̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - travel

Cambridge-led team developing a simulator to help reach net zero flight

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��simulator will capture the whole aviation sector, from the sources of renewable electricity and raw materials to the production and transport of fuel, and the introduction of new aircraft technologies and operations. Leaders in industry and government will gain an understanding of the potential for change and the trade-offs between decisions. ̽��ֱ��simulator will guide innovation, investment and policy action, and provide educational benefits.

̽��ֱ��AIA is led by the Whittle Laboratory and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). “Achieving an aviation sector with no climate impact is one of society’s biggest challenges,” said Professor Rob Miller, Director of the Whittle Laboratory and co-lead of the project. “Solving it will require a complex combination of technology, business, human behaviour and policy. We have assembled a world-class team of academics and industry experts to take on this challenge.”

Users of the simulator will be able to simulate future scenarios to 2050 and calculate the resource requirements, such as renewable electricity and land use, the climate impact, both CO₂ and non-CO₂, and the cost of flying.

Options include the type of energy used, such as hydrogen, batteries and a range of sustainable aviation fuels, the type of aircraft and aircraft technologies, the way in which aircraft are operated, and the value judgments made by the public and government. ̽��ֱ��simulator will take a whole system approach – from the source of the electricity to the methods of fuel production and transport – to the passenger journey.

“International travel helps people and societies connect,” said Clare Shine, Director of CISL. “To retain this opportunity for future generations, we must urgently address aviation’s environmental impact as part of systemic decarbonisation of the economy. This calls for imaginative and inclusive innovation, which is why the Aviation Impact Accelerator brings together insight from industry, policy and civil society.”

̽��ֱ��AIA team also includes the Air Transportation Systems Lab at ̽��ֱ�� College London and the Melbourne Energy Institute at the ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne. ̽��ֱ��AIA is in partnership with HRH ̽��ֱ��Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, ̽��ֱ��World Economic Forum, Cambridge Zero, MathWorks and SATAVIA, and is supported by industry advisors Rolls-Royce, Boeing, BP, Heathrow and Siemens Energy.

“ ̽��ֱ��transition to a zero-carbon future requires a bold response to climate change,” said Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero. “ ̽��ֱ��Aviation Impact Accelerator is such a bold response, bringing together multidisciplinary expertise to inform decision making and enable meaningful change.”

̽��ֱ��simulator was conceived in early 2020 at a roundtable hosted by HRH ̽��ֱ��Prince of Wales and attended by senior industry leaders, government and academia.

“ ̽��ֱ��Aviation Impact Accelerator will play a vital role in highlighting the action required to achieve net zero aviation and support Heathrow to ensure 2019 is our year of ‘peak carbon’,” said John Holland-Kaye, CEO of Heathrow Airport. “ ̽��ֱ��first priority is accelerated use of sustainable aviation fuel. Government can act to unlock SAF through a mandate stimulating supply, plus incentives to drive demand. ̽��ֱ��prize is a new British growth industry and UK leadership in the race to net zero.”

̽��ֱ��official launch of the Aviation Impact Accelerator will take place at COP26 in November.

Adapted from a CISL news story.

̽��ֱ�� announces launch of Aviation Impact Accelerator (AIA) – a team of experts in aerospace, economics, policy, and climate science, who are building an interactive simulator to help achieve net zero flight.

Achieving an aviation sector with no climate impact is one of society’s biggest challenges: solving it will require a complex combination of technology, business, human behaviour and policy

Rob Miller

Photo by Pascal Meier on Unsplash

Plane landing in Zurich

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Opinion: Uber should take its lead from Thomas Cook’s battle with Victorian Britain

Anonymous — Thu, 19 May 2016 00:15:26 +0000

App-based ride company Uber has been battling the “establishment” around the world, from traditional black taxi drivers in London to regulators in Australia. But Uber is far from the first upstart travel company to rock the status quo. More than 150 years ago, in Victorian Britain, the Thomas Cook travel agency faced vilification before skilfully winning over its critics.

So how did the original travel disruptor pull it off? ̽��ֱ��circumstances behind the rise of both companies are vastly different, but there are lessons in the way a former cabinet maker and temperance preacher navigated his company from outcast to mainstream in about 15 years, not only by dulling criticism, but by actually winning the public over to his side.

Having started from modest beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Cook’s travel agency brought continental European travel to the middle classes through what we now call package holidays. This enraged the elite, who indulged in “Grand Tours” of European capitals that often lasted months, and who called themselves “travellers” rather than mere “tourists”.

Leading newspapers condemned Thomas Cook as an “unscrupulous man” and branded his customers “barbarian hordes”. They were cheered on by an upper crust who worried about pristine attractions being overrun by people who were, according to Blackwood’s Magazine, “low-bred, vulgar and ridiculous”.

Fighting Fear

Thomas Cook refused to be vilified, and effectively fought back against this scaremongering by defending both his business model and his customers in a manner that was steely but not abrasive. He was unapologetic about his activities and set out to show that they were far from harmful to British society.

Cook used his monthly journal, ̽��ֱ��Excursionist, to depict his opponents as a “misguided minority” who lacked “genuine nobility” because they sought to deny other people a form of cultural enrichment. He said his tours helped to improve peaceful global relations through closer contact among nations. And Cook argued that his tours allowed respected but poorly paid professions, such as clergy and teachers, to travel abroad:

There is no class of men to whom a good tour could be more beneficial than to hard-working ministers.

He also adopted some of the practices of the “Grand Tours” – including offering greater freedom to customers by allowing them to check into hotels individually rather than as a group.

Steadily and rapidly, the “stigma” and bad press attached to Thomas Cook and his customers evaporated. In return, Cook helped the media by providing valuable news tips – gleaned from his customers – about countries that seem so close now, but were then so far away.

So just a decade after the Daily News condemned Cook’s “swarm of followers” and “barbarian hordes”, the newspaper batted down rumours that the Danube had been closed to passenger traffic by reporting:

Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son have received the following telegraphic reply: ‘Danube route open. No fear of its being closed.’

Before long, newspapers began praising Cook for offering “invaluable services” and joining the ranks of public benefactors.

Turning Enemies into Allies

Today’s disruptors, of course, don’t face identical challenges to those handled so deftly by the arriviste Thomas Cook. Not all of Cook’s tactics will transfer successfully to the internet age. Yet we’ve already seen some recent moves that have echoes of those used by Cook a century and a half ago.

This month, Uber appointed former EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes as an advisor to work more closely with governments around the world to advance its arguments. Thomas Cook, sought support from high places, too; his son John even organised a package tour of the Holy Land for Prince Edward and Prince George.

In another echo of Cook, Uber argues that its service brings simplicity and democratisation to a highly structured system that served a privileged few. Previously, a limited number of licensed taxi drivers and people lucky enough to find a cab in a downpour could prosper; now many drivers and customers can, in theory, benefit from more choice and competition. Like Cook, Uber could try to be more collaborative, too; to present its services as an innovative alternative to licensed taxis rather than their replacement. An Uber that is part of a complementary taxi ecosystem will combat the image that it presents a mortal threat to the black cabs of London or the yellow taxis of New York.

Thomas Cook is now listed on the London Stock Exchange, and is part of the FTSE 250 index as one of Britain’s largest companies. It has become part of the establishment it once challenged. In the end, that kind of success boils down to staying power. After successfully shedding its stigma, Thomas Cook was able to show good long-term value for money, and Uber will need to do the same.

Uber already has taken some steps towards fostering a gentler image, using its ride sharing service to donate clothes for refugees, and suspending surge pricing during a big US snowstorm early this year. If the stigma is to be entirely removed, Uber probably needs to offer a convincing answer to criticism of that system, which allows fares to skyrocket during periods of peak demand in what some see as a grave exploitation of customers.

Just seven years after it was founded in San Francisco, Uber’s history is still being written. But there is an intriguing parallel with the journey of Thomas Cook and his once-upstart travel agency, and it is now playing out with a new high-profile disruptor in a new century.

Christian Hampel, PhD candidate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Christian Hampel (Cambridge Judge Business School) discusses Thomas Cook travel agency's battle with Victorian Britain's status quo.

Asim Bharwani

Hailing in the city

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��adventures of Sir Kenelm Digby: 17th-century pirate, philosopher and foodie

amb206 — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 09:00:33 +0000

On 7 January 1628, a fleet of ships weighed anchor off the coast of Kent and set sail for the Mediterranean. As fleets go, this one was small. It comprised just two vessels – the Eagle and the Elizabeth and George – fitted out for war. Aboard were around 250 men, overseen by carefully selected mariners, and some 200 barrels of gunpowder imported from Amsterdam. ̽��ֱ��mission of crew and captains was simple: to vanquish England’s enemies and return laden with prizes.

In command of the two vessels was 24-year-old Kenelm Digby, a man whose naval experience was slight. His seafaring was confined to being a passenger but Digby was a believer in the power of books, and he had just the right volume in his pocket. From a stall in London’s St Pauls’ churchyard, he had purchased John Smith’s A Sea-Grammar. If nothing else, it provided a guide to the wonderful terminology of seafaring with its belays, bonits and Drablers – and Digby was a fast learner.

Digby was a man of many parts: he was a privateer (or state-sponsored pirate), compiler of recipes, assimilator of foreign tongues (“a great student of the Arabicke language”), collector of objects (antiquities of every kind), thinker and doer. In his extensive writing, and experiments in kitchens and laboratories, he embraced philosophy and alchemy, science and magic, food and flavours.

On his death aged 62 in 1665, Digby left behind a library of several thousand books, countless letters and journals, and a fictionalised account of his adventures in elaborately flowery style. On the Greek island of Milos, scribbling furiously and barely eating for a week, he wrote Loose Fantasies, recasting himself as a romance hero in the shape of Theagenes, a character lifted from classical literature.

Drawing these sources together, Joe Moshenka (Faculty of English) has produced a masterful narrative – a blend of biography, history and imaginative reconstruction – that focuses in gripping detail on Digby’s foray into the cultural melting pot of the Mediterranean world. A Stain in the Blood: the Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby is the first book to dig deep into the story of an adventurer who, quintessentially English yet endlessly curious, personifies an era when seafaring was opening up routes into boundless possibilities and exotic goods of every shape and form.

Sailing south in January 1628, Digby left behind a beloved wife and two sons, the youngest just a few weeks old. He was a man on the make. Despite being well-connected and highly educated, he had a black mark against his name. His father, Everard Digby, had been hung for treason against the crown. Revealed to be a co-conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, Everard was subjected to the most grisly of executions. In front of approving crowds, his heart was ripped out and his genitals sliced off.

Everard Digby maintained his dignity right up to the moment he lost consciousness. He professed that he “deserved the vilest death” and made an impassioned plea that wife and sons not be punished for his crime. Everard’s fortitude became legendary but his family lived with a sense of disgrace. ̽��ֱ��blood stain in the title of Moshenska’s book is a reference to a wound cut deep into a man with an extraordinary thirst for knowledge and experiences.

Seventeenth century England was layered in complexity. Raised as a gentleman and a Roman Catholic in a country that had officially broken its ties with Rome, Kenelm Digby learned early on to tread a delicate line between faith, politics and expediency. As a practising Catholic student at Oxford, he was unable to “weare a gowne” (matriculate) and each November endured the bonfire celebrations that reminded him of his father’s death. But Digby had friends in high places and the means to travel.

Trips to Europe, the first when he was aged just 14, helped Digby to develop the worldly ease and diplomatic skills so vital to him later in life. In Italy, his nimble mind won admiration in philosophical debates. In France, his handsomeness gained the (embarrassing) attention from the older and powerful Queen Regent. Visiting Spain, he socialised with the future Charles I – and became dangerously entangled in negotiations for a royal marriage bringing two disparate nations together.

̽��ֱ��single voyage that allowed Digby to establish himself as a loyal subject was almost derailed by those who sought to discredit him as papist. ̽��ֱ��1620s saw England engaged in an expensive war with its Roman Catholic neighbours. When he finally got the commission he sought from the king, it gave him permission to sail wherever he chose and to take as prizes any ships belonging to enemies of England. He was empowered to undertake any action “tending to the service of the realm and the increase of his knowledge”.

A conveniently vague brief was just what Digby needed. Entering the Mediterranean, he moved dizzyingly from adventure to adventure. Half his crew perished from a “violent pestilential disease” which erupted at ghastly speed. Forced to put in at Algiers, his filthy ships were scoured and replacement crew recruited. Digby hobnobbed with local dignitaries, and feasted on partridges and “Melons of marveilous goodnesse”. Ever mindful of his reputation, he negotiated the freedom of 50 English slaves, some of the many Europeans incarcerated in warehouses filled with human chattels.

Digby’s big moment came when he reached the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean. In the Bay of Scanderoon, gateway to the city of Aleppo, he surprised fleets of Venetian and French ships in an audacious attack. ̽��ֱ��famously agile Venetian galleases (which were guarding French ships laden with pieces of eight) were forced to admit defeat. ̽��ֱ��French hurriedly ferried their cargo ashore. But, surveying the damage his men had done, Digby was able to claim a glorious victory, one that he richly-embroidered in the fictional account of his venture.

Warfare, and the need to prove himself on a world stage, was only one strand of Digby’s character: he was also an inveterate foodie. Bobbing in the wake of his protagonist, Moshenska takes us into cosmopolitan Mediterranean ports brimming scents and flavours – and introduces the chefs of Algiers who engineered crazy confections made in sugar. Ashore in Turkey, on respite from command, Digby hunted “wilde boare” with “the countrie people”. That night, they settled by a roaring fire to feast on “goates, sheepe, hens, milke, egges, mellons, and bread baked as thinne as strong paper”.

For a man given to pondering the relationship between body and soul, the rich mix of faiths and ethnicities was enthralling. Digby reflected delightedly that his crew included “French, Venetians, Lygononces, Savoyardes, Greekes, Slavononians, Maltoses and Dutch”. He was fascinated by the shape-shifting Ambo-Dexters and Nulli-fidians who swapped religions on a whim. ̽��ֱ��same adaptability smoothed his own passage into the spaces that had fired his imagination in England, where he had immersed himself in stories of the Bible and classical world.

Insatiable English hunger for the antiquities of Greek and Roman civilisations spurred Digby to add chunks of architecture to the treasure in his holds. Anchoring at the island of Delos, and finding it deserted, he was able to “avayle myself of the convenience of carrying away” a great many marbles, rolling the stones down to the shore. ̽��ֱ��largest objects were more problematic. When Digby’s entire crew of 300 men failed to shift one large piece, he devised a mechanism using the “mastes of ships” to lever it aboard. Displayed in a London warehouse, these looted prizes earned the approbation of the king.

Digby had many loves – but the greatest was his wife Venetia Stanley. They met when Digby was aged 14 and Venetia three years older. Both had shadows over their names; they married in secret to avoid gossip about Venetia’s supposed impropriety with other suitors. When Venetia died, Digby was inconsolable, turning to alchemy and beset by tumultuous thoughts. He lived for a while in Paris where he wandered the streets “with his beard down to his middle” accompanied by a large dog on a leash.

Returning to England, Digby became involved in politics once more. Denounced as ringleader of a plot to advance popery, he was briefly imprisoned – but managed to persuade the authorities to allow him access to a small laboratory where he (allegedly) made “artificiall pretious stones … out of Flints”. His mind ever active, he wrote “a total survey of the whole science of Bodyes”, cramming more than 200 pages with theories and memories. He counted among his friends some of the most famous figures of the era – Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Van Dyck – and late in life formed an unlikely friendship with Oliver Cromwell.

As much as it exults in daring exploits, A Stain in the Blood is much more than a riveting account of 17th-century derring-do. English literature, not history, is Moshenska’s primary field: he unravels the fanciful prose of Digby’s writing, and the books he absorbed, to show us what shaped a man who saw no barriers to learning or discovery. Moshenska opens up for us a world in constant flux – a place where ships sail on a “high popping sea”, sweet scents drift on the breeze, and “wyld beastes” roam the land.

A Stain in the Blood: the Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby by Joe Moshenska is published by William Heinemann. An event to launch the book will take place at Heffers (20 Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1TY) on Wednesday 4 May at 6.30pm. To book https://astainintheblood.eventbrite.co.uk

Inset images: Map of Algiers from Civitate orbis terrarum (Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge); Venetia Digby on her deathbed, by Anthony van Dyck (By permissions of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Library, London).

A dark shadow lay over his family name when, aged 24, Sir Kenelm Digby raised a fleet to sail against the enemy French in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean. In his new book, Joe Moshenska (Faculty of English) looks at the intellectual, political and culinary life of a man driven by a thirst for knowledge.

Forced to put in at Algiers, his filthy ships were scoured and replacement crew recruited. Digby hobnobbed with local dignitaries, and feasted on partridges and “Melons of marveilous goodnesse”.

Sir Kenelm Digby, engraving after Anthony Van Dyck (Wikimedia Commons)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Shakespeare goes to East Africa

amb206 — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:00:00 +0000

In 1857 the explorer Captain Richard Francis Burton set out from the East African coast to find the source of the Nile. As his expedition struggled through unmapped bush, men and horses died from starvation and disease – or perished in raids from tribes whose land they crossed. Often hysterical from fever and fear, Burton reduced the baggage carried to ammunition, medicine and materials to trade with locals. But he clung to a few volumes of reading matter. He wrote later: “ ̽��ֱ��few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again.”

Burton wasn’t the only westerner to take a volume of Shakespeare into Africa. Others who did so included the legendary Henry Stanley, John Speke and Thomas Parke. In 1886 the aristocratic Walter Montague Kerr protested at the meagreness of the baggage accompanying him to the lakes of central Africa compared with that of “some expeditions to the dark interior of the continent” but added that he found space for “a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas”.

In the year that celebrates 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, Dr Edward Wilson-Lee (Faculty of English) takes us thousands of miles south of the poet and playwright’s very English birthplace. In Shakespeare in Swahililand, Wilson-Lee revisits the land of his own childhood to discover, on foot and by train and tuktuk, the often surprising ways in which Shakespeare is woven into the shifting cultures of East Africa.

While Victorian explorers took the complete works as a weighty talisman of civilisation, Wilson-Lee travels lightly. With his own volume of Shakespeare in an old leather shooting bag, he flits between libraries, archives and institutes in a world of 100 million Swahili speakers. Along the way he meets a colourful cast of characters: painters, actors, soldiers, a teenage prostitute, intellectuals, readers, thinkers.

̽��ֱ��earliest performance of a Shakespeare play in Africa is said to have taken place aboard a sailing ship during the playwright’s own life time. An article published early in the 19th century, reportedly based on a captain’s dairy, claims that the crew of the Dragon, a vessel sent in search of spices by the India Company, performed two Shakespeare plays in September 1607. While the ship was anchored north-west of Madagascar, its crew performed the ‘TRAGEDY OF HAMLET’.

Supporting evidence for these early stagings is fragile. But, though fanciful, these reports do suggest an early and uncanny link between Shakespeare and East Africa. For hard facts, however, we jump to 1867 when the English missionary Edward Steere printed Swahili translations of four of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Written in 1807, these tales were abridged, and widely popular, versions of the plays written to help young audiences grasp some of the more complex twists and turns.

Strange and wonderful things happen when Shakespeare crosses continents. Titles are misspelt ( ̽��ֱ��Merchant of Venus); plots are subverted to suit political agendas; and sometimes the players don’t realise they are performing Shakespeare at all. Wilson-Lee applauds this fluidity with glee: it echoes Shakespeare’s own pilfering of character and storyline. “Shakespeare himself showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures,” he writes, “and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture.”

Educated in mission schools, where the study of English literature stood at the centre of the syllabus, the East African leaders who sparked the region’s independence movements had an easy familiarity with Shakespeare. According to his daughter, Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, counted his volumes of Shakespeare among his favourite books and often recited from them. In 1948 Appollo Milton Obote, later to become Uganda’s first president, played the title role in Julius Caesar in a performance at Makerere ̽��ֱ�� in Kampala.

̽��ֱ��Indian diaspora was just as deeply touched by Shakespeare. Such was the fervour with which Shakespeare was embraced by the immigrant community, who were at the turn of the 20th century building the East African railways, and much more, that between in the 18 months from February 1915, there were no fewer than 15 Hindustani productions of Shakespeare plays in Kenya – more than in London’s West End during the same period.

When independence from colonialism came, enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not wane. As caretaker and then President of Tanganyika (Tanzania), Julius Nyerere spent his days forming a new nation and his evenings working on a translation of Julius Caesar. ̽��ֱ��puzzle of Nyerere’s choice of play lies, Wilson-Lee suggests, lies in its concern with the consequences of past upheavals, something Nyerere knew all about. He is quoted from an interview: “When hunting there is no problem… Problems start when the animal had died, that’s when the fighting starts.”

Criss-crossing East Africa, Wilson-Lee is often frustrated in his quest for material evidence of a once-thriving tradition of Shakespearean theatre. Of burgeoning colonial Mombasa, he writes: “As is so often the case, in the rush to record what seemed important at the time, much of what must have given the fledgling city its flavour was simply treated as unimportant and ephemeral, leaving future ages with a somewhat sterile version of the lives lived by these early settlers.”

With his own boyhood, “in a jumble of places filled with things from elsewhere”, Wilson-Lee has no such problem. And it’s his experience as a child growing up in Kenya, some two decades after its independence, that makes Shakespeare in Swahililand so compelling. Born to conservationist parents, he was brought up in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, a place that takes its name from Karen Blixen, author of best-selling Out of Africa. She was a huge fan of Shakespeare.

At home in Karen during the school holidays, Wilson-Lee unlocks the door to a dusty storeroom. Inside is a mishmash of belongings left by previous occupants of the house: zebra skins, animal skulls, tribal shields and masks, crested brass buttons long separated from their uniforms, and bell pulls that would once have summoned servants. He delights in this invitation to the world of make-believe. Only later, as an adult and a scholar, is he able to understand just how charged with meaning these items are.

Wilson-Lee’s book is more than travelogue-cum-memoir. Unique in its subject matter, and the way it blends history, politics and literature, his writing is rooted in Shakespearean scholarship. With his guidance, we see the African experiences of colonialism and independence – the relationship, for example, between master and servant, the lettered and unlettered – through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. These universal themes of power and inheritance, love and loss, clashes between old worlds and new, are, after all, what make Shakespeare resonate on a world stage.

Shakespeare in Swahililand is imbued with a sense of time running out. It is Wilson-Lee’s mission to capture, before it is too late, the vestiges of an era in which Shakespeare was performed by pupils in East Africa’s elite fee-paying schools, by students in the gleaming new university of Makerere in Uganda, and by Indian railway workers in corrugated iron sheds. Wilson-Lee argues, however, that this sense of the elusive, of knowledge just beyond our grasp, is central to the power of Shakespeare’s own poetic explorations.

Shakespeare in Swahiland by Edward Wilson-Lee is published by William Collins (2016)

On the eve of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Dr Edward Wilson-Lee explores the remarkable ways in which the works of England’s greatest poet-playwright are woven into the merging cultures of East Africa. In his debut book, Shakespeare in Swahililand, Wilson-Lee gives a compelling account of an era in which Shakespeare took centre stage.

Shakespeare showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures, and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture.

Edward Wilson-Lee

Apollo Milton Obote, future President of Uganda, playing Julius Caesar at Makerere ̽��ֱ�� in 1948

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Remember, remember: how education “beyond the seas” kept Catholicism alive

amb206 — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 06:00:00 +0000

In 1698 a painter and his wife, William Seeks and Mary Brittell, appeared in court in central London. ̽��ֱ��crime for which they stood before the Middlesex Sessions in the borough of Clerkenwell was to have sent their nine-year-old daughter out of the country to be educated in a convent in France.

As Roman Catholics living in staunchly Protestant England, Seeks and Brittell were not able to have their children taught according to the tenets of their faith, which was held to be idolatrous in its teaching and treasonous in its allegiance to Rome. Thus they made what must have been complicated and costly arrangements for their daughter to travel to Paris – a journey not without hazards.

As part of a wider study of English travel, pilgrimage and exile, Liesbeth Corens, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has been looking at the ways in which Catholic families made use of religious houses in continental Europe, chiefly France and the Low Countries, in order to instil Catholic devotion in their children as a foundation for their lives as upholders of the ‘true faith’.

“Education has long been a battleground between faiths with different beliefs and conflicting allegiances. Seldom has this been more striking than in 17^th century England. Society was riven with religious divides as the fiercely Protestant Government sought to repress the vestiges of Catholicism while, for their part, Catholics were equally determined to educate the next generation to pass on their beliefs,” said Corens.

“There’s been considerable research into the role of religious orders in preparing English Catholics for life as permanent members of seminaries and convents – but much less research into English families’ use of the schools run by religious orders in continental Europe. These schools offered places for children who would spend several years being instructed in both the tenets of their confession and the skills of participating in worldly society, before returning to England to start their own families.”

England broke with Rome in the mid-16^th century when Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Many families, however, refused to comply with laws making Henry “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England” and retained their allegiance to the Pope.

In the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of 1605 Guido Fawkes famously conspired to put a bloody end to Protestant government. ̽��ֱ��plot was quashed, and Fawkes and his compatriots hung, but Catholic families continued to observe their faith. Operating clandestinely, they housed priests and smuggled in books and rosaries.

Seventy years later, the Popish Plot (1678) saw the country once again gripped by a surge of anti-Catholic feeling, leading to the execution of at least 22 Catholics. Titus Oates, who had studied at the Jesuit College in St Omer in France, claimed that the Jesuits were plotting to kill Charles II and return England to Catholicism. In the months that followed these (false) accusations, the government reissued acts against educating children in the Catholic faith and stepped up its watch on Catholics’ movements within the country and across the Channel.

Plans floated in Parliament included a proposal to remove children from Catholic families and place them with Protestant relatives. Proclamations were issued to prevent children being sent overseas. ̽��ֱ��Middlesex Sessions court records for 1698 state that Seeks and Brittell had acted unlawfully in sending their daughter “beyond the seas out of the obedience of his Majesty… on purpose to have the said Child remain and be trained up in a Nunery and strengthened in the popish Religion”.

Corens’ investigation of the private archives of a number of Catholic families, in parallel with research carried out in the archives of religious orders has enabled her to build a picture of the ways in which English Catholics, in the context of ferocious opposition and danger to their lives, raised their children to pass their faith on to future generations.

It’s impossible to know how many Catholic children were sent overseas to be educated. Institutional provision for English Catholic education in northern Europe started in the late 16th century and the schools remained active until the 18th century. Over two centuries, these schools educated large numbers of children. They ranged widely in size: the biggest college, at St Omer, had about 180 students on their roll at any one time, while the smallest institutions took around a dozen pupils.

̽��ֱ��education that Catholic children received in convents and colleges overseas was largely in line with the education their Protestant peers received in grammar schools. In both schools, the focus was on Latin and the classics. However, there was one big difference: Catholic children did their learning in the context of a fully functioning religious community, observing and absorbing religious practices that had been outlawed in England.

“ ̽��ֱ��sheer force of feeling about religious matters shouldn’t be understated: to practise Catholicism was an act of subversion, albeit one carried, in many cases, from a position of privilege, and within the bounds of polite society,” said Corens.

“ ̽��ֱ��language of militancy permeated education in the schools run by religious orders. Children were expected to learn their catechism with precision and be able to instruct others whenever an opportunity occurred. On leaving school, it was expected that children would take up the battle for the Catholic church as soldiers of Christ. At the Jesuit College of St Omer, the book recording prizes refers to students as milites – soldiers.”

Catholic parents were acutely aware of their duty to provide the best possible religious education for their children whose contribution to the English mission was seen to be as vital as that made by priests. Corens’ research reveals the careful planning that went into the education of children from middle and upper class homes. She said: “In their early years, children were seen as vulnerable – and this vulnerability, while putting them in danger, also provided an opportunity.”

A formative spell in a seminary or convent was only part of the plan. ̽��ֱ��next step was for many young people to undertake the Grand Tour in the company of a tutor who would be chosen by, or certainly approved by, the religious house. Travel to the classical sites of Europe – and exposure to cultured society in its capital cities - would prepare young Roman Catholics to return to England to take up life as ladies and gentlemen in the ‘better’ ranks of society.

̽��ֱ��handwritten notes of one tutor – a Benedictine priest called W Champney – have survived in the archives of Douai Abbey. Describing Champney’s travels between 1706 and 1712, they offer a rare insight into the ambitious programme young travellers went through as they absorbed the classics, learnt to identify the exemplary young men of the past, took part in processions, visited pilgrimage sites and attended mass.

Records show that huge care was taken in the selection of tutors. Planning to send his son abroad for education in 1699, Robert Throckmorton asked the abbot of the English Benedictines in Dieulouard, north-east France, to propose suitable candidates. ̽��ֱ��abbot came up with three candidates. Mr Scudamore had “good sense” and was “ingenious”; Mr Rigmade was “an extraordinary good Religious man, very mortifiyed and retired”; Doctor Moore was a “man more dignified”.

̽��ֱ��best known Catholic travel tutor was Richard Lassels. A prolific writer and scholar as well as priest, he had a reputation as an educator of gentlemen and tutor of “persons of distinction” and was the first to use the term Grand Tour. Lassels’ travel guide ̽��ֱ��Voyage of Italy, published in 1670, was the outcome of five years of journeys and pilgrimages and, as such, it poses a challenge to the notion that the Grand Tour was broadly secular.

Travel was an essential ingredient of a rounded education. In the late 17^th century the Lancashire landowner William Blundell had given his grandsons Edmund and Richard Butler a basic education in English, French and Latin. Though impressed with the boys’ progress, Blundell felt that he had reached the limit of what was possible in the “obscurest part of the nation” which lay “out of the Rode of Intelligence”. He was especially concerned about Edmund: “both his garb & his language are very much impaired by playing with the rude boyes of our neighbourhood”.

To remedy the situation, Blundell was prepared to make the considerable financial sacrifice needed to send Edmund to the Jesuit College in St Omer (“which speaks the best language in France without comparison”) and later to Blois or Paris to learn “dancing, fenceing and horsemanship” – skills that would equip him to be a gentleman ready to manage the family estates.

Girls were an important part of the strategy to carry the family faith forward. Blundell had earlier sent his daughter Jane overseas to be educated. On her travels, she has endured many storms and difficulties. Blundell explained away these hardships as character-building. In a letter to Jane, he wrote that she had “arryved with more merit (by reason of more trouble) then if an Angel had taken you up lyke Abacuce [Habakkuk, biblical prophet] & dropt you before the Grate of the Convent”.

Correspondence of another Catholic landowner, Marmaduke Constable, reveals a belief that an overseas education was both a safe haven, away from Protestant influence, and a seedbed. Parents should bide their time in being reunited with their sons and daughter. During extensive travels in Europe in the mid-18^th century, Constable visited the children of Carnaby Haggerston. Constable recommended that Haggerston should not yet recall his son: “If you send for him now, you will ruin him for ever.” Haggerston, wrote Constable, should imagine his son “as if he had been asleep ever since he came… and that if was just now time to waken him, which if you do in the right way, I am sure you will see him come home to your pleasure and satisfaction.”

Subversive though their confessional adherence may have been, Catholics did not cut themselves off from their largely Protestant neighbourhoods. Constable, Blundell, Throckmorton and other Catholic landowners were players on the local political scene, and were expected to use their position to support less wealthy Catholics in their households and on their lands. Simultaneously, they cultivated bonds with their Protestant peers out of a positive commitment to civility and neighbourliness, using the skills acquired abroad to excel in sociability.

Nevertheless, the dangers of educating children in a faith that had been banned – and was deemed superstitious and idolatrous - were very real. In the 1670s, two young brothers called Francis and Michael Trappes, pupils at the English College in Douai, northern France, sent medallions to their siblings back at home in England but refrained from enclosing the rosaries they wanted to share with them because they thought “perhappes they would be troublesome for the bearer”.

Corens said: “What emerges in my research is how the transition from violent confrontation between Catholics and Protestants to peaceful toleration was much bumpier, and more nuanced, than conventional narratives suggest. In their determination to practise their faith, Catholics were stubbornly subversive in breaking out of an insular situation to interact with the rest of Europe. Their networks and connections were dynamic in a way that we consider to be much more modern.”

Liesbeth Corens is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College.

Inset images: prospectus for the English Jesuit College for boys in St Omer (Stonyhurst College); notes for young travellers written by a Benedictine tutor in the 1700s (Douai Abbey); corridor and exterior of the English convent in Bruges (Sister Mary Aline)

Bonfire night marks a plot in 1605 to burn down the Houses of Parliament. It’s also a reminder of the ferocious divides that existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Historian Liesbeth Corens is researching the measures taken by English Catholics to educate their children in the 'true faith'.

Education has long been a battleground between faiths with different beliefs and conflicting allegiances. Seldom has this been more striking than in 17th century England.

Liesbeth Corens

Abbot Geoffrey Scott

̽��ֱ��'Blue Nuns' in Paris educated the daughters of some leading English Catholic families, watercolour in Teignmouth Abbey Archives.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Views of the landscape

amb206 — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��second half of the18th century witnessed a revolution in agriculture driven by individuals who saw in the emerging scientific methods of producing food the means of securing wealth for themselves and prosperity for the nation. ̽��ֱ��contemporary sources that tell the story of these improvements in farming provide a window on how people saw the land in its role as a provider, and how they worked with the resources that nature offered on a practical level, putting into motion the practices developed through careful experimentation.

A close reading of these publications and archival materials reveals a complex discourse which drew on artistic and literary traditions as well as the developing field of agricultural improvements. This overlap in the perceptions of land and landscape, how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into at least some of the literature of agricultural improvement, represents one of the strands of my current research as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS).

On Monday, 20 May I will be talking about, ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c 1770–c 1820’, in a presentation that will discuss how one man in particular – Arthur Young - embodied this blurring of boundaries. In an informal presentation intended to outline my preliminary thoughts on the topic, I will encourage my audience to drop the divides between disciplines and explore, through Young and his writing, the creative links which have come to inform our own way of seeing landscape.

̽��ֱ��principal motor of agricultural improvement was the enclosure of common and waste lands, which abolished traditional common rights and transferred the land to private ownership. Although enclosure of common and waste lands had started much earlier, the second half of the 18th century saw a much more concentrated effort in that direction. In particular, parliamentary acts were increasingly used to facilitate quicker and more extensive enclosure. By the end of George III’s reign some six million acres had been transferred from waste or common land to privately owned enclosures.

̽��ֱ��energetic traveller and commentator Arthur Young (1741-1820) is remembered as a promoter of enclosure and experimental agriculture as the means of improved farming. He was a prolific writer and tireless promoter of agricultural improvement, editor of the Annals of Agriculture between 1784 and 1809, secretary to the Board of Agriculture from its foundation in 1793 to his death, and centre of an international corresponding network that included Sir Joseph Banks, George Washington, the radical chemist Joseph Priestley, the Irish chemist and mineralogist Richard Kirwan, and a number of improving aristocrats in France, Poland and Russia. These letters reveal that agricultural advances were at the top of the agenda in circles that went far beyond that of farmers and landowners.

An easily accessible compilation of Young’s prodigious output is GE Mingay’s Arthur Young and His Times (1975). But even a most thorough perusal of that book, with its selection of farm accounts and experimental observations collated by Young, the economic aspects of farming and the political and social importance of agriculture, does not prepare the reader for the sort of dizzily romantic writing of which Young is capable.

Below is an extract from Six Months Tour Through the North of England in which Young, the man who elsewhere extolls the use of root vegetables and deep ploughing to enhance productivity, takes the reader deep into the intoxicating landscape of an English paradise.

We had not travelled many miles over the moors, before a most enchanting landscape, as if dropt from heaven in the midst of this wild desart, at once blessed our eyes. In ascending a very steep rocky hill, we were obliged to alight and lead our horses; nor was it without some difficulty that we broke through a shrubby steep of thorns, briars, and other underwood; but when it was effected we found ourselves at the brink of a precipice with a sudden and unexpected view before our eyes of a scene more enticingly pleasing than fancy can paint. Would to heaven I could unite in one sketch the cheerfulness of Zuccarelli with the gloomy terrors of Pousin, the glowing brilliancy of Claud, with the romantic wildness of Salvator Rosa. Even with such powers it would be difficult to sketch the view which at once broke upon our ravished eyes.

Incircled by a round of black mountains, we beheld a valley which from its peculiar beauty, one would have taken for the favourite spot of nature, a sample of terrestrial paradise. Half way up the hills in front many rugged and bold projecting rocks discovered their bare points among thick woods which hung almost perpendicular over a deep precipice. In the dark bosom of these rocky shades a cascade glittering in the sun, pours as is from a hollow of the rock, and at its foot forms an irregular bason prettily tufted with wood, from whence it flows in a calm tranquil stream around this small, but beautiful vale, losing itself among rocks in a most romantic manner. Within the banks of this elysian stream, the ground is most sweetly varied in waving slopes and dales, forming five or six grass inclosures of a verdure beautiful as painting can express. Several spreading tress scattered about the edges of these gentle hills have a most charming effect in letting the green slopes illumined by the sun, be seen through their branches; one might almost call it, the clear obscure of nature.

It’s certainly a far cry from Country Life or Farmers Weekly. In reading these words today, part of our surprise that a man devoted to the improvement of agriculture should write such heady prose arises from received notions of the incompatibility of a more utilitarian view of the land and one centred on its aesthetic qualities. Our distinction between nature and culture compartmentalises art from science, fact from feeling. So historians who deal with Young have tended to concentrate on his economics rather than his aesthetics, on his taste for experiment rather than his experiments with taste. Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.

To understand Young’s (to us) overblown allusions to the charm and drama of the landscape it is necessary to bring to mind the cult of the picturesque – a gentler precursor to the romanticism of the later 18th and early 19th centuries and a notion rooted in a sensibility to aesthetic values. In a like manner, much of the scholarship on the picturesque and the place of landscape within it assumes a fundamental antagonism between the dictates of aesthetic sensibility and those of hard nosed utility, a dichotomy that we have come to know as the ‘two cultures’ – the humanities and the sciences. I argue that the distinction we assume between what is practical and what is aesthetically pleasing is not so clear cut.

It is significant that Young’s most popular published works – accounts of extensive tours undertaken in England, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy and Spain in the 1770s and 1780s – are as full of the picturesque as they are of the utilitarian. In his Annals of Agriculture, too, where one might have expected a more focused attention on the practical and useful, Young continued to offer his own general views of various farming regions that included attention to the aesthetics of landscape. In the same forum, Young also published a series of letters by Thomas Ruggles on ‘Picturesque farming’ in which the useful improvement of farming was pursued alongside its aesthetic melioration, which meant applying the principles of scenic beauty so a to render a view of the farm picturesque through the use of trees, hedges and other such features.

Moreover, while Young certainly resisted the more dogmatic attempts to see landscape only according to the rules of painting, there are clear and important parallels between the way Young structured his writing about the aesthetic qualities of landscape and the way in which landscape painters depicted their scenes visually. It is as if Young was painting with words. In this way, Young takes on the formal rules of William Gilpin, a major theorist of the picturesque aesthetic, but resists his rejection, itself never complete, of the “plough and the spade”.

My research involves parallel studies of literature and history of art with particular attention to ways in which they related epistemologically, socially and discursively. Hilly Landscape, the painting by Charles Towne reproduced here by kind permission of the Fitzwilliam Museum, follows the basic pattern employed by the classical landscape artist, Claude Lorrain. Firstly, the whole view is taken from a high vantage point which allows a distant horizon to be seen even though middle ground between the viewpoint and that horizon can rise up. This prospect gives the whole space a more enclosed frame, albeit leaving the suggestion that there is something beyond which the eye cannot see.

Towne thus achieves the impression of incredible depth and distance associated with Claude. As Richard Wilson (1714-1782), the Welsh landscape painter known as ‘the English Claude’, noted ‘you may walk in Claude’s pictures’. In Towne’s painting this is given added emphasis by the wagon and horse descending into the valley below; our eyes move with the travellers in the painting.

While differing in detail, the passage from Young’s Six Months Tour reproduced above certainly shares a lot of the features found in Hilly Landscape. Whatever we make of the way in which Young situated taste and utility, the two were closely connected. They can, in some respects, be seen as expressions of a single way of seeing that, while different in some respects, shared so many features as to allow slippage from the one to the other.

This could, of course, be something peculiar to Young. William Marshall (1745-1818), a rival of Arthur Young who was equally committed to agricultural improvement, dismissed Young’s ramblings as a confused and confusing hotchpotch of ‘paintings, pigs, and picturesque views’. But whereas Young travelled rapidly through the country to build up his picture of agriculture, Marshall advocated his own method of residing in the region under survey for lengthy periods of time. In other words, his way of seeing was more introverted and perhaps excluded those prospect views that Young shared with some landscape painters.

̽��ֱ��same prospect view, moreover, is embedded in Young’s method of noting the agricultural practices of the regions he visited. When he himself farmed, he developed a system of conducting and recording experiments which moved from the practical business of husbandry to the economic costs and benefits that variations of these practices entailed. This approach was applied in his Tours and became also the model for the later Board of Agriculture’s County Surveys. While I don’t want to push this notion too far, it seems that oscillation between the physical and economic aspects of farming has its correspondence in the alternation between light and dark which allows a view of scenic beauty to become visible. In Young’s case, though, what becomes visible is the view of the farm not as a household, as had been very much the case earlier in the 18th century, but as an integrated unit of production. Where the landscape painter brought beauty into view, Young brought utility into view.

This combination of painterly and scientific ways of seeing, I suggest, offered what is possibly one of the first views of the capitalist economy. Whereas economic tracts from the 17th century to the first decade of the 19th offer ‘snapshot’ accounts of various economic subjects from balance of payments and trade to land and rent, money, population and taxation, there is no clear idea that something as unified as ‘an economy’ was perceived to exist. ̽��ֱ��compositional elements were there, but there was no picture. They lacked the sort of perspectives that made landscape art possible. With Young, who very clearly had a sophisticated sense of the aesthetic and a commitment to what he saw as economically and socially useful improvements, this changes.

Just why Young wrote like he did is, of course, explainable on various fronts. Not least is Young’s personal combination of aesthetics and practical improvement. But Young was by no means alone in this. Several writers of the Board of Agriculture’s County Reports, for example, also moved quite easily from aesthetic to practical concerns. Even William Marshall published works on gardening and the aesthetic improvement of estates. Moreover, the genre of the Tour was itself becoming more popular. Tourists to the Lake District, North Wales and the Scottish Highlands became increasingly common, and so too did travel guides. A sign, perhaps, of the structural changes occurring in both the economy and society, touring and travel literature, of which Young was a pioneer, gave wider currency to the ways of seeing that Young deployed; one of the most popular travel guides on the period, Thomas West’s Guide to the Lake District, even quoted Young at length. More tellingly, though, Young’s mixing of taste with utility would have rendered him a more reliable observer, a more trustworthy authority.

Displaying all the sensibilities of taste that marked a cultured gentleman of the period would give credibility and trustworthiness to what were, as far as his agricultural observations went, radical and often destabilising opinions. In nearly every account of the aesthetic qualities of natural landscapes that Young offered, for example, enclosed lands are present. That such a renowned theorist of aesthetics as Edmund Burke could write to Young asking for practical advice on farming is suggestive in this respect. By combining a radical agenda for improvement with a sense of aesthetic taste, Young secured a more receptive audience ready to see on the farm what they saw in the landscape.

Simon Nightingale will be talking about ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c.1770–c.1820’ on Monday, 20 May, 1pm, at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge. All welcome.

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Communications Office, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

In a talk on Monday (20 May 2013) Dr Simon Nightingale will explore how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into the literature of agricultural improvement in a way that might surprise modern readers.

Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.

Dr Simon Nightingale

Charles Towne, Hilly Landscape, Oil on canvas, 38.7cm x 51.1cm (detail)

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For lust of knowing what should not be known

amb206 — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:09:28 +0000

There are few pictures of Clare Holtham. This is partly because she was always diffident about having her picture taken, and partly because she was for many years estranged from her family. As a keen amateur photographer, Clare was generally the person behind the camera, taking thousands of pictures of people and places in a pre-digital age.

Of the handful of photographs of Clare that do exist, one is remarkable. It was taken in Afghanistan and shows Clare sitting cross-legged but demure on the floor of a rough courtyard next to a smiling young man wearing traditional robes. He was an Uzbek chieftain and the picture was taken to record their marriage – a union that lasted just 24 hours.

It was the early 1970s; Clare was 23 and a fiercely independent undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. In her journal she describes meeting a ‘tall and handsome’ Uzbek while travelling in a jeep on the road to Mazir-i-Sharif. She notes that he owned ‘700 sheep, 200 camels, 25 horses and the same number of rifles’. They conversed in Farsi, a language she has picked up on the road. She writes: ‘I was very taken with him.’ She offered herself to him and they agreed a bride price.

She records in handwriting that races smoothly across the page that their marriage was consummated that night ‘in a little room overlooking a courtyard with a wall and tethered goats. ̽��ֱ��sun was low… In the outer room the Turkomans were unwinding and rewinding their puttees, the Ouzbeks were laughing over something as they sipped their green tea, and the world was at peace’. ̽��ֱ��next day she continued her journey.

When Clare died in February 2010, after a struggle with cancer, her friends began to piece together the extraordinary story of her life – a narrative full of apparent paradoxes. She was a brilliant linguist and an intrepid traveller; she was a computer analyst and a prize-winning poet. As a teenager she was, in her own words, “a beatnik and rebel”; she was expelled from a reform school. For a while she worked as a bus conductor to make ends meet.

Today a book of Clare’s poetry will be launched at Newnham College where she studied English from 1970 to 1973. Some of the most powerful of the 59 poems contained in ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat, published by Five Seasons Press, brim with her love for the wild landscapes of Afghanistan and its proud people. Roger Garfitt, the lyric poet who was Clare’s tutor at the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, says: “It was in Afghanistan that Clare’s imagination found its first home, an emptiness where ‘the thread of being’ can fray until it is ‘unbearably light’ but where a traveller might still descend to the sound of a rabab being played beside a well under the lemon trees.”

Clare had a vivid imagination and steely determination. Aged eight, she visited Cambridge where, in the gardens of Newnham College, she decided that this was where she would study. But the circumstances of her life were stacked against her. Her parents were committed communists at a time when many intellectuals embraced the heady ideals it seemed to represent. She was just two when her mother disappeared to China with another activist. Clare was left with her grandfather in Devon. At the age of five she joined her father and his new wife in London – but they did not get on and she was sent to a school for maladjusted children in Bexhill.

Despite her troubled family relationships, Clare’s poems that address her disrupted childhood hint at a sense of ferocious attachment. ‘Lamplight’ describes how: ‘the very world might crack / from side to side ‘When your father gets home!’’ In a way that is typical of Clare, the poem moves towards an eventual resolution. ‘‘Children’ (and poems) ‘are like wild animals’ – that / was what you said, in the nursing home where you sat / fifty years on – ‘They need to be disciplined’ / (and cannot be left like reeds to blow in the wind).’

At Clare’s death, Newnham College inherited an archive of her papers and some of her books. Clare was a meticulous record-keeper and diarist: her notebooks capture the minute detail of her travels – where she went, whom she met, what she ate and where she slept – and hand-drawn maps show the routes she took across Europe and into Asia by public transport and cadging lifts. A list of what to take includes brandy and Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, and notes that J-Cloths are ‘better than flannels’ for washing. ̽��ֱ��reverse of a map of Europe is used as a fold-out hitch-hiking sign with the names of the chief destinations on her route spelt out in bold red letters outlined in black.

In a type-written account of her early life that is part of the archive, Clare describes cleaning her parents’ flat at the age of nine or ten. Passing her duster over books with intriguing titles, and opening them at random, she became transfixed by the world of ideas that lay within the covers. On a shelf halfway down the stairs was a volume of poetry by James Elroy Flecker. She opened it and read: ‘For lust of knowing what should not be known / We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.’ ̽��ֱ��imagery of these lines burnt into her mind. Written many years later, the poem recording her temporary marriage to the Uzbek chieftain ends: ‘In the morning / the wind rose… / … and touched our feet.’

By the age of 15, Clare’s life had gone badly awry. She had been expelled from the school in Bexhill and for a while she lived rough on the streets of London. Her intelligence, however, was evident: when she was given an IQ test, she came out top of the MENSA scale. It was at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (known locally as the Tech), where she went to study for O and then A levels at the suggestion of an older friend, that she began to find her feet academically. She worked on the buses and in factories, while devouring literary classics and teaching herself Persian languages.

Applying to Newnham College (through the Oxbridge Entrance exam), Clare chose to write about the epic poem, Gilgamesh – one of the earliest known works of literature. This came as a shock to Clare’s Director of Studies, Jean Gooder, and colleagues, who had never read Gilgamesh – and had quickly to get hold of a copy.

Jean Gooder says: “Clare was very bright and she was also absolutely clear about what she wanted to study. She had no truck with anything she thought was second rate. Her circumstances were characteristically irregular and this led to the College adjusting many of its normal practices. We gave her a place without the O level Latin required at the time. We organised for her to study Russian and we allowed her to work part-time during term at the Cambridge Arts Cinema.”

At the start of Clare’s second term at Newnham, Jean Gooder asked her casually whether she had had a good Christmas, to which Clare replied that she had spent Christmas Day weeping silently in a corner of the accident and emergency department at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Nobody had even asked her why she was there. Newnham promptly organised for Clare to have student accommodation all year – and the Gooders also took Clare into her own family home. “My children especially gained a huge amount from her. She gave them an education in film that resulted in two of them becoming film producers,” says Jean Gooder. “Everything she did, she did with huge attention to detail.”

On graduating from Cambridge, Clare worked and lived with Eddie Block, manager of the Cambridge Arts Cinema. Together they founded the Cambridge Film Festival and then moved to Sussex to transform the Duke of York Cinema in Brighton into a flourishing art house venue. When Eddie retired, Clare retrained as a computer systems analyst and travelled all over the world for a number of well-known companies, finally setting up her own business, Small Blue.

̽��ֱ��small girl who fell in love with maps and atlases – and wanted to see the steppes and the Oxus River for herself - became an adult who never stopped learning. In her 50s Clare trained as a Blue Badge Guide, studied genetics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall, and at the time of her last illness was close to qualifying as a homeopath.

It was at Madingley Hall that Clare met Roger Garfitt. Discovering that she wrote poetry, he persuaded her to join his Masterclass and found that she liked nothing better than a formal challenge. He remembers: “Set up a flight of hurdles and she would leap over them. ‘Walter the Tramp’, the sequence that won second prize in Scintilla’s Long Poem Competition, is fluent in the tight ballad metre, which is by no means easy, while her ‘Elegy for the Buddhas of Bamyan’ makes use of a repeated refrain, a technique we had been studying in Yeats, varying the repeated phrases so skilfully that they never seem wilful but become integral to the development of the poem.”

̽��ֱ��archive of Clare’s papers at Newnham speaks of a life lived absolutely to the full. Her notebooks spill over with an urgent sense of adventure: so much to see and do. In 1969, aged 21 and with no family backing, she decided to visit India, obtained visas and had the relevant jabs. She writes: ‘ ̽��ֱ��day finally arrived and I took a train to London. It’s an odd feeling boarding a train full of ordinary commuters when you are en route for the Orient. One thinks: Don’t these people realise that I am going to India?.'

Anyone interested in the archive of Clare Holtham’s papers is welcome to contact the Newnham College Archive at archives@newn.cam.ac.uk. Newnham College has set up a student travel scholarship in Clare Holtham’s name. ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat is published by Five Seasons Press http://www.fiveseasonspress.com/.

Clare Holtham (1948-2010) had a huge enthusiasm for learning. After a troubled childhood, which led to a spell of homelessness, she became an intrepid traveller and independent-minded student at Newnham College, Cambridge. A book of Clare’s poems called ̽��ֱ��Road from Herat, launched today at Newnham, reflects a life lived to the full. It included working on the buses and a rapid marriage to an Uzbek chieftain.

Clare was also absolutely clear about what she wanted to study. She had no truck with anything she thought was second rate.

Jean Gooder

For lust of knowing what should not be known

Newnham College Archive, Cambridge

Poet Clare Holtham and Uzbek chieftain in Afghanistan, early 1970s

White Morning

On the road to Meshhed we stop
at Chaman Bid, the place of the willow.
We shiver in the dawn, or sefideye sobh1 –
one of the several stages of morning
noted in the Persian language.

Later, in the bazaar circle
round the shrine of the Imam Reza,
forbidden to Westerners,
there is dazzling light –
cut mirrorwork, water gold;
and dazzling darkness -
heat from generators,
cries, and the heavy
press of pilgrims shrouded in black,
or backs flailed and bleeding,
seeking an unbearable bliss.

Sefideye sobh again,
waking in my bed on the roof
under the thin quilt, a lightness
as though a fever had left me.
White birds wheeling
on the breath of dawn,
and a distant smoke rising
in the bowl of the mountains.

Clare Holtham

1‘White morning’

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Yes