Showing 319 results

Ronald Derek Hayes was a student of St John’s College. After being educated at Latymer Upper School, he came up to the Cambridge to read Geography and received a grant from the Worts Fund to study the peasant economy of Northern Portugal. He gave a talk to the Purchas Society about his research, and became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Hayes died on the 30th August 2018, at the age of eighty-six.

Nigel John Spearing was born on the 8th of October 1930, to Austen and May Spearing. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, before going up to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

After his graduation, Spearing worked in education at both Wandsworth and Elliott School. However, he was best known for his career in politics, which began when he joined the Labour Party. He became the MP for Acton in 1970, and Newham South in 1974; he would hold this seat until the abolishment of the constituency in 1997. During his time in politics, he promoted the Private Members Bill, which became the Industrial Diseases (Notification) Act 1981. A noted Eurosceptic, Spearing chaired a panel on European Legislation and campaigned both against the common market and for British independence from the European Union.

Spearing occupied his spare time with rowing, cycling, and reading. He married his wife Wendy in 1956, and they had one son and two daughters. He died on the 8th of January 2017.

Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist, zoologist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He was among the last generation of "explorer" scientists, exploring the Alaskan and Siberian Arctic, the Galapagos Islands, and the Amazonian jungle on a mission to discover the history of the climate.
Colinvaux was born on September 22, 1930 in St. Albans, England. He grew up in London during the Battle of Britain, studying, even as a boy, the ecology of plant regrowth in the craters left by German bombs. He attended University College School in London, where his activities included rowing in the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.
After graduating from UCS, Colinvaux served in the British Army of the Rhine in occupied Germany as a Second Lieutenant, Royal Artillery, 42nd Regiment. After leaving the army, Colinvaux studied at Jesus College, Cambridge completing his BA in 1956 and his MA in 1960.
After graduating, he emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was employed by a government soil survey and where he met his wife, Llewellya Hillis. Hillis and Colinvaux emigrated to the United States where Colinvaux earned his Ph.D. as a paleoecologist in 1962 from Duke University.
Colinvaux extracted fossilized pollen from the bottom of ancient lakes as a tool to investigate climate conditions at the end of the last glacial maximum. The pollen buried in the mud could then be dated and used to identify pre-historic climate conditions. In a pre-Google Earth era, without benefit of GPS technology, Colinvaux explored in the old ways, quizzing tribal fishermen and local traders, interviewing bush pilots, and poring over aerial maps to identify sectors of jungle to search for tiny, unmapped lakes undisturbed by streams or human activity. His research was instrumental in laying the foundation for modern thinking and research on Amazonian species diversity. In 1966, he discovered a new species of flower in the Galapagos, which was subsequently named for him (Passiflora colinvauxii), as was the Galapagos diatom, Amphora paulii.
After completing post-doctoral studies at Yale University, Colinvaux and Hillis both took up appointments in the Department of Botany & Zoology at Ohio State University in 1964. He became Professor Emeritus in zoology there from 1964 until 1991. In 1971 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His skill as an orator was renowned. During his years at Ohio State University, Colinvaux won every teaching prize that could then be awarded for undergraduate teaching and he was the recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1985. During the Vietnam-era student uprising and occupation of Ohio State in May 1970, Colinvaux addressed, impromptu, a throng of demonstrating students, using the power of his voice and words to disperse the crowd. In 1991 Colinvaux and Hillis left Ohio State University to take positions with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. They then moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they were affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Colinvaux was the author of several books. His most famous 1979 book 'Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare' uses the second law of thermodynamics to argue that big meat-eating animals are rare because the available energy in each step in the food chain is degraded. In 1973 he authored the first undergraduate textbook in Ecology, which was used, in various editions, to educate generations of students He is also the author of 'The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History' (1980) and a scientific memoir 'Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice Age Equator' (2008).
In 2013, he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Quaternary Association. He died on February 28, 2016 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, leaving two children (Catherine and Roger) and four grandchildren.

James Beaumont Neilson was an engineer who contributed greatly towards the expansion of the British iron industry in the 19th century. He was born on the 22nd of June 1792 in Shettleston, Scotland, to Walter Neilson and his wife Barbara. Walter was an engine-wright at Govan colliery, and Neilson joined him there after leaving elementary education at fourteen. Neilson’s brother John would become a prominent engineer, and after two years at Govan Neilson became his apprentice at Oakbank. During his spare time, he studied physics and chemistry from Anderson’s Institution in Glasgow.

In 1814, Neilson was appointed as an engine-wright at a colliery in Irvine, but it was not to last; he lost his job when his employer’s business failed. Neilson then moved to Glasgow, and became appointed foreman at the Glasgow gasworks at the age of twenty-five. He rose through the ranks to manager and engineer, and used his influence to improve both the manufacture and utilization of gas and the lives of his employees. Neilson encouraged the men to educate themselves, establishing a workers’ institute which featured a library, lecture room, a laboratory, and a workshop.

Neilson is best known for his discovery of the value of hot blast in iron manufacture, a breakthrough which he began to research in the 1820’s. He came to the conclusion that the manufacture of iron would be more efficient if hot blast was used rather than cold. The prevailing view at the time was that cold blast was more effective for the manufacture of iron, and the ironmasters were reluctant to allow Neilson to test his theory on their furnaces. However, when the hot blast was finally tested at the Clyde ironworks, it was so immediately successful that two other men—Charles Macintosh and John Wilson—entered into a partnership with Neilson to patent the invention.

With refinement, hot blast allowed the same amount of fuel to produce three times as much iron, and with a wider range of fuel than had worked with cold blast. Neilson’s success—to the tune of £30,000 a year—led to controversy. In 1832 the Baird ironmasters challenged Neilson’s patent and refused to pay the licence duty that allowed them to use his process. The resistance snowballed; in 1833 Neilson had conducted three legal cases against iron companies who challenged his patent. He enjoyed several more years of success until 1839, when the Bairds challenged him again. This began a four year legal battle involving twenty separate court actions against different British iron companies, with many in Scotland forming an association against Neilson. The case was finally closed in England at the end of 1841, in Neilson’s favour. The Scottish trial in 1843 set a record for the longest trial conducted at the time and called over 102 witnesses before settling, again, in Neilson’s favour.

Neilson married Barbara Montgomerie in 1815. After her death, he remarried Jane Gemmell in 1846, but she would also died in 1863. In 1832 Neilson became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1846. He retired in 1847, and purchased a property in the Isle of Bute, before moving to Queenshill in 1851. There, he founded an institution similar to the one he had set up for his workers in Glasgow. Neilson died on the 18th of January 1865, survived by four sons and three daughters.

Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, holding geographical research and teaching posts at universities around the world for sixty years. He is currently Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.
Peter Haggett was born in Pawlett, Somerset on 24th January 1933 and he was educated at Dr Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater. He read geography at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-first in 1954. He started teaching at University College London (1955-57) and then at Cambridge University where he was University Demonstrator in Geography (1957-62); University Lecturer in Geography (1962-66); Director of Studies for Magdalene, Pembroke, and Trinity College (1957-66) and a tutor and Fellow at Fitzwilliam College (1963-66). He then took up a teaching position at the University of Bristol in 1966 and has remained based there for the rest of his career.
A gold medallist of both the Royal Geographical Society and the American Geographical Society, he has also been awarded the Anders Retzius medal (Sweden), the Vautrid Lud prize (France) and the Lauréat d’Honneur (International Geographical Union). He holds seven honorary degrees in Law and in Science from universities on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1994 he became an honorary Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and in 1993 he was awarded the CBE for services to geography.
Peter Haggett has researched and written on three main scientific areas. First, on the nature of geography as a discipline and its contribution to human understanding of the earth. Secondly, on quantitative methods in human geography and locational analysis. The third area has been on applying geographical ideas, especially diffusion waves, to understanding the changing geography of infectious diseases. This has been the focus of his sustained research over the last quarter-century.
He has served as a visiting scientist at both the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, and the World Health Organisation, Geneva. He has written and edited over 20 books, covering all three of his areas of expertise. With three Cambridge colleagues, he has also established two journals reviewing developments in the field: Progress in physical geography and Progress in human geography.
In addition to his geographic interests, Professor Haggett has acted as Vice Chancellor of Bristol University. He also served as Vice President of the British Academy and as a member of the National Radiological Protection Board. For seven years he chaired the Wellcome Trust’s History of Medicine panel. He was one of the two geographers amongst the founding members of the European Academy, and he is currently the only European geographer to hold honorary foreign membership of both the American Academy of Arts and Science and the US National Academy of Sciences.
Now retired, but continuing his research actively, he lives in a small Somerset village with his wife, Brenda. They have four children and six grand-children in Australia and England.

Henry Dawes Bonsey was born the third son of William Henry Bonsey, of Slough, Buckinghamshire. He earned his BA from St John’s College, Cambridge in 1874. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1872, and called to the bar in 1875. He was a reporter for the Law Times, Queen’s Bench Division, and also stood as Recorder of Bedford from 1910-1912, and Judge of County Court No. 2 from 1911.

Bonsey married his wife, Helen Jane, in 1898. He died in Newcaste-upon-Tyne on the 12th of May 1919, aged 68.

George Gordon Coulton was was a British historian, known for numerous works on medieval history. He was born in King's Lynn on 15th October 1858 and attended Lynn Grammar School and then Felsted School. In 1877 he won a scholarship to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, but a severe case of blood poisoning meant he was awarded an aegrotat degree.
After leaving Cambridge, Coulton was briefly a master at a school in Malvern before being ordained deacon in 1883. By 1885 his beliefs led him to forsake his entry into the priesthood and he instead turned to teaching, holding a number of posts in various public schools.
In 1896 his employment at a coaching establishment in Eastbourne allowed him time to develop his medieval studies, and he became an expert on the primary sources of the period. From 1900 Coulton began to publish works on the medieval period, probably the most important being two anthologies of medieval sources: 'A Medieval Garner' (1910) and 'Social Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation' (1918).
In 1911 Coulton returned to Cambridge to become Birkbeck Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at Trinity College, and in 1919 he was elected to a lectureship in the English faculty and to a Fellowship at St John's College. He retired from his faculty position in 1934, and devoted himself to research and writing. He published a number of important works during this period, among them 'The Medieval Village' (1925), 'Art and the Reformation' (1928), 'Inquisition and Liberty' (1938), 'Medieval Panorama' (1938), and 'Five Centuries of Religion', published in four volumes between 1923 and 1950, the last appearing posthumously. He spent the majority of the war years (1940-1944) in Canada, as a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1929.
Coulton was something of a controversialist and much of his work was directed at Roman Catholic historians, whom he accused of having a flagrant disregard for historical accuracy. As an historian, Coulton was most noted for his attention to primary sources, particularly those illuminating religious, social and economic topics. For Coulton, historical truth, which he placed in those sources, accurately cited, was the cornerstone of historical study. Something of a modernist, he considered it his duty as an historian to confront those who proffered what he believed to be a less than accurate view of the past.
Coulton, though, is remembered for more than this confrontational reputation. His extensive scholarship, which extended much further than many historical works at the turn of the century, is rightly seen as important. He contributed to a widening of the range of medieval studies by his attention to social and economic issues. He was also a strong advocate for compulsory military service and an active member of the National Service League who wrote and spoke publicly on the subject. Coulton was keen to extend his learning to a much wider audience than just those in academic circles, being a fine public speaker and a clear and lucid writer.
In 1904 Coulton married Rose Dorothy Ilbert, and together they had two daughters. Coulton died on March 4th 1947.

Sir John Sandys was born in May 1844 in Leicester, to the Reverend Timothy of Calcutta and Rebecca. He came into residence at St John’s in Michaelmas Term 1863. He obtained many awards during his studies including the Bell scholarship at the end of his first year of study, Browne Medal and Porson Prize in 1865, the Porson Prize for a second time the following year, Members’ Prize in 1866 and 1867, before graduating BA as Senior Classic in 1867. The same year, he was elected to the Fellowship, and he was to remain a Fellow until his death. He served as a College tutor for 30 years between 1870 and 1900, and as Public Orator for the University between 1876 and his retirement in 1919.
Sandys wrote a number of books on classical subjects, most notably a 'History of Classical Scholarship'. Published in three volumes between 1903 and 1908, it still remains a valuable reference guide. Sandys married Mary Grainger in 1880, was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1909 and died in 1922. He was a generous benefactor to the College, and also bequeathed a sum of money to the University to found a studentship.

Obituary in The Eagle: Vol. 43, Michaelmas Term 1922, p. 15

Katherine of Aragon was Queen Consort of England from June 1509 until May 1533 as the first wife of King Henry VIII. She was previously Princess of Wales as the wife of Henry's elder brother, Arthur.
She was born Catalina in Alcalá de Henares, Spain on 16 December 1485. She was the youngest daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516) and Isabella of Castile (1451–1504).
Along with her older sisters, she received an education fitting for one who was intended for marriage with foreign rulers. In addition to her acquisition of the domestic arts, Catalina's skill in Latin, and knowledge of classical and vernacular literature, brought her the admiration of the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives and of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
The notion of a marriage between Catalina and the heir to the English throne Prince Arthur (born 19 September 1486), seems to have originated when the princess was only two. In 1487 ambassadors were sent to England to negotiate the marriage. The negotiations were protracted and complicated by events and alliances in Europe and also by the fact that both Arthur and Catalina were children. The marriage was formalised in a treaty agreed at Medina in 1489, where it was agreed that it should be deferred until the two children came of age. A proxy marriage ceremony took place in 1499 and it was then solemnized in London in 1501. Arthur died, still aged only fifteen, on 2 April 1502.
After Arthur’s death, Katherine was quickly betrothed to Arthur's younger brother Henry (later Henry VIII) and a formal treaty to this effect was concluded in June 1503, but again it was necessary for Henry to be of a suitable age before the marriage could take place so they were not married until 1509. The first years of her marriage saw Katherine's hold on her husband, and her political influence, at their height. She was frequently pregnant but suffered a long series of miscarriages and stillbirths. In 1511 she gave birth to Prince Henry (known as the 'New Year's Prince') but he only lived for a few weeks before dying of unknown causes. In February 1516 she did have a child who lived – the princess Mary - who later became Mary I (Mary Tudor).
Katherine had already been fluent in French and Latin when she arrived in England, and she now became proficient in English. She defended the interests of Queens' College, Cambridge, and interceded with Henry to protect Lady Margaret Beaufort's benefaction to St John's College. She provided exhibitions for poor scholars and supported lectureships at both Oxford and Cambridge. She may have been involved in trying to persuade Erasmus to prolong his stay in England beyond 1514, and was habitually praised by him; he dedicated his Christiani matrimonii institutio (1526) to her.
The first moves in the procedure to annul Katherine's marriage took place in 1527. The specific problem was not merely that Henry and Katherine were related in the first degree of affinity, but that sexual relations with a brother's wife were among those specifically forbidden in the Bible (Leviticus).
On 22 June Henry demanded formal separation. Katherine contended that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, that her marriage to Henry was therefore valid in the sight of God and man, and, moreover, that Henry knew this. She stuck to this unalterably thereafter. The case went on for many years. Following the announcement in February 1531 that Henry was 'Supreme Head' of the English church 'as far as the law of Christ allowed', Pope Clement offered Henry a compromise to allow a trial to take place. The council saw Katherine in May 1531, but she refused any compromise and spiritedly defended both the papal supremacy and her marriage.
On 11 July 1531 Henry and Katherine saw each other for the last time. The queen and her daughter were also separated. Katherine was ordered to The More in Hertfordshire, and Mary remained at Windsor. Mother and daughter never met again.
In 1532 the death of Archbishop Warham opened the way to a settlement. On 8 May Thomas Cranmer, the new archbishop of Canterbury, summoned Katherine to his court at Dunstable but she refused to appear. On 23 May Cranmer pronounced her marriage null, finding that her marriage to Arthur had been consummated, and that no dispensation could remove an impediment resulting from divine law.
On 23 March 1534 Rome at last pronounced on Katherine's marriage, decisively in her favour, but too late to influence events in England. In May 1534 she was removed to a secure house at Kimbolton, in Huntingdonshire. She died there on 7 January 1536. Katherine was buried at Peterborough Abbey on 29 January 1536. No monument was ever erected.

Philip Malcolm Shaw was born in Huddersfield in 1921. He was educated at Royds Hall and Manchester Grammar Schools, before coming up to Cambridge in 1939 as a member of St John’s College. He completed his B.A. in Natural Sciences in 1942, and would go on to pursue postgraduate study at University College London after the Second World War. However, immediately after his graduation he worked in the chemical industry at Grangemouth for the duration of the war. Shaw continued in his career as a chemical engineer, becoming managing director and then director of various companies, until his retirement. He then moved to the Lake District.

Shaw died in 2003.

Admitted to St John's, 1584; graduated BA, 1588 and MA, 1591. Was a Fellow of the College by 1595. BD, 1599. Held the rectories (consecutively) of: Honington, Suffolk; East Ham, Essex; South Luffenham, Rutland. Senior Bursar of St John's, 1607-1610; Master, 1612-1633. Under his Mastership, important improvements were made to the administration and recordkeeping of the College. Made Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1615. Made archdeacon of Huntingdon and held a prebend at Lincoln Cathedral from 1622. Initiated the building of a new library at St John's, which was completed in 1624. Buried in the College Chapel.