Tuesday 11th November 2014 - Remembrance

Along, I guess, with several other members of the University Executive Board, I am from the first generation in over a century not to have had direct experience of war or of a wartime economy.  My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were of serving age in the second and first world wars respectively.  I know of relatives who were involved in the Boer War, and one of my wife’s ancestors was a Troop Sergeant Major in the Crimean War and took part in the Charge of the Light Brigade.  I know that the parents of many UEB members did war service, or were conscripted into National Service during the later 1940s or 1950s.  And I know that the father of one UEB member was held as a prisoner-of-war: others of my colleagues may also have that experience written into their family histories – I don’t know.

The modal age decade of University Executive Board members is almost certainly in their 50s (although there are some younger and some older).  For our undergraduate students, many born in the 1990s, it will have been their great grandparents or grandparents who would have been involved in the Second World War.

My own father was in an occupation that was initially ‘reserved’, but that classification later changed and he was called up into the Royal Air Force well before his twenty-first birthday – in other words at the age of many of our final year undergraduates.  My mother was in a reserved occupation throughout the war, but I had female relatives who served in various ways.  I sometimes wonder how our current students would fare put into the same sort of situation. War is now something that passes most of us in universities by.  And I am thankful that is the case.  But I am, of course, cognisant of the students and ex-students who were called up to serve in the two World Wars, and who left their studies to serve in the trenches, in Normandy, the Far East, or in the Royal Navy. 

I was chairing today’s Executive Board, with a very long and complex agenda.  But at 1100 I stopped the proceedings and we observed the two minutes silence.  The Vice-Chancellor had previously left the meeting to lay a wreath at the University’s war memorial.  These were the right things for us to do – both as representatives of the University and in personal capacities as individuals who have grown up – in the UK, in Australia, in the USA – in circumstances of peace.

Here’s a final twist – I’m entering this blog whilst on the train to London to have dinner with an ex-student who has become a very successful businessman and who is deeply grateful for his education at our University.  It will be delightful to catch up with him, and to hear about life in the country he is from and which is now a close partner of the UK.  He is German.