generously supporting students at the highest
academic levels, by funding Somerville’s three new
Thatcher Scholarships for the next ten years.
In 1957, 15 year-old Philip Harris found himself running
three carpet shops. With the determination and leadership
skills practised on the football field, he turned a small
family business into the 1,700-store Harris Queensway
group, which he eventually sold for £450 million. After 31
years of work, his £67 million share of the proceeds might
have been reward enough. But two months later he began
again. Focussing on what he knew, Lord Harris established
Carpetright, which now sells 20% of all UK floor coverings.
By a strange twist of fate his new company was floated in
the same month that his old one collapsed.
Despite over 50 years in the retail business, Lord
Harris has not lost his enthusiasm for carpets. On the
morning I interviewed him, he had dashed down to the
warehouse and had to be located amongst the rolls. But
we talked mainly about his support for education, which
he believes is the key to social change: “It gives bright
kids who lack opportunities a chance in life. It’s about
motivation. You instil motivation by making a child want
to come to school, and then make him want to learn.”
Lord Harris believes that everyone should be given the
encouragement to succeed. He sponsors the Harris
Federation of South London Schools, an educational
foundation that now runs nine City Academies, seven
specialist and four primary schools, teaching 20,000
children. Rather than huge investments in new buildings
and equipment, the Federation concentrates on uniform,
discipline and rewards, and encourages sport. But most
important is a firm belief that the children can succeed.
The results are impressive. From failing, undersubscribed
schools, four of the six academies inspected have been
judged outstanding by Ofsted. One went from inadequate
to outstanding in two years. Examination results are steadily
improving and the schools are vastly oversubscribed. These
results have been achieved without selective entrance, and
the pupils are certainly not privileged: 43% get free school
meals and 20% cannot read or write when they arrive.
The link with Somerville becomes more obvious when Lord
Harris talks about his ambitions for these children. He wants
to send three-quarters of sixth form students to university.
As usual, he has invested his time and money in seeing
this through, building links with Oriel, and Lucy Cavendish
College in Cambridge. He also supports Harris Manchester
College, which became part of Oxford University in 1990
and focuses on mature students to provide higher education
for those traditionally excluded from it.
“Somerville’s ethos has always been to improve access
to non-traditional backgrounds and to make the college
more approachable,” says Dame Fiona Caldicott.
“Somerville has one of the largest proportions of students
on student bursaries.” Australian Robert Simpson is
one of them. He is reading for a DPhil in philosophy,
researching contemporary free speech issues and liberal
multiculturalism. For him, the scholarship means the
chance to study outside Australia. “As a recipient of the
Thatcher scholarship, I have an opportunity to work in one
of the best centres for philosophy and political studies in
the world. I feel very lucky to be here, working in such an
intellectually rich environment, and this would not have
been possible without the Thatcher scholarship.”
Talented young academics are essential to the future of a
thriving international academic community, but student
bursaries may not be enough. Competition from wealthier
institutions is tough. The first three Thatcher Graduate
Scholars have impressed Lord Harris already with their
willingness to listen and learn. With bursaries like these,
Somerville can continue to provide a springboard for
outstanding academics like Dorothy Hodgkin, who went
on to tutor a certain Margaret Roberts. And we all know
what became of her.
CLARE HOWARTH
(Latham, 1985, PPE)
It gives bright
kids who lack
opportunities a
chance in life
(l – r)
Oliver Gregory
(2009, MSt candidate in
English 1780 – 1900),
Franziska Maria Hack
(2009, DPhil candidate in
General Linguistics and
Comparative Philology),
Lord Harris of Peckham,
Robert Simpson
(2009, DPhil candidate in
Philosophy)

Alumni Events 2010
For the latest information on events please visit
the College website www.some.ox.ac.uk
All events are in College unless otherwise stated.
For further details please contact Liz Cooke
at elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk or
telephone 01865 270632.
Somerville and its alumni volunteers run a wide range
of events and activities to help Somervillians keep in
touch with each other and with the College. We hope
to welcome you to one of our events this year.
If you have feedback on our existing events or
would like to suggest a new event, please contact:
the Development and Alumni Relations Offi ce
telephone 01865 280626
email development.offi ce@some.ox.ac.uk
June
12 Commemoration Service
19 Garden Party: All Somervillians and their families welcome
26 Somervillians in the north: Luncheon in York
July
2 - 4 Gaudy for 1994 – 2006: Principal’s farewell Gaudy
September
18 1965 Reunion Luncheon - tbc
20 - 21 1960 Golden Reunion
24 - 26 Oxford University Alumni Weekend
November
13 Literary Luncheon:
Speaker Ms Jane Robinson (1978, English), author of
Bluestockings:The Remarkable Story of the First Women
to Fight for an Education
20 Media Network Day