Univ Record 2017

Music and drama flourished. The Univ Players’ annual Garden production – Under
Milk Wood – was resourcefully converted into the Chapel Play in the face of foul weather,
and demonstrated a capacity for improvisation that matched their thespian talents. The
arrival of Giles Underwood as our Director of Music three years ago has ushered in
a welcome revival of music making in the College. Univ musicians played alongside
professionals in concerts given by the Martlets Ensemble and Univ singers performed
with professionals in the first concert given by the newly formed Martlets Voices. The
Chapel Choir released Dayspring Bright, a CD of Advent Carols, and more CDs are
planned for the future. This one will give special pleasure to all who attended Sunday
Choral Evensong as students or who have come to the Advent Carol Services in the
Chapel on the first Saturday of December. The highlight of the College’s musical
calendar was the College Choir’s visit to Florence, where, with the invaluable help and
encouragement of William fforde (1975, Classics) and Cecile Bosc they performed a
varied programme in Florentine churches, a dinner club and the Palazzo Lanfredi in
front of an audience including HRH Camilla, Duchess of Cambridge.
At the end of the academic year two of the College’s senior Fellows retired; in
both cases their departure is a reminder of how fortunate the College has been in its
senior appointments in recent years. Professor Frank Arntzenius, a Tutorial Fellow in
Philosophy, retired to devote himself, characteristically, to the voluntary sector. He
has been a dedicated and stimulating tutor for our philosophy undergraduates and a
thoughtful and selfless colleague among the Fellowship.
Frank Marshall has stepped down after 15 years’ stewardship of the College’s
finances. He arrived in 2002 from the investment house Schroders as the College’s first
professional Estates Bursar. At the time the College was well on the way to recovery
from its deep financial difficulties in the 1970s. He oversaw a return to robust financial
health, by benign but firm management of the budget, careful attendance to the needs
of the Estate (assisted by Richard Pye, the College Surveyor, who has also retired) and
a consistently successful record of investment of the endowment. He has presided over
a steady expansion and modernisation of the College’s estate and deftly masterminded
the complicated and protracted negotiations for the acquisition of the strategic Fairfield
site in north Oxford. As the tomb at St Paul’s says of Christopher Wren, Si monumentum
requiris, circumspice – If you are seeking his monument, look around you.
Members and visitors who have looked around the Hall since March will have
noticed a change. Hanging beneath the great painted portraits of the College’s past
prime ministers, bishops, judges and Masters is the Young Univ Gallery, forty-eight
photographic portraits of a cross-section of the College’s recent leavers, all under 35.
They demonstrate to our current students, as the large portraits cannot, that Univ
undergraduates and graduates came to College from a remarkably wide range of milieus
and left a few years later on an equally rich diversity of pathways. As one studies the
portraits and returns the subjects’ steady gaze at the camera, one notices what they share
in common: a confidence to take on the challenges of the world they have entered.
Fellows and Staff
Sir Ivor Crewe
4
5