UNIV | Sean Denniston Speaks at NYC Ox-Cam Virtual Dinner

Under the title "Oxbridge goes to Washington," University College ("Univ"), Oxford , posted the following report on the participation of Sean Denniston in the 2020 (88th) New York City Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner.

The Road to Washington

Sean C Denniston (1987, History), Transportation Industry Analyst at Federal Aviation Administration, was the dinner speaker at the 88th Annual New York Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race Dinner on 27 December 2020. The dinner was held virtually because of COVID-19, but its taking place continued an 88-year unbroken streak.

Sean Denniston (1987, History)

Mr Denniston’s remarks were titled “Oxbridge goes to Washington (again and again) Trump, Biden, Oxbridge and the District of Columbia”. He is President of the Oxford University Alumni Networkof Washington D.C. and an integral part of the East Coast American Univite network.

After studying History at Univ, Sean Denniston obtained a JD from Boston College Law School and Graduate Certificate in Dispute Resolution from the University of Massachusetts Boston. He previously worked as a consultant at Isaacson, Miller and as Special Assistant to the Director of External Affairs, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).

 

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE | New Master, Baroness Amos

Photo: SOAS

Baroness Valerie Amos

Valerie Ann Amos, Baroness Amos of Brondesbury, CH, PC in September 2020 became the new Master of Univ, the first-ever head of an Oxford college. Born 13 March 1954, she has been a British Labour Party politician and diplomat. In 2015, Amos was appointed the ninth Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, becoming the first Black woman to lead a university school in the UK. She served as the eighth UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2010-2015. Before her appointment to the UN, she was British High Commissioner to Australia. She was created a life peer in 1997, serving as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council in 2003-2007. When Amos was appointed Secretary of State for International Development on 12 May 2003, following the resignation of Clare Short, she became the first Black woman to serve as a Cabinet minister. She left the Cabinet when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. She was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2001-2003 and Chief Executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission in 1989-1994.

An alum of Univ, Sean Denniston of the Washington, D.C. branch of the Oxford University Society, tells me that the latest exciting development at the college is the expansion of its North Oxford space.  The previous Master of Univ, Sir Ivor Crewe, says this is the largest expansion of the college since the 17th century. It is being built with attention to sustainability, biodiversity, and relationship to the local community in North Oxford.

OXFORD & CAMBRIDGE ARMS: Martlets

L to R: Your blogger (Trinity, Oxon.) and Cheryl-Lisa Hearne-
McGuiness, Hon. Sec. of the Oxford University Society's London
Branch. Photo by branding expert Paul C. Walton (BNC, Oxon.).

Oxford, U.K., Wednesday, April 18, 2018 – Yesterday, and the day before, Alice and I stayed at the fine Oxford and Cambridge Club in London.

On Monday I spoke there to 70 members of the Oxford University Society, London Branch, about the 38 coats of arms of the Oxford colleges and the six coats of the Permanent Private Halls.

On Tuesday I was speaker at a "Discussion Supper" of the Oxford and Cambridge Club and I added in most of the 31 Cambridge colleges.

My objective was to make the college coats of arms more accessible to students, alumni, tourists and anyone else curious about Oxford and Cambridge.

Dropping the usual baggage of lists of tinctures, furs, metals, ordinaries, subordinaries and so forth, I also skipped past explanation of the history of coats of arms, how they were brought over by the Normans with William the Conqueror and became widespread through the growth of tournaments among the knights in the 12th century, etc.

Instead, I dove right in to the Oxford (and Cambridge) coats of arms by selecting two or more college shields at a time that have a device in common, such as a form of cross or a species of bird (big or small), and focusing on the meaning of the device and of significant differences.

I used each set of shields as a prompt to tell stories about how the devices relate to the history of the colleges, and inevitably the history of England. Along the way I slipped in a few comments about relevant heraldic conventions.

To illustrate my approach, consider a little footless bird on the arms of three colleges and one permanent private hall – three of them at Oxford and one at Cambridge.

The bird is the MARTLET, which is important in heraldry because it is a brisure, a mark of cadency on a coat of arms indicating that it is being carried by a fourth son of the owner of the arms. The discussion below is amplified, and a few references added, from my remarks yesterday.

The perfect venue was the Oxford and Cambridge 

Club room named after Queen Victoria's grand-

daughter, Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-

Holstein, Germany's northernmost state.

University College's shield shows four (on its website) or often five golden martlets around a cross on a blue (azure) field. The St Benet's shield includes an almost identical coat of arms on its top right (the sinister side in chief). The difference between the two crosses (Univ's is a cross patonce, while St Benet's is a cross fleury) is not significant, as both crosses have been used interchangeably in the posthumously attributed arms of Edward the Confessor. Edward was of course the last of the great Anglo-Saxon kings, whose death in 1066 precipitated a nine-month succession battle that culminated in the death of Harold Godwinson and victory of William, Duke of Normandy at Hastings. With the accession of William I, Norman nobles arrived with their knights and heraldry. Univ has claimed the arms attributed to Edward the Confessor, although the founding in 1249 was by William of Durham, long after Edward the Confessor. As the Univ website explains, "a legend grew up in the 1380s that we were actually founded even earlier, by King Alfred in 872, and, understandably enough, this became widely accepted as the truth." (The Univ martlets are a possible origin of the four martlets in the St Peter's College coat of arms.)

St Benet’s Hall seems to have more claim to the arms of Edward the Confessor than Univ because the Hall is a foundation of Ampleforth College [full disclosure: I was a pupil there in 1952-55], which was created by the same English Benedictines who occupied Westminster Abbey at its inception. When Edward the Confessor built the original Benedictine Abbey and Church, he decided that English monarchs should be crowned there [all but two subsequent monarchs have been]. The other half of the top of the shield (the chief) shows the imputed coat of arms of St Peter, to whom Westminster Abbey is dedicated; the bottom of the shield is from the original Abbey. Henry III built the Gothic Abbey Church in honor of Edward, who by then had been canonized.

Pembroke College, Cambridge is the owner of the third shield. The five red (gules) martlets look dissimilar from the martlets in the previous two shields, but they are meant to be the same bird, in that they have no feet. Pembroke was founded by Aylmer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, a man of importance in the reigns of Edwards I and II. The left side (dexter to the bearer) of the shield is half of his arms, which are split (impaled or dimidiated) with his wife Mary de St Pol, who came from Brittany.

Worcester College, represented by the fourth shield, has two chevrons and six martlets, which are blazoned as black (sable) or sometimes red (gules). The coat of arms is that of Sir Thomas Cookes [someone at the meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club said it should be Crookes, but he was being funny, I think], a Worcestershire baronet, whose bequest of £10,000 back in 1698, when a pound sterling was really worth something, founded the college. The Worcester College shield is almost always shown, as here, with black (sable) martlets, but the blazon often calls for red (gules) as in the Pembroke arms. [Sir Thomas also founded Bromsgrove School, which uses the arms with red (gules) martlets, corresponding to its blazon.] 

MEANING: So what does the martlet signify? All sources I have consulted agree that the lack of feet means that they can't land, so they are always aloft. This suggests that the martlets are always searching and is a good symbol for the search for knowledge. A lovely idea – although when you think about it, it makes the intellectual life sound tiring. (Tiring, but surely not as discouraging as the fates of Sisyphus or Tantalus.)

Another interpretation is that the martlet is a symbol of the self-made man, someone without foundation. But to impute such arms to a King like Edward the Confessor would hardly be appropriate with that interpretation, unless one was imputing modesty.

Links to Further Reading: Use of Star-Like Devices in the Oxford Colleges . Creation of Arms in the Newer Colleges at Oxford (Oxford Today, Michaelmas 2015)

Set of 46 Newly Design Coats of Arms: Oxford City and Oxford University coats of arms, 38 colleges, and six Permanent Private Halls. Below is a low-resolution version of an original set of shields drawn for me by heraldic artist Lee Lumbley. I plan to be at the 2018 BookExpo America at the Javits Center in New York City, May 31-June 2 and will be looking for appointments to talk with publishers at this event. My email address is teppermarlin at aol dot com.

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.

BIRTH | Nov. 29–C. S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

C[live] S[taples] Lewis was born this day in Belfast in 1898, the son of Albert Lewis, a lawyer, and Flora Hamilton Lewis. He had a brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis ("Warnie"), three years older.

C.S. Lewis was known as Jack in his personal life because when he was four, his dog Jacksie was run over by a car. Young Lewis announced he was changing his name to "Jacksie" and from then on, he was known as "Jack" to family and friends.

The two boys, Jack and Warnie, created a special world of adventure called "Boxen," in which animals talked.

Jack was home-schooled in Belfast by private tutors until he was ten. But his mother died of cancer and a month later Jack was sent to join his brother at boarding school in England – the Wynard School in Watford, Herts.

The school's attendance was dwindling under its  methodically mad headmaster, Robert "Oldie" Capron, who kept telling his students to "think!". While Lewis was there, Capron was removed to a mental institution and the school was closed. Jack was sent for a year to Malvern College, where he had a better experience. After that he studied privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's one-time tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College.

Two favorite books of young Jack Lewis were Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose birthday is also this month (that author and book also a favorite of my mother, Hilda van Stockum). His happy early childhood followed the Burnett pattern of paradise lost and regained.

Lewis obtained a scholarship to University College, Oxford in 1916. He was conscripted into World War I and was sent home after being wounded in the back by friendly fire. He continued his studies and won first-class honors in Greats (1922) and then in English (1923) followed by a distinguished academic career at Oxford and Cambridge. For one year he was a tutor in philosophy at University College, then won a post at Magdalen College, where he was an English tutor from 1925 to 1954. From there he went on to another academic post at Cambridge (Magdalene College, 1954-63).

Raised in the Church of Ireland, he became an atheist in his teens but returned to the church after long theological arguments with his friend and Oxford English faculty colleague (and a fellow member of the "Inklings", who met in Lewis' home every week for tea and literary discussion for 16 years) J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis said:

I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.

Lewis is probably best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, seven volumes of stories about young children who go to another world through an old wardrobe meet a lion named Aslan who asks for help to fight evil. Aslan says, "I never tell anyone any story except his own."

Lewis also once said:

I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.

For more on C. S. Lewis, read our remembrance of his death one week ago or check out a timeline of his life.

More Oxford bios.