NYC DINNER: 85th Annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner

The Program, Thursday, April 5, University Club (click on each page to enlarge)

Photos of the 2018 NYC Dinner, via Cambridge in America. 

Stephen Hawking at 21

Moment of Silence for Professor Stephen Hawking

John Tepper Marlin, Trinity College, Oxford 

It is an honor to rise in memory of Stephen Hawking, who died three weeks ago at 76 years of age. He was born in Oxford, because his parents believed that even Hitler would not bomb Oxford… which turned out to have been true. 

Soon after his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, known in this country as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He was given few years to live. He actually lived for 55 more years, and became the Number One Celebrity Scientist as well as the Poster Child for battling disease and disability. He wrote a book called “A Brief History of Time” that sold 25 million copies.

He set out to finish Einstein’s quest for a general theory of everything. He wanted to understand the universe, “why it is as it is and why it exists at all,” and he focused on Black Holes.

Hawking as Cox of the Univ 2nd Eight

Hawking’s life revolved around Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford, he coxed the Univ 2nd Eight, and reportedly steered with as little effort or propriety as he studied physics and chemistry. Getting into the water-borne shell helped him get out of his own. At Cambridge, he taught for more than 50 years. He said: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

Hawking also said: "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

Ladies and gentlemen, may we have a minute of silence in memory of this very special inspirational force, Stephen Hawking, whose happiest moments might have been in the stern of the Univ 2nd eight. (284 words, 2 minutes)

Other Posts on Stephen Hawking
Obituaries

The Committee

Committee (R to L): Dhaval Patel (MC), Hervé Gouraige (Chair), John Tepper Marlin,
Lee Li, Andrew Cunningham, Daniel Vasquez Sally Fan, Jack Carlson, Cassie
Llewellyn-Smith, Seth Lesser.

The Newark Boys Chorus

Previous Boat Race Dinners
2017 2016 2015 2014 & Earlier . History of the Boat Race

Alumni Boat Races and Other Reunions
Boat Races 2017 .  Branches Reunion 2012

Other Events
Talk on Oxford Colleges' Coats of Arms,  Oxford-Cambridge Club, April 16, 2018

BLOG VIEWS: 250K, Top 10 in March

This blog has just passed the 250,000-views mark. Thank you for reading. The views of all of the blogs I maintain is over two million.

The most-read post over the lifetime of the blog is the second one below, on Hitler's not having bombed Oxford.

That was a reason that the late Stephen Hawking (see memorial comments below) advanced, at the opening of his book of essays (Black Holes and Baby Universes, 1994), for his parents' having moved from London to Oxford just before he was born. He said:  

I was born in Oxford, even though my parents were living in London. This was because Oxford was a good place to be born during World War II: The Germans had an agreement that they would not bomb Oxford and Cambridge, in return for the British not bombing Heidelberg and Göttingen.

Here are the ten most-read posts in this blog during the past month.

Entry

ARMS: Lincoln College, Oxford (Updated March 28, 2018) Apr 9, 2017

HITLER: Why Didn't He Bomb Oxford? (25K Views, Mar... Jun 8, 2013, 3 comments

OXFORD IN FICTION: Top Six Fictional Colleges (Upd... Jul 2, 2016

NEWARK BOYS CHORUS | Will Sing on April 5, 2018 Mar 18, 2018

HERALDRY: OXFORD SUPERLINK Nov 22, 2015

OXFORD-CAMBRIDGE DINNER | New York City's 85th, April 5, 2018 Mar 15, 2018

BIRTHDAYS | Oxonians, April 2018 Mar 17, 2018

STEPHEN HAWKING, R.I.P. | Selected Obituaries, Lin... Mar 15, 2018

COLLEGE ARMS: Oxford Shop (Updated Sept. 24, 2016)... May 13, 2016

COATS OF ARMS | Talk to OUS London on Monday, April 5, 2018 Mar 20, 2018

BIRTHDAYS | Oxonians, March 2018

Bodleian Exhibit Opens, Sappho to Suffrage, March 6, 2018.

85th New York City Boat Race Dinner, April 5, 2018.

01 John Tepper Marlin (Trinity), 1942 😉

02 Dr Seuss (Lincoln), 1904

11 Rupert Murdoch, 1931
14 Stephen Hawking (Univ), death, 2018 (born in April)
24 William Morris (Exeter), 1834

26 Robert Frost, 1926

26 A. E. Housman, 1859

31 Rachel Maddow (Lincoln), 1973

Other Months: February . January

Year's worth of birthdays (in process of being compiled)
To add a name, write to the compiler – jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.

OXFORD-CAMBRIDGE DINNER | New York City's 85th, April 5

The late Stephen Hawking as an Oxford
undergraduate, coxing the Univ 2nd Eight.

The 2018 Boat Race will be on March 24. 

Both men's and women's boat races will be held that day.

A festive dinner to celebrate the event will be held at the University Club in New York on Thursday, April 5. It will be the 85th consecutive uninterrupted boat race dinner in New York City. As usual, the dress code for men is black tie or boat club blazer. (The dinner program and some remarks are posted.)

The Newark Boys Chorus will sing the American and British national anthems and their own song.


For further details and to reserve a place or two, go to the Cambridge University website.

Information on the 2017 NYC Boat Race Dinner and the 83 previous boat race dinners in New York may be found here. The outcome of the Boat Race in 2017 may be found here.

More information on the 2018 Boat Race may be found on the Oxford-Cambridge NYC Boat Race Dinner site or on the official boat race site.

A brief history of the boat race says that the boats use "much the same equipment as in 1829." Well, yes, if you don't consider significant the improving outrigger of the earliest years, the move from a wherry to a flat shell, the offset oarlocks, and above all the sliding seats starting in 1869 and the composite shells in the 20th century. See my review of boat innovations for more details.

On April 16, I will be giving a presentation on the Oxford colleges' coats of arms to the Oxford University Society in London (at the Oxford-Cambridge Club).  I will be posting details shortly here.

The next evening, I will be talking to the Oxford-Cambridge Club membership about the coats of arms of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. This event is nearly sold out, one month in advance.

STEPHEN HAWKING, R.I.P. | Selected Obituaries, Links

Stephen Hawking (Univ, Oxon),
1942-2018

Stephen W. Hawking (Univ, Oxon) was born on January 8, 1942 and died on March 14, 2018.

Prof. Neil Comins, an astronomer at the  University of Maine, 
remembers presenting a paper to Hawking and others. (Comins is a cousin of my wife Alice, whose mother was born Grace Comins.) With his permission, I quote his recollection:

I first met Stephen in the late 1970s. I was working on my Ph.D. thesis in Cardiff, Wales. I shared some results with my thesis advisor, Bernard F. Schutz [now director of the Max Planck Institute at Cambridge]. The next day Bernard came to see me, saying, "I've arranged for you to present your results to Stephen Hawking and his group at Cambridge." It would be the first talk I ever gave about my research.

A few weeks later, I took the train to Cambridge and presented my work. Stephen was smiling through the talk. There was some debate about the results, but he ended it by saying that he believed they were correct. He was right and five years later, S. Chandrasekhar cited that work in his 1983 Nobel prize lecture. 

Back then, Stephen was able to control his motorized wheel chair and he zoomed around Cambridge. Everyone just had to get out of his way! I had dinner that evening with Hawking and his family. I have a vague recollection that someone said the home they lived in was also where Isaac Newton once lived. 

My nephew Chris Oakley earned his BA-MA and DPhil in Physics from Oxford and took the Physics Tripos at Cambridge. He remembers seeing Hawking in Cambridge and at a seminar in Oxford. Chris says (I quote by permission): 

Hawking only really got into his stride at Cambridge. I used to see him in his wheelchair in the street in Cambridge when I was there in 1980-1981, but the first time I went to a seminar of his was about a year later at the Rutherford-Appleton laboratory near Oxford. He still had his voice then, but it was near-incomprehensible and a graduate student was translating for us.

-New York Times Obituary
-BBC Obituary
-Why did his family move from London to Oxford just before he was born?
- Hawking as coxswain for University College's Second Eight.