An obscure book, which was stored in Cambridge after travelling to Britain via a Hornblower-style Napoleonic naval adventure, has been identified centuries later as an exceptionally rare document of early Chinese music.

According to experts in China, the small volume of musical scores may well be unique, and is a priceless resource for anyone interested in the country’s pre-modern musical heritage, for which very little of the original literature survives.

For the last 210 years, it has been kept at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, but its value and importance were only realised last month, when a visiting Chinese scholar called Dr Jian Yang was advised by an academic colleague that he might want to look at “that odd little book” in the College library.

Yang immediately realised its significance for Chinese music, but further research then revealed that it had reached Cambridge only after surviving the Napoleonic naval engagement known as the Battle of Pulo Aura.

The book appears to have been en route back from China with its owner, the Reverend James Inman, in 1804, when the boat he was sailing with was caught up in the skirmish. The encounter itself is a boys’ own tale of dauntless heroism, in which a barely-defended British merchant fleet saw off a French naval squadron through a combination of trickery and daring.

“When I saw the book, I realised almost immediately that it might be a very rare volume of Gongche notation, printed in China around 1770,” Yang said. “I have consulted other researchers and none of them has ever seen any other copy of this title, so it is quite possibly unique.”

“We should count ourselves very lucky that James Inman survived his difficult voyage bringing it back from China to Britain. After 210 years of silence, it means that we now have the chance to learn more about Chinese culture and music.”

Inman, who signed the book and dated it February 1804, was a mathematician graduate of St John’s and went on to become a Fellow. A year before he obtained the book, he had been appointed replacement astronomer aboard HMS Investigator, a ship charged with the task of “charting Australian waters”. According to the records, the previous astronomer pulled out with a severe case of seasickness.

Inman’s two-year trip was far from uneventful. He made it to Australia where he disembarked at Port Jackson, Sydney. Most of his shipmates were then transferred to HMS Porpoise, but he chose to stay, leaving on a later boat bound for China called the Rolla. This proved a good move as both the Porpoise and another boat were shipwrecked on a reef, and Inman’s own ship participated in the rescue.

He arrived at Whampoa in Canton (modern Guangzhou) on 14 December, 1803, where he stayed for a few weeks, and where he appears to have picked up the book. Early in 1804, however, Inman was at sea again, this time heading for England aboard the East India Company’s Warley, part of the British China Fleet.

This Fleet, laden with valuable trading wares, had become a target for the French under Napoleon. The Emperor had assigned Admiral Durand Linois command of French forces in the Indian Ocean, with the express purpose of harrying British merchant shipping. On 15 February, Linois spotted his prize at the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, off the Malaysian coast.

Typically, a lightly-armed merchant fleet would have turned and fled, but instead its commanding officer, Commodore Nathaniel Dance, manoeuvred his boats into defensive formation and ordered several to hoist the Ensign, in an effort to trick the French into thinking they were facing British warships.

Amazingly, the ruse worked – Linois turned tail and fled, and was pursued by Dance until the convoy was safe. Dance was later knighted by King George III, while Linois had a less illustrious career: after being reprimanded by Napoleon, he returned to sea, where he suffered a series of humiliating defeats against weaker opponents before being captured in 1806, ironically after he mistook a British naval squadron for a merchant convoy.

Inman meanwhile arrived safely back in Britain on 14 August, 1804. He became a Fellow of St John’s the following year, and donated his collection of Chinese books to the College.

The book itself is entitled Xian Di Pipa Pu, which means the musical score for Chinese flute and “pipa” (a Chinese lute). It contains a condensed introduction to three instruments – “Xiao” (a type of recorder), “Di” (Chinese flute) and “Sanxian” (the three-stringed Chinese lute). This is followed by 13 pieces of music in the traditional Gongche notation.

It is particularly valuable because attempts to understand China’s musical heritage have been thwarted by a lack of reliable historical documents. Zhiwu Wu, Professor of Chinese Music at Xinghai Conservatory in Guangzhou, who has analysed Yang’s find, said: “The discovery of this rare volume of pre-modern Chinese musical notation might contribute a great deal to current research and performance of Chinese traditional music and some of the pieces included might be the earliest and only source available.”

Yang believes that Inman may have been drawn to the manuscript, despite his lack of a musical background, because of his academic interests. “Beside the wide range of interests that we can infer from his biography, there is a subtle relationship between mathematics, astronomy and music in both Western and Chinese culture,” he said. “This may well have attracted him to the book in the first place.”

For more information about this story, please contact: Tom Kirk, tdk25@cam.ac.uk

Highlights from Ramsay’s personal archive – which includes his D-Day diary, maps and photographs, eyewitness accounts from Dunkirk, and correspondence with Field Marshal Montgomery – will be on display as a distinguished army of speakers pay tribute to the man who masterminded the British landings at Normandy.

Admiral Ramsay’s role required detailed planning as well as inter-service and international diplomacy of the highest order. When Churchill suggested that he and King George VI should be allowed to witness the June 6 landings, Ramsay, according to his diary, managed to persuade both that the risk was unacceptable.

Thursday’s keynote speaker is Dr Andrew Gordon, a British naval historian currently putting the finishing touches to an eagerly-anticipated biography of Ramsay. The biography, a preview of which will be given at Churchill, is a timely reminder and fitting memorial to Ramsay who was killed in 1945 when his plane crashed in France, en-route to meet Montgomery in Brussels.

Joining Dr Gordon will be Commodore Michael Clapp, commander to the Falklands Amphibious Task Group during the 1982 conflict, and Mrs Fanny Hugill, a ‘Ramsay Wren’ during the Second World War, who will give a first-hand account of working with Ramsay – including her recollection of  being on duty as Operation Neptune (the landing operations of Operation Overlord) unfolded.

Also speaking during the afternoon are Sir Bertram’s two sons Charles and David Ramsay. Charles had his own eminent military career rising to the rank of Major-General, while David is a distinguished author and historian.

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “Sadly, because of Admiral Ramsay’s untimely death, his undoubted contribution to the Second World War has been somewhat overshadowed by those who lived and were able to write their memoirs and receive their honours. It’s fitting that almost 70 years after he oversaw Operation Neptune, we have such a distinguished array of speakers coming together to celebrate and consider his legacy.

“The Churchill Archives Centre is home to Ramsay’s personal papers, all of which have been hugely important to Dr Gordon’s research and will continue to be of great value to historians looking at this crucial period of British history.”

The event is free and press and public are welcome to attend.

Astronomers exploring the disk of debris around the young star Beta Pictoris have discovered a compact cloud of carbon monoxide located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star. This concentration of poisonous gas – usually destroyed by starlight – is being constantly replenished by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies.

In fact, to offset the destruction of carbon monoxide (CO) molecules around the star, a large comet must be getting completely destroyed every five minutes, say researchers.

They suggest the comet swarm is most likely frozen debris trapped and concentrated by the gravity of an as-yet-unseen exoplanet.

This mystery ‘shepherd’ exoplanet – so-called for its capacity to corral the swarms of comets through its gravitational pull, like Jupiter in our own solar system – is likely to be about the size of Saturn.    

"Detailed dynamical studies are now under way, but at the moment we think this shepherding planet would be around Saturn's mass and positioned near the inner edge of the CO belt," said Mark Wyatt, from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who proposed the shepherd model – currently the favoured hypothesis because it explains so many puzzling features of the Beta Pictoris disk.

"We think the Beta Pictoris comet swarms formed when the hypothetical planet migrated outward, sweeping icy bodies into resonant orbits."

Paradoxically, the presence of carbon monoxide – so harmful to humans on Earth – could indicate that the Beta Pictoris planetary system may eventually be a good habitat for life. If there is CO in the comets, then there is likely also water ice – meaning that the cometary bombardment this system’s planets are probably undergoing could also be providing them with life-giving water.

The findings are published today in the journal Science Express.

The clump was discovered when an international team of astronomers, led by ALMA-based ESO astronomer Bill Dent, along with Wyatt, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to map the millimeter-wavelength light from dust and carbon monoxide molecules in the disk surrounding Beta Pictoris, a star located about 63 light-years away and only 20 million years old.

Beta Pictoris is considered one of the best examples of a typical young solar system, and hosts one of the closest and brightest debris disks known – making it an ideal laboratory for studying the early development of planetary systems. The latest findings that reveal a vast belt of carbon monoxide at the fringes of this system could help us understand what conditions were like during the formation of our own solar system.

Much of the carbon monoxide is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and the sun. The total amount of the gas observed exceeds 200 million billion tons – equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth’s oceans, say researchers.

The presence of all this gas is a clue that something interesting is going on because ultraviolet starlight breaks up CO molecules in about 100 years, much faster than the main cloud can complete a single orbit around the star. “So unless we are observing Beta Pictoris at a very unusual time, then the carbon monoxide we observed must be continuously replenished,” said Bill Dent, ESO astronomer based at ALMA and lead author on the paper.

The researchers calculate that a large comet must be completely destroyed every five minutes, and only an unusually massive and compact swarm of comets could support such an astonishingly high collision rate.

"Although toxic to us, carbon monoxide is one of many gases found in comets and other icy bodies," said team member Aki Roberge, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "In the rough-and-tumble environment around a young star, these objects frequently collide and generate fragments that release dust, icy grains and stored gases."

Because we view the disk nearly edge-on, the ALMA data cannot determine whether the carbon monoxide belt has a single concentration of gas or two on opposite sides of the star. Further studies of the gas cloud's orbital motion will clarify the situation, but current evidence favors a two-clump scenario, which in turn points to a shepherding planet.

In our own solar system, Jupiter's gravity has trapped thousands of asteroids in two groups, one leading and one following it as it travels around the sun. A giant planet located in the outer reaches of the Beta Pictoris system likewise could corral comets into a pair of tight, massive swarms.

Astronomers have already directly imaged one giant exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, with a mass several times greater than Jupiter, orbiting much closer to the star. While it would be unusual for a giant planet to form up to 10 times farther away, as required to shepherd the massive comet clouds, the hypothetical planet could have formed near the star and migrated outward as the young disk underwent changes. Indeed, this outward motion is needed to corral the comets.

If, however, the gas actually turns out to form a single clump, Wyatt’s recently graduated Cambridge PhD student Alan Jackson, also a co-author on the paper, suggested an even more violent alternative scenario. A crash between two Mars-sized icy planets about half a million years ago would account for the comet swarm, with frequent ongoing collisions among the fragments gradually releasing carbon monoxide gas.

Either way, Beta Pictoris clearly has a fascinating story to tell, say the scientists, one that could provide insight into the early development of our own solar system.

Due to the overwhelming level of public support and assistance from public bodies and charities, The Scott Polar Research Institute has already raised a fifth of the purchase price of £275,000 in just six weeks. Following careful negotiation, the vendors have agreed to extend the original deadline for the sale of these historic images. The Institute now has until 25 March to raise the necessary funds to purchase Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s rediscovered photographic negatives, taken in 1911 on the British Antarctic Expedition, for its Polar Museum.

As part of the Institute’s redoubling of efforts to secure the negatives, it has today launched a video of Britain's greatest living explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, giving his full support to the appeal and explaining the importance of preserving the negatives for the nation. Fiennes stresses the uniqueness of the negatives and their importance both to the national heritage and to research.

In the video, Sir Ranulph Fiennes says: “The negatives of Scott’s lost photographs are of major significance to the national heritage. Scott’s attainment of the South Pole and his subsequent death captured the public imagination on its discovery in 1913 and continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination. The negatives are a key component of the expedition’s material legacy as an object and as a collection in themselves. Although the Scott Polar Research Institute holds prints of a number of these photographs, acquiring the negatives is very important. They take us right back to the point of origin, a fact made all the more exciting given that the Institute also holds the camera on which they were taken. Unlike a print, of which any number can be made, the negatives are unique and would be a huge asset to the Institute.”

The extension to the deadline gives time to approach further funding bodies and private donors. The generosity of the public is vital in the race to ensure that the negatives remain available to all in perpetuity, for research and exhibition.

Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: “There has been an extraordinarily generous response to the appeal, proving how important Scott remains in the national imagination. Every donation, however small, brings us closer to reaching our goal of £275,000. With this new extension, I am confident we can raise the remaining funds to acquire the negatives.”

The Polar Museum needs to find a further £200,000 in the next three weeks to avoid the prospect of the 113 photographic negatives being sold at auction.

The negatives are a record of Scott’s earliest attempts - under the guidance of expedition photographer Herbert Ponting - through to his unparalleled images of his team on the Southern Journey. The force, control and beauty of his portraits and landscapes number them among some of the finest early images of the Antarctic.

The Polar Museum is already home to the remaining prints of Scott's photographs, Herbert Ponting’s glass plate negatives and Ponting’s presentation album from the same expedition. Added to that are the prints and albums of all the other expedition members equipped with a camera. Together, they form the most comprehensive photographic record of the expedition held anywhere in the world.

Anyone able to make a donation can do so here: http://bit.ly/1nWQz0k

The two teams are among 10 winners of the first Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, run by US organisations The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI), the Avon Foundation for Women, and National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.
The competition is the first of its kind and was launched last September. The teams will receive a $5,000 award from the Avon Foundation for Women and CAI. The money will allow them to take the business to the next phase with their start-up business. They will also be put in touch with venture capitalists and different funding bodies who can provide more seed funding.

The Challenge is aimed at teams of business, legal, medical/scientific, engineering, and computer science students, as well as seasoned entrepreneurs and gives them the opportunity to create strategic business plans and start new companies focused on developing and commercialising 10 inventions that the NIH deems to have high potential to benefit the treatment of breast cancer and potentially other diseases.

The first team - made up of Gates Cambridge Scholar Grecia Gonzalez, Nikolaus Wenzl, Alasdair Thong, Hind Kraytem and Tim Xu - chose to focus on early stage cancer as there is no current tool in medicine which specifically addresses the distinction between early stage cancer and invasive subtypes, which require more careful and aggressive treatment planning to resolve, potentially leading to unnecessary surgery and/or chemotherapy. These early stage cancers account for 20% of all breast cancer diagnoses, and 25-50% of these cases become invasive within 10 years.

There was also a personal reason for their choice. Grecia Gonzalez’s mother died from breast cancer last year after her initial symptoms were not regarded as serious by her doctor years before. Grecia, who is doing a PhD in Biochemistry, says: “Our platform technology can access the spatial positioning of genes within a cell. The genetic information in a cell is stored in exactly the same way in every person, but certain diseases, like cancer, can cause some genes to move. Our technology can track these early changes and more accurately assess what the cancer is doing way before other technologies currently being used can.”

Many members of the team have a strong business background. Nikolaus Wenzl, Alasdair Thong, and Hind Kraytem are doing an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise, which covers topics that parallel the competition. Tim Xu is doing an MPhil in Public Policy, Hind has a biomedical engineering background and has experience in working on start-ups from her involvement with Neuro360. The team’s business plan extends over 10 years and provides a road map for developing their business, Radial Genomics Ltd.

The second team is led by Alice MacNeil, a former ‎Research Assistant at Cambridge Judge Business School and now at Accenture. Other members are Julia Powles, a PhD student from the Faculty of Law,  Moharem El Gihani, an MBA Candidate at Lord Ashcroft International Business School, Jun-Han Su, a Business Development Intern at Bicycle Therapeutics, Aleksandra Kotwica, a PhD student in Physiology, and Alexander Frey, a PhD student in Education. Their project is about creating a versatile delivery method for cancer therapeutics.

Current methods of delivering proteins or RNA [ribonucleic acid] to mammalian cells are limited by a lack of target specificity and toxicity, among other shortcomings.  Protein transduction is an emerging technology for delivering proteins into cells by exploiting the ability of certain proteins to penetrate the cell membrane.  However, the majority of the proteins delivered by this means are usually trapped and subsequently degraded in the endosomes-lysosomes of recipient cells.  Virus mediated gene delivery (or gene therapy) has been widely used as a delivery method for the past two decades.  Since viruses have unique ability infect cells and deliver the contents in the cytoplasm with almost 100% efficiency, two novel technologies have been developed to deliver proteins and RNAs, respectively, based on virus-like particles. The team’s company will seek venture capitalist funding for this method of treatment and will seek to establish an open technology pool to increase the scope of gene therapy.

After winning the competition the teams will receive advice on how to build their business. The first team have already started looking for funding sources and finalising a licence agreement with the NIH.

Grecia Gonzalez says: “When my mother passed away, I was devastated. But this competition became an opportunity to channel that difficult experience into a project that will hopefully go on to have a positive impact on breast cancer treatment and peoples’ lives. I couldn’t be happier to be taking this forward with my team.”

Douglas Lowy, M.D., NCI deputy director, said: “NCI has always had a strong interest in fostering young investigators and the fact that this challenge pairs each student team with entrepreneur-mentors to assist in the development of the business plans is another example of how we can bring new ideas and energy to cancer research."

Read Grecia Gonzalez's blog on the competition.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge has been granted £87,582 by Arts Council England to allow greater permanent access to its collections of illuminated manuscripts through a new digital resource.  The Digital Layers online archive will explore a wealth of images using layer and zooming techniques inspired by internet mapping tools to show the historical, cultural and scientific secrets of the manuscripts.

The Fitzwilliam Museum and the colleges of the University of Cambridge have one of the largest, finest and most historically important selection of illuminated manuscripts in existence.  Fragile and sensitive to light, temperature and humidity, the manuscripts can only be displayed for short periods of time under special conditions to protect their delicate materials and pigments. 

Illuminated manuscripts are the most representative and best-preserved examples of medieval and Renaissance painting, doubling as portable galleries of artistic traditions through the centuries.  The manuscripts collections are one of the most popular at the Fitzwilliam, with exhibitions such as the Cambridge Illuminations in 2005 drawing record numbers of visitors.  Extensive research and digitisation of the collection, will allow enthusiasts and researchers world-wide to explore the manuscripts up-close and in-depth as has never been possible before.

The tools created for the Digital Layers project will be inspired in part by commonly used internet mapping and visualisation resources such as Google Earth and the WorldWide
Telescope project (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org). They will explore the different layers of the manuscripts uploaded online, allowing the viewer to examine its creation, from original sketches hidden beneath the illuminations, to the type of pigments, inks, and paint binders used.  These different layers will also reveal secrets about artists and patrons: where and when the manuscripts were made, how did highly-skilled professionals collaborate on their production, and how did owners use them over time and across countries.

All of this incredible detail and information has been made possible by two research projects being run by the Fitzwilliam; the Cambridge Illuminations and MINIARE.

The Cambridge Illuminations continues to research over 4000 illuminated Western manuscripts and pre-1500 printed books from the Fitzwilliam and the Cambridge Colleges, bringing them together in a multi-volume series of catalogues.

Launched in February 2012 the MINIARE project is playing a major part in the current revolution in scientific analysis of works of art - moving away from invasive techniques that take samples to using advanced imaging and spectroscopic techniques to analyse manuscripts in depth without even touching their surface.

The field of non-invasive analysis of illuminated manuscripts is still in its early days.  With opportunities to connect with science research across Cambridge University, the Fitzwilliam is uniquely placed to develop cross-disciplinary methods of comprehensive analyses, sharing the discoveries with colleagues worldwide.

Some of the analytical methods employed include fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence, as well as scientific imaging techniques such as photomicroscopy and infrared reflectography.  Using a variety of techniques, researchers can identify the composition of pigments and reveal under-drawings and preparatory sketches in the manuscripts. 

The images and information gathered from both projects will provide the foundation for the Digital Layers portal. It will play an essential part in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary exhibition in 2016, which will display the Museum’s finest illuminated manuscripts to international audiences.

The tools created for Digital Layers will be made available for re-use in Cambridge and beyond and it is hoped that the project will help set new standards in how museums can bring cutting-edge research to a wider audience.

The investment came through the Arts Council‘s Designation development fund which supports projects that ensure the long-term sustainability of Designated museum collections, and which maximise their public value and the sharing of best practice across the sector.   Successful organisations use this money to improve their collections for the benefit of their audiences, improving enjoyment, understanding and engagement.  In the University of Cambridge Museums both the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences were successful in securing grants to open their collections to wider audiences.

Hedley Swain, Area Director, South East, Arts Council England, said: “This is a really exciting project and one that we are delighted to be supporting through the Designation development fund. The Fitzwilliam Museum has incredibly important collections of illuminated manuscripts which give a wonderful insight into Medieval life. This project will see the very latest digital technology used to understand the complexity of these documents and share them with as many people as possible.”

Cambridge University Officers' Training Corps (OTC) are working as part of Operation REFLECT, the Army’s First World War commemoration initiative, to bring communities together in remembrance of those who have dedicated themselves to the protection of our country.

Lieutenant Colonel G A Macintosh OBE, Commanding Officer of the OTC, explained: “It would be great if, in a small way, we were able to shine a spotlight on local individuals who died in the Great War; creating links that connect the past and present, young and old, county and University.”

A significant number of individuals from Cambridge University lost their lives in WW1 and they are remembered by various memorials across the Colleges.

Young cadets will be visiting these memorials in the city centre, encouraging members of the public to do the same, before attending a service taking place at 1.30pm at the War Memorial on Hills Road, opposite Station Road.

Members of the public are invited to the service, and to visit the memorials in Clare, Downing, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Westminster, King’s, St Catharine’s, Corpus Christi, Gonville and Caius, Sidney Sussex, Christ’s, Jesus and Magdalene Colleges.

Many of the College memorials commemorate the losses of more than 100 fallen men, with Pembroke’s memorial representing the sacrifices of 319 individuals. The Colleges will be open between 9am and 1pm.

Elsewhere in the county, members of the Officers' Training Corps, current Army soldiers and the county running team will be visiting memorials in the surrounding towns and villages.

They will be taking photographs and collecting postcards of thanks from local schools to be displayed in the service at 1.30pm, connecting together war memorials and the brave individuals they represent.
Cambridge University OTC is formed by the students of the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge) and the University of East Anglia (Norwich).

The leadership development program is set to the same standards of military training that all Officers must undergo at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Alice Foley was born in 1891 and was so poorly that she was baptised soon afterwards; it was assumed she would die. The night of her birth, her parents did a moonlight flit from their accommodation as her father had lost his job and poor relief was denied. The family settled in Bolton where her mother took in washing to make ends meet, at the same time ensuring that her own small house was spick and span.

Looking back on her early life with five older siblings, and a father who was frequently absent or inebriated, Alice described in her autobiography, A Bolton Childhood, how her mother supported the family: “We were brought up mainly out of her washtub earnings. Frequently I accompanied her to various better-off houses and sitting on the floor amongst a pile of dirty clothes played games and prattled aloud whilst she silently scrubbed shirts and mangled sheets.”

Foley’s autobiography and other memoirs written by working class women in the long 19th century is the subject of a talk by Sophie McGeevor, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, on Monday March 10. In her presentation, she will show how this niche literary genre can help to shine a light on millions of women’s lives and, in particular, illustrate how their time was spent in a mix of paid and unpaid roles, in the home and in the workplace.

She will argue that women’s roles as paid workers was largely determined by their unpaid work as mothers, and that access to childcare or the lack of it determined what paid work they could do. Without relatives to look after their children, women who lacked the money to pay for childcare were limited in the choice of paid work. Alice’s mother could bring Alice to her employer’s home, other mothers sought work which could be done from their own homes, or which could fit in around school hours – characteristics of flexible working that parents of young children today will recognise.

McGeevor is a member of a 30-strong research group – the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure - which links the Faculty of History and Department of Geography. She is part of a project which is mapping the occupational structure of Britain from 1379 to 1911. In her presentation, she will explore the ways in which autobiographies can answer the seemingly straightforward question: how did working class women in the 19th century spend their time? 

“In the 21st century, government statisticians and social scientists routinely collect data on how men and women divide their time between paid work, unpaid work and leisure. This data is seen as crucial for understanding the economic role of the household, and individual household members, within the wider formal economy. However, with the exception of domestic servants, we know remarkably little about time-use before the 20th century,” said McGeever.

“This lack of information creates a big gap in our knowledge because a large proportion of the goods and services consumed and used by a single household may have been produced by the unpaid labour within that same household, typically the labour of women and children. Examples are goods such as hand-made clothes and home-cooked food and services such as the care of children, the sick and the elderly. These goods and services are completely invisible in historic estimates of GDP and this absence has significant consequences for our understanding of living standards in the past.”

One of the key sources for historians studying patterns of paid work is the census, first taken in 1801 in England and Wales and carried out every ten years since. While individual adult male occupations were first recorded in the 1831 census, it was not until 1851 that household heads were instructed to record married women’s occupations and only then, the instructions from 1851-1881 stated, if they were deemed to be ‘regularly employed’. This rule means that the part-time, seasonal and ‘odd jobs’ which may have constituted much of women’s work would not have been captured by the census. From the 1891 census onwards, the distinction between the recording of male and female occupations was apparently removed altogether; the householder’s instructions merely asked that ‘the occupations of women and children, if any, are to be stated as well as those of men’. However, the belief that the irregular paid work of women was not akin to an ‘occupation’ may have remained.

In a quest to fill this gap, McGeevor is examining 50 published autobiographies written by women born before 1900 and held by the British Library, that tell, in a variety of styles and viewpoints, the stories of women whose voices are seldom heard. Many were written as memoirs towards the end of their authors’ lives in order to tell the next generations what life was like. Over the course of the 19th century the British reading public was increasingly avid consumers of fictional and to a lesser extent non-fictional, tales of the life of the working poor, as demonstrated by the wide appeal of Charles Dickens’s novels and Henry Mayhew’s journalistic account, London Labour and the London Poor.

“There were lots of reasons why female autobiographers were greatly outnumbered by male autobiographers,” said McGeevor. “Women were less likely to be literate which meant that they represented a smaller proportion of the reading public and it was assumed that men wouldn’t want to read about women’s lives. Perhaps most importantly, male autobiographers were often men who had risen from humble origins to public roles in politics and wider society. Working class women had fewer opportunities to do this.”

The picture that emerges from the autobiographies McGeevor is studying challenges many of our preconceptions about class and the way people lived – and also charts the radical changes that took place in the course of the century in terms of the ways in which women (and their families) organised their lives.

Details of life in London recorded by Mary Ann Ashford, born in 1787, makes surprising reading today. At only four months old she was sent to Camberwell to live with a nurse called Mrs Long. It was common at this time among families who lived in cities, and had the means to pay, to have their children looked after by women who lived in what was seen to be the relatively healthful air of the countryside and suburbs. Mary Anne’s parents jointly owned an inn in the City of London, and while Mary Ann stayed with Mrs Long they only saw her on evening visits and in the holidays.

For her parents, and particularly her mother, not having to care for the young Mary Ann on a day-to-day basis meant that she could be an active partner in the family business. However, for Mary Ann the consequences seem far from ideal; she noted that Mrs Long ensured that she looked clean and tidy when her parents were expected but otherwise sent her charge to school in “an unwashed and slovenly manner”. McGeevor notes that: “Noticeably absent in Mary Ann’s account of her mother is a sense of emotionally intensive parenting, a phenomena which appears to emerge only in the later 19th-century autobiographies. Of course, the vast majority of mothers loved and cared for their children, but they did not seem to think their presence was necessary for what we would now call their psychological wellbeing.”

For Mrs Long perhaps the cleanliness of her boarders was overlooked in the midst of her additional work. Mrs Long took in washing as well as child boarders – and wash days were busy. Mary Ann writes: “As she had the whole of the washing from the City Arms, she requested that my governess to let me bring my dinner and stop with her on busy days.” In the popular imagination, governesses are associated with the upper classes so it’s disconcerting to read references to Mary Ann’s “governess”, who was in fact her day-school teacher.

“It’s no coincidence that laundry features in so many of these women’s stories. Taking in washing, or going out to other people’s houses to do washing, required a great deal of strength but a minimum of skill or expensive tools or materials not already owned by women – and it could be planned to fit around women’s work at home and childcare responsibilities. Working class women had to be flexible and they had to multi-task, they had to be resilient and resourceful – all qualities that are valuable for working women today, particularly in developing economies,” said McGeevor.

There are a number of developments in 19th-century society which had many positive benefits for the wider population while conversely increasing the burden of unpaid work for women.  As standards of hygiene improved, medical advances were made and urban infrastructure grew, child mortality rates fell and women found themselves caring for ever larger families. Mass manufacturing enabled the less well-off to buy cheap household goods and clothing. More consumer goods meant more things to look after – clothes to keep clean, food to be cooked at home on a stove rather than purchased ready-made or eaten cold.

McGeevor commented: “There are two key stories emerging from my research. The first is that the paid work which women did was constrained by their access to childcare – childcare and work had to be either combined or childcare had to be outsourced. The second is that children’s living standards and development were determined not just by the paid work of their fathers, but also by the paid, and crucially the unpaid, work of their mothers. While men’s wages were rarely elastic – and did not increase each time there was a new mouth to feed – women’s time, within the limits of the 24 hour day, typically came increasingly under pressure as they took on more paid work or spent more time, cooking, cleaning and caring for their families.”

In a seminar on Monday 10 March, 1pm in Seminar Room 5 at the Faculty of History, Sophie McGeevor will explore the question: ‘What can autobiographies tell us about women's time-use in 19th century England?’ All welcome.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

Inset images: Magdalen Laundry, Ireland, early 20th century; Cook with Red Apron by Léon Bonvin, Walters Art Museum; The Butter Churn by Ralph Hedley, Bonhams; Old Lodging House in St Giles by Hubert von Herkomer, 1872 (all Wikipedia Commons)
 

In mid-19th century China, the great Qing Empire experienced an uprising that led to the death of at least 20 million people, roughly 5% of the population in the empire and nearly 2% of the global population. Known in contemporary Britain as the Taiping Rebellion, it is often described as the bloodiest civil war in history. The Taiping forces – composed of miners, smiths, charcoal burners, out-of-work coolies and former pirates -– faced the armies of the ruling Qing dynasty in a conflict that lasted 14 years. The conflict began in July 1850 with the gathering of a force numbering 20,000 at Thistle Mountain in Guangxi Province and ended in July 1864 with the Qing recovery of Nanjing.

The Taiping Rebellion arose from tensions between the Hakka and Zhuang ethnicities and the Qing authorities, and had its roots in a heterodox Christianity called the God Worshipping Society. A crucial episode in the conflict was the campaign for Anqing, the provincial capital of Anhui in central China, which was taken by the Taiping in October 1853. The Qing siege of this walled city was the first of numerous sieges across all 18 provinces of the empire and it set the agenda for the much of the conflict to come.

Most notably, the siege of Anqing saw the Qing armies make their first use of ‘investment’ – a term to describe the severing of supply routes as a military tactic to bring about the fall of a city. At a talk on Tuesday 11 March, Kang Tchou, a PhD candidate in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Faculty at Cambridge University, will discuss the ways in which the campaign for Anqing spurred both sides in the conflict to introduce new military technologies and strategies.

Tchou chose to study at Cambridge for several reasons, among them the existence of unique resources held by the University Library (UL). The Wade Collection of Chinese and Manchu books (and western books about China) was presented to the UL in 1886 by Sir Thomas Francis Wade (1818-1895), who negotiated with both the Taiping and the Qing as Lord Elgin’s Chinese secretary. Wade later became first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge. Classified under "Miscellaneous" books, is a rare collection of ‘pamphlets issued by the Tai-pings during their great rebellion’.

The Taiping fought for their way of life and ultimately paid with their lives. When Anqing fell, an event documented by the diaries of a bureaucrat named Zhao Liewen on the personal staff of the Qing commander-in-chief Governor General Zeng Guofan, all its adult male inhabitants were slaughtered and more than 10,000 women were carried off by Qing soldiers as booty, sparing perhaps only some of the children. With them perished all first-hand experiences of holding out against the besieging forces that had surrounded them for almost two years – testing to the brink the patience and tenacity of the Qing and their superior military might. The Qing soldiers who entered the city on 5 September 1861 found evidence that the inhabitants had resorted to cannibalism for there were records that human flesh had a market rate of the equivalent of 50 pence per kilogram.

The items in the Wade Collection currently of greatest interest to Tchou are Taiping pamphlets, dealing with military operation and administration, as well as archival materials from the Ming-Qing archives, local gazetteers and data collected from field work while in China. Meticulous study of these materials, which are written in literary Chinese in documentary style and use traditional characters, is helping Tchou to build a realistic picture of a battle that has long been overlooked by historians.

The Wade Collection’s Taiping pamphlets, 32 in kind and 40 in number, represent an extraordinarily precious source for a historian of the period. “In China, there are just three of these pamphlets – which is an indication of the rarity of our collection,” says Tchou. “They were printed either with woodblock printing or moveable type and would have been circulated throughout the Taiping Kingdom and to foreign missionaries and the emissaries of foreign governments. Together they cover every aspect of the Taiping’s philosophies – from religious rituals, to military administration and organisation – and provide  a window through which the historian can glimpse the past through the veil of historiography.”

It was essential that Tchou visited the sites he was researching and get a grasp of the physical terrain of the Anqing and its surroundings – and visit sites that survive to tell the story of the siege. Two years ago he flew from the UK to China to spend 11 months doing archival research at national and local archives, and carry out battle field surveys in central and southern Anhui. The trip was funded by a travel award from the Cambridge Overseas Trust. “As I sat on the plane, I ran through the objectives of my research which were to find primary and secondary sources and to verify them as much as possible through field work,” he said.

“As every academic discovers, research opens up more questions than it answers and I found myself constantly re-examining the relationship between the printed text and realities on the ground. I had set up appointments with scholars of modern Chinese history in national universities, local historians in Anhui province and organised access to the Ming-Qing Archives and Taiping History Museum – but I also wanted to find the actual location that the sources describe and the experts discuss.”

Today Anqing is a conurbation of 5.3 million people – a place where there is comparatively little evidence of either its turbulent history or modern China’s economic boom. The city lies on the northern bank of the Yangtze river and is reached from the north by the Jixian pass, a strategic entrance from northern Anhui into the outskirts of the city. It was its strategic location that led to Anqing being caught up in the ferocious conflict between the Taiping, who were holding fast to the city, and the Qing who surrounded it.

As the Qing gradually tightened their grip on the city, they encircled it with a line of circumvallation (circular fortifications) several kilometres in length, formed by earthen ramparts covered with a layer of thick stone that was further entrenched with rings of trenches filled with sharpened bamboo stakes to slow down enemy infantry. This line of defence was further protected with rings of sharpened thick wooden stakes to stop any potential cavalry charges.  To protect their positions from Taiping forces sent to relieve the siege from their capital in Nanjing, Qing forces also built a second line of second line of contravallation (outer fortifications) using similar fortifications outside the line of circumvallation.

The Qing forces advanced slowly and painfully spending half a day on the march and the rest building temporary defences around their camps out of wood, mud and wet cotton. “Previous conflicts in China had been fought with hand weapons – swords, halberds, spears and swords and older types of firearms such as jingals and muskets – but now both sides began to use rifles and artillery pieces purchased from the European merchants in Shanghai and to manufacture their own versions of these military innovations. The use of these weapons transformed both the way of fighting and logistics necessary to supply the armies,” said Tchou.

“Rivers played a crucial role in transportation of food, weapons and munitions. A few years ago you could find a local family living on boats to take you to Anqing but now there are only luxury tourist cruises on the Yangtze river. However, traveling by the inter-county roads you can still see how the complex waterways with the smaller channels and tributaries were ideal for smuggling supplies and rifles and artillery, sold by British merchants in Shanghai, past the besieging armies and into the walled city.”

The Taiping rebels holding out inside Anqing were predominantly Hakka and Zhuang. The Hakka were traditional builders of village fortifications and the Zhuang were charcoal burners and miners which meant that they were expert in tunnelling and building fortifications – evidence of tunnels and lines of circumvallation and contravallation are still visible today. Tchou said: “One of my greatest surprise discoveries was at the location of Jixian pass, where you can see the ruins of the stone fortification that formed either the line of circumvallation or contravallation. According to my guide, a local refuse collector who as a child walked his younger sister everyday over Jixian pass so that she could attend school in the city, the ruins run for at the least 2 kilometres atop the mountains to the north of Anqing.”    

Both the French and the British got involved in the Taiping Rebellion by sending forces to defend their interests in treaty ports such as Shanghai. Their motivation lay in their desire to choose the winning side — the side that could guarantee their right to trade in all of China. Either as regular forces of the respective governments or as mercenaries for hire, veterans of the Crimean War (1853-6) and soldiers who were trained to fight in the US Civil war (1861-5) brought with them new Anglo-American and European methods of warfare that included the use of the latest rifles and field artillery and concepts of logistics and administration and the use of steamships in riverine navies.

Tchou hopes that his presentation  will lead to a discussion of new approaches to non-European wars that were fought in the 19th century and demonstrate how much there is still left to discover on a topic that is either considered ‘forgotten’ or ‘already been done’.

The talk New Perspectives on the Taiping and Qing Civil War: Rediscovering Anqing, as a Place of Innovation in Nineteenth Century Warfare will take place on Tuesday, 11 March, 2014 at 5pm in the Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. All welcome. For more information contact Rudolph Ng rn339@cam.ac.uk  

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

Inset images: Kang Tcho in Anqing, detail from a Taiping pamphlet in the Wade Collection, Taiping coin, river inlet diverted for smelting, Taiping cannon.
 

On 10 March, 1945, a single shell landed in Kleve, a town close to the Dutch border in northern Germany. Kleve was badly bombed by Allied Forces and much of its medieval centre had already been destroyed. According to reports the shell that fell into the street near Kleve railway station on a spring day almost 70 years ago killed just one person, an Englishman called Ronald Balfour. 

A slightly built, short-sighted historian, Balfour was a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and had received basic military training before taking up his post just a few months earlier. At the time of his death he was operating beyond allied lines in the chaos of disputed territory.

With the help of a small group of German civilians Balfour was transporting treasures, removed from Christ the King Church in a suburb of Kleve, to safety in nearby Goch.  When the shell hit, Balfour was on one side of the road and his companions were on the other with a handcart carrying the artefacts. Balfour’s companions were unharmed as were the church treasures. A few weeks later the local German forces surrendered and by the end of April war in Europe had come to an end.

The film, Monuments Men, released last month, has drawn public attention to the role of the MFAA in safeguarding at least some of the heritage of war-torn Europe. MFAA was American-led and had a multinational membership of around 350 men and women. The movie is based on a book (The Monuments Men by Robert M Edsel) and billed as telling a “true story”.  But according to the Balfour family, Donald Jeffries, the English ‘monuments’ man’ in the film (played by actor Hugh Bonneville), is quite unlike Ronald Balfour.

Balfour was 40 when he enlisted in MFAA and just 41 when he died. When he signed up to join the MFAA, Balfour must have seemed an unlikely candidate for military service: he was a specialist in medieval history; he was slim in build and wore thick pebble glasses. He was a Fellow of King’s College and his entire adulthood had been devoted to scholarship. What motivated him to risk his life was his passion for art and history.

In his will, Balfour bequeathed his personal library of 8,000 books to be shared between Cambridge University Library and King’s College Library. King’s College was also given several boxes of Balfour’s papers with his family donating further papers in 2005 and 2006. The most recent accession includes the last letter that Balfour wrote to his friend and superior officer Geoffrey Webb. Just a few days before his death, Balfour wrote about how much he enjoyed his work despite the hazards.

“It has been a grand week, certainly the best since I came over. One has the tragedy of real destruction, much of it quite unnecessary, but the compensating feeling of getting something done oneself. No civil authority to worry about and the need for quick decisions on one’s own responsibility... The degree of looting is terrible.. it will be a pretty business if all the repositories of foreign works of art are treated thus.”

Newspaper reports suggest that in a few months Balfour and his colleagues had been successful in saving some of the heritage of several towns in northern Germany. An article in the Rheinische Post in 1955 records: “With his own hands Balfour salvaged from amidst the rubble of destroyed buildings the archives of several towns, including those of Goch, Kleve, Cranenburg and Xanten.”

The archive of Balfour’s papers at King’s College also contains evidence of his determination to impress upon his army colleagues the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of the territories they would be going into as an invading force. In a speech he prepared but never delivered he wrote: “No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.”

It’s a message that resonates today. Patricia McGuire, King’s College Archivist, said: “The Balfour papers offer significant insight into the critical work of the MFAA in preserving tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of works of European art. Containing Balfour's own postcards and photos from visits he took before the war, personal letters, testimonial memoirs as well as professional reports, the collection provides a personal view that the official papers alone cannot.”

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673.

Inset images: Churchill tanks in wartime Kleve (Wikimedia Commons), MFAA poster, bells destined for smelting (both King's College Archive Centre)

Casts of a group of fossils that have puzzled palaeontologists for at least 60 years will go on display at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge today. The temporary exhibition – ‘Ediacaran Enigmas: Resolving the Fossil Record of Early Animals’ – showcases current research into life on Earth between 560 and 580 million years ago.

The casts have been taken from impressions of fossils from the Ediacaran, a geological period formally ratified by the world’s scientists only ten years ago.  The fossils – which some researchers suggest could be some of the earliest examples of animals – predate those from the Cambrian by around 40 million years.

The 15 examples of Ediacaran fossils on display in the exhibition date from a period when scientists believe that multicellular life on Earth was in the process of diverging into the major groups, or Kingdoms (such as fungi and animals) that we are familiar with today.  Many of the fossils have not been shown in the UK before, and the display is the first research-based exhibition of Ediacaran material to be staged in the UK.

Twelve of the casts on display are of fossils found in the dramatic cliffs of Mistaken Point on the east coast of Newfoundland. “The fossils seen on bedding planes [sheets of rock] at Mistaken Point are quite literally a snapshot of an ancient community – they capture a wide range of life-forms as they appeared at a particular moment in geological time,” said palaeontologist Dr Alex Liu, who has coordinated the exhibition with colleagues at the Department of Earth Sciences.

The remaining three casts on show are of fossils from Charnwood in Leicestershire, including a cast of the iconic Ediacaran organism Charnia masoni, found by a schoolboy in 1957. Strange impressions had been recognised in Charnwood as long ago as 1848, but it was only with the 1957 discovery that their importance as true Precambrian fossils was realised. Similar fossils have since been found in Russia, Namibia and Australia, revealing that these organisms were widespread on the planet during Ediacaran time. 

“When David Attenborough released a television documentary called ‘First Life’ about the Ediacaran biota in 2010, it sparked huge public interest in this time period,” said Liu. “We’re now working to find more, better-preserved material and to use the latest analytical techniques to discover new insights about the environments and organisms living during this fascinating interval.”

Mistaken Point, which may soon become a World Heritage Site, was first discovered by scientists in 1967. Liu has visited the site (so called because ships often foundered there having mistaken it for Cape Race to the east) each year since 2007. Jutting out into the Atlantic and often swathed in fog, its cliffs are rich in fossils – so rich that some planes contain as many as 4,000 specimens.

“These fossils can be interpreted as a single community, enabling researchers to look at aspects of their lifestyles including competition, feeding and reproduction. We can identify at least 22 different species of organism, many of which were anchored to the sediment with their fronds elevated into the water column,” said Liu.

With permission from the Parks and Natural Areas Division, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Liu took ‘peels’ (silicon rubber impressions) of the fossils in situ.  To reach the site means a two-hour drive from the city of St John’s, a 40-minute journey along bumpy tracks, and then a 45-minute trek on foot across rough terrain.

Back in Cambridge, the peels are used by Liu and colleagues to make solid casts which, once painted, closely resemble the original rocky material. These casts are essentially replicas of impressions left in the rocks by organisms whose shapes resemble the fronds of modern ferns. The largest cast on display is of an organism almost 60 cm in diameter. The smallest is a 20 mm-long fossil of a Charnia.

The bedding planes from which these fossils originate offer precious clues about early life forms. Canadian palaeontologists working on the material from Mistaken Point favour the argument that they are examples of early stem group animals, from which the major groups of modern animals – such as molluscs, cnidarians and sponges – evolved. Others suggest that they are a “failed evolutionary experiment” in multicellular life that has subsequently gone extinct.

Liu said: “The big question is whether we can find convincing evidence for the presence of features in these fossils that can conclusively determine their biological relationships. In the past, study of their overall structure has not revealed many useful features, so by applying modern techniques, and considering evidence for how they might have been behaving – in terms of feeding, movement, or reproduction – we are hoping that we can determine exactly what these organisms were.”

He and his colleagues hope that the display will raise awareness of the fascinating research going on to establish more about these fossils and others from the same period. A slideshow accompanying the exhibition shows some of the field sites, the techniques used to study the fossils, and a virtual reconstruction of these ancient ecosystems.

“The casts enable us to look in detail at the fossils, and to determine their fine morphological structure,” said Liu. “Many of the impressions in the rock are low relief, which means that they are hard to spot except when the sun is low in the sky. In the laboratory we can control the lighting so that we can see them in all their glory. The way we have lit them in the display cases should show how important this is.”

The exhibition, ‘Ediacaran Enigmas: Resolving the Fossil Record of Early Animals’, runs until December 2014. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences is open to the public Monday to Saturday. For opening hours and all other information go to http://www.sedgwickmuseum.org/

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Communications Office, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673.

Inset images top and bottom: Mistaken Point, Newfoundland (Jack Matthews). Images centre: fossils from the famous fossil-bearing surfaces (Alex Liu)
 

February half-term’s events were organised as part of the collegiate University’s Realise project.

Realise works to encourage children in care to continue their education beyond school, and to offer advice on the financial and other support available to help them do so.

Each of the three days had a different theme.

Trinity Hall and the Sainsbury Laboratory hosted the students for Natural Sciences Day. Under the supervision of research scientists Thomas Rey and Sandra Cortijo, the Realise participants set up and ran an experiment using plant infiltration, a technique used by researchers and technicians daily at SLCU, to explore how plants react to drought conditions. 

Also at SCLU, Siobhan Braybrook led a workshop using fundamental scientific skills of observation, measurement, and naming, to identify which plant they had in front of them and which parts were present, missing or modified due to human selection. 

"I have never had such enthusiastic students,” commented Siobhan. “It was great to watch them make the connection between what they eat and what it actually means for the plant.”

Elisabeth Burmeister, Events and Outreach Manager, said “SLCU is keen to generate enthusiasm for higher education in general and plant science in particular, and is pleased to support the University's Realise programme.

“This particular group of children were committed, engaged and full of enquiry. A participant wrote that the day had 'encouraged me to be a scientist'; we are delighted that our programme may have played a part in helping this aspiration to become reality,” Elisabeth added.

Selywn College hosted Languages and Culture Day, for students interested in languages, to give a taste of the breadth of higher education courses available which combine language with another subject.

Dr Shady Hekmat Nasser gave a sample lecture introducing some of his research on the traditions around the recitation of the Qurʾān, while Hannah Weibye discussed the links between language and national identity.

“The sample lectures were really helpful – you get an idea of what it might be like at uni,” commented Songul, from London. “…though they might be making a special effort to make them really good ones!”

Queens’ College and the Scott Polar Research Institute hosted the final day of the half-term programme, Science and Environment Day. The event included a session on the work of the British Antarctic Survey, which is based in Cambridge.

All three of the days included a talk from TK, a current Cambridge student who went into care while still at school.  He spoke on each day about the decisions he had made which brought him to Cambridge, and the ways in which he had found the motivation to work hard on his education.

“When you’re in care, a lot of decisions are made for you,” he told the Realise participants. “For me, university is the way to get my independence. It’s about standing on my own two feet and making my own decisions.”

“It was good to get a care leaver perspective,” said Alex, who came from Suffolk for Natural Sciences Day. “It’s helpful to hear from someone who’s been in that situation.”

Sherelle, also from London, also found TK’s talk encouraging. “TK’s talk was inspirational,” she said. “It’s something everyone can learn from. We can all take away something from it.”

“I am thinking about university, and about applying to Cambridge,” she added. “Getting to come here and experience what it is like has been really helpful – a full-on view of what it is like!”

The Cambridge Colleges play an important role in the success of Realise. By hosting part of each day, talking about university admissions, and offering tours of college rooms, led by current students, they offer a behind-the-scenes look at university life and a chance to ask questions informally.

“The chats that we had at the start were very good,” said Allanah, 16, from Marlow. “It was views of the college and university from the students themselves.

“I was surprised to hear about the funding which is available and the help and pastoral support that you have at the university. I did not know much about Cambridge but wanted to go to university, so this has helped me look at Cambridge.”

Allanah’s foster carer Lynne found the day a helpful insight into the realities of Cambridge “The whole day has really changed our assumptions and lifted expectations,” she said. “It is very easy to think that Cambridge is for the elite but that has been completely myth-busted. I will do everything I can to get Allanah here - but if not here then any university she wishes will be equally as good.”

Realise could not happen without the support of foster carers and local authority education teams, who give up their time to accompany younger participants.

Elle Zwandahl , Education practitioner at Suffolk County Council, has become a Realise regular.

“I want to have as many of my looked-after children to access as many of the University of Cambridge Realise Events as possible,” Elle said. “I want them to know that they can access Higher Education and can have a university place if they want.
“Realise is about opening their eyes to higher education choices, improving their options and making it an expectation that university can be something for them.”

“I see a difference each time we come. When I am driving back with them in the car they say ‘I fancy going to university now Elle’. Even if it’s not Cambridge it means a lot that they are thinking like that.”

As the interview with the female prisoner came to a close, the researcher – through a translator – enquired whether she had any questions she would like to ask. The prisoner asked when she was going to be shot.

Trafficked into the UK and then detained for a crime, the prisoner had spent six months in a UK prison believing herself to be under a death sentence. No one had ensured she understood her situation.

Between 1999 and 2009, the number of foreign nationals in female prisons jumped from 8% to 19%; they had mainly come from countries like Nigeria and Vietnam, and were usually imprisoned as a result of crimes relating to theft, drugs or false documentation. However, the distinction between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ in many of these cases is blurred, says criminologist Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe: “many of those described as ‘offenders’ will have had little to no choice, and are often victims of crime and horrifying abuse themselves. Some have been held captive in slavery-like conditions, forced to work as prostitutes or in drug factories – sometimes for years. Some have been raped and beaten, and their documents withheld by criminal gangs.”

“Offenders are assumed to have agency; whereas victims don’t have agency – but those who are trafficked very often have both,” explained Gelsthorpe. “There is a confusion of narratives which the criminal justice system doesn’t know how to respond to.”

Although the UK has a National Referral Mechanism (NRM) for the identification and support of ‘victims’ of trafficking, which was introduced in 2009, Gelsthorpe believes there are major issues around its effectiveness: “there are big questions as to whether the training of first responders – such as police and border agencies, but also third sector organisations – is currently sensitive enough to enable victim identification,” she said.

The new Human Slavery Bill, announced by the Home Secretary at the end of 2013 has pledged to review the NRM process and establish a ‘legal duty’ for first responders to report all suspected cases of human trafficking to the NRM.

To address the ‘knowledge gap’ that undermines the position of foreign national women who end up in UK custody, Gelsthorpe and Dr Liz Hales from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology spent 18 months conducting in-depth interviews with 103 migrant women across several prison establishments and Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre.

Of those interviewed, 43 were found to be victims of trafficking, although only 11 had been processed through the NRM (and, for two of the women, this didn’t happen until after their sentences had been served).

A further 15 women had either entered the UK independently but then worked in slavery-like conditions, or had their documents stolen by those who smuggled them in – a situation that resulted in the crime for which they had been convicted.  

The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, culminated in a major report by Gelsthorpe and Hales – The Criminalisation of Migrant Women. It makes for harrowing reading. Research findings are interspersed with testimony from many of the interviewees, giving accounts of the exploitation and abuse they suffered before entering custody.

The women had set out for the UK in the hope of better lives, many believing they had already secured legal work. Among them were women who had been abused, starved and forced into sex work. Routine rape and forced abortion left some with severe internal injuries. Many underwent servitude and imprisonment. Some were victims of war crimes in their homeland, and had witnessed executions of husbands and children.

Once arrested as offenders in the UK, those interviewed spoke of confusion, terror and powerlessness when confronted by the authorities.

Interpreter support and access to documents in languages the women could understand were frequently lacking or limited. Some women spoke of trying to tell the police what had happened, but without being understood or in some cases dissuaded from doing so by their ascribed legal counsel.

During police questioning, fear of traffickers and cartels often prevented full disclosures. One woman explained to police she had been held captive for seven years and forced to work as a prostitute, yet was told her story did not make “a great deal of sense” as she sounded too “sensible”. Another victim of trafficking told police she had been forced to work in a cannabis house but didn’t know the names of those involved: “because of that I do not think they believed me.” She was sentenced to two years.

None of these women knew what the term ‘trafficking’ meant.

“An incoherent story, one that makes police suspicious, might be a result of the trauma the person has experienced,” said Gelsthorpe. “Many NRM assessments are made alongside decisions on asylum, mainly by the immigration department, and the frame of mind is often one of suspicion – the very term ‘asylum seeker’ has been criminalised. There needs to be caution in assessments, but caution is different from suspicion.”

Gelsthorpe describes being amazed that, in some cases, obvious signs of abuse – such as physical scarring – went unrecognised in prisons.

Interviewees spoke of complete disorientation during court proceedings. The process focuses on the offence, and seems to exclude the context in which it took place, write the researchers. One woman described her helplessness in the UK court as “like being in the hands of the people who brought me here.”

Another trafficking victim, arrested for use of a false document, summoned the courage to tell her legal representative all she had suffered. “I am not going to mention to the court that you have worked in sex work as this will not be in your favour,” was the only response.

Many migrant women find themselves trying to survive in a foreign prison without much idea as to how long they will serve and what will happen next, some without knowledge of, or access to, their children for months at a time.

Gelsthorpe and colleagues presented their report to MPs and Peers in the House of Lords in 2013, outlining several policy implications. They recommend training for government agencies based on key ‘indicators’ – such as types of offences – for flagging up trafficked women; interviews should then be carried out by female staff with interpreting support, to investigate human rights abuses.

“Some relatively simple changes would make a big difference in these cases,” says Gelsthorpe. “These include induction videos for all remand prisoners with subtitles in key languages, explaining the functions and stages of the court system as well as legal terminology, and standard questions on the need for interpretive support before police interviews and court appearances.” She also suggests that prison healthcare staff be trained as active first responders.

As well as aiming to expand the study into mainland Europe by looking at anti-trafficking measures, Gelsthorpe is in discussion with various police forces about taking the research further, and has had follow-up meetings with government policy makers.

“I know that the police worry about identifying those committing crime under duress, and want to refine their responses,” she said. “We want to keep people on board. It’s not a question of just presenting a report on the table – that’s not the kind of research we do. If we want academic research to have impact, then we have to work with those who can create change.”

“But the message is clear: the powerlessness of these women in the hands of their traffickers is terrifyingly replicated within the criminal justice system, the legitimacy of which stands or falls on the way it treats victims as well as offenders.”

Read the full report at www.crim.cam.ac.uk/people/academic_research/loraine_gelsthorpe

Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe and Professor Madeleine Arnot are Co-Convenors of a new Cambridge Migration Research Network.

Cambridge outweighed Oxford at yesterday’s Crew Announcement and Weigh-In for The 2014 BNY Mellon Boat Race, with the Light Blues weighing in heavier by an average of 2.6kg per man more than their Dark Blue rivals.

For the second year now, The Newton Women’s Boat Race crews weighed-in with their male counterparts yesterday, which is part of their journey to join the Men on the Tideway in 2015. It was the Cambridge Blue Boat that topped the scales, weighing in by an average of 4kg per woman more than their Oxford opponents.

The average weight for the Cambridge Men’s crew was 92.3kg and a total weight of 738kg excluding the cox. Oxford’s Men weighed in with an average weight of 89.7kg and a total weight of 717.8kg excluding the cox.

For the Newton Women’s Race, the average for the Light Blue crew was 73.2kg and a total weight of 585.8kg excluding the cox. The Dark Blue athletes weighed in with an average weight on 69.2kg and a total weight of 553.6kg excluding the cox.

The Official Crews for The 2014 BNY Mellon Boat Race are listed below with their respective weights:

CAMBRIDGE
Position Name Weight (kg)
Bow: Michael Thorp – 88kg
2: Luke Juckett – 84.2kg
3: Ivo Dawkins – 89.2kg
4: Steve Dudek – 101kg
5: Helge Gruetjen – 99.6kg
6: Matthew Jackson – 94.4kg
7: Joshua Hooper – 92kg
Stroke: Henry Hoffstot – 89.6kg
Cox: Ian Middleton – 53.6kg

Total Weight Ex. Cox  728kg
Average Weight Ex. Cox  92.3kg
Total Weight Inc. Cox  791.6kg
Average Weight Inc. Cox  88kg

OXFORD
Position Name Weight (kg)
Bow: Storm Uru – 80.4kg
2: Chris Fairweather – 85.4kg
3: Karl Hudspith – 91kg
4: Thomas Swartz – 81.2kg
5: Malcolm Howard – 108.2kg
6: Michael DiSanto – 89.2kg
7: Sam O’Connor – 88.8kg
Stroke: Constantine Louloudis – 93.6
Cox: Laurence Harvey – 54.8kg

Total Weight Ex. Cox  717.8kg
Average Weight Ex. Cox  89.7kg
Total Weight Inc. Cox  772.6kg
Average Weight Inc. Cox  85.8kg

The Official Crews for The 2014 Newton Women’s Boat Race are listed below with their respective weights:

CAMBRIDGE
Position Name Weight (kg)
Bow: Caroline Reid – 64.4kg
2: Kate Ashley – 75kg
3: Holly Game -74.6kg
4: Isabella Vyvyan – 87.2kg
5: Catherine Foot – 71kg
6: Melissa Wilson – 77kg
7: Claire Watkins – 72.6
Stroke: Emily Day – 64kg
Cox: Esther Momcilovic – 52.4kg

Total Weight Ex. Cox  585.8kg
Average Weight Ex. Cox  73.2kg
Total Weight Inc. Cox  638.2kg
Average Weight Inc. Cox  70.9kg

OXFORD
Position Name Weight (kg)
Bow: Elizabeth Fenje – 58.6kg
2: Alice Carrington-Windo – 67.2kg
3: Maxie Scheske – 64.8kg
4: Nadine Graedel Iberg – 72.6kg
5: Anastasia Chitty – 69.4kg
6: Lauren Kedar – 75.4kg
7: Amber De Vere – 72kg
Stroke: Laura Savarese – 73.6kg
Cox: Erin Wysocki-Jones – 49.6kg

Total Weight Ex. Cox  553.6kg
Average Weight Ex. Cox  69.2kg
Total Weight Inc. Cox  603.2kg
Average Weight Inc. Cox  67kg

The 2014 BNY Mellon Boat Race will take place on Sunday 6th April 2014 on The Tideway between Putney and Mortlake. The Newton Women’s Boat Race will be raced a week earlier, on Sunday 30th March, at Henley.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Working with a well-studied group of baboons in the Namibian desert, Dr Alecia Carter of the Department of Zoology set baboons learning tasks involving a novel food and a familiar food hidden in a cardboard box. Some baboons were given the chance to watch another baboon who already knew how to solve the task, while others had to learn for themselves.

To work out how bold or anxious the baboons were, she presented them either with a novel food or a threat in the form of a model of a puff adder.

She found that personality had a major impact on learning. “The bolder baboons learnt, but although the shy ones watched the baboon with the novel tasks just as long as the bold ones did, they did not learn the task. In effect, despite being made aware of what to do, they were still too shy to act on that information,” said Dr Carter.

The same held true for anxious versus calm baboons: the anxious individuals learnt the task by observing others while those who were laid back did not, even though they spent more time watching.

This mismatch between collecting social information and using it shows that personality plays a key role in social learning in animals, something that has previously been ignored in animal cognition studies.

“Our findings are significant because they suggest that animals may perform poorly in cognitive tasks not because they aren’t clever enough to solve them, but because they are too shy or nervous to interact with it. Individual differences in social learning that are related to personality may thus have to be taken into account systematically when studying animal cognition,” she said.

The results also suggest that the baboons’ social networks may prevent them from learning from others. “I couldn’t test some individuals no matter how hard I tried, because although they were given the opportunity to watch a knowledgeable individual who knew how to solve the task, some baboons simply never went near a knowledgeable individual and thus never had the opportunity to learn from others,” she explained.

The findings may impact how we understand the formation of culture in societies through social learning. If some individuals are unable to get information from others because they don’t associate with the knowledgeable individuals, or they are too shy to use the information once they have it, information may not travel between all group members, preventing the formation of a culture based on social learning.

The study, published in PeerJ, is the result of Dr Carter’s research for her PhD at the Australian National University. Now at the University of Cambridge, Dr Carter will continue to work with the Tsaobis Baboon Project, a long-term project run by the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology.

She will return to Namibia in April and June to set up a new study examining whether the baboons’ social network really affects from whom they get social information.

British professor Colin Blakemore, chairman of the Foundation's selection committee, said: “These three scientists are internationally recognised for the scale and outstanding quality of their work in the difficult field of human cognition and behaviour.

“They each have made unique and lasting contributions that have motivated the interests and efforts of many other researchers around the world.

“All three have made particular efforts to move from basic research to clinical application – in cognitive development, mental health, addiction, brain damage and delayed learning.”

Professor Robbins, head of the Department of Psychology at the University, was recognised for his work examining the basis for addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

The Brain Prize is awarded by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize Foundation and is the world's largest prize for brain research.

The three scientists were invited to attend a prize-giving ceremony in Denmark to receive the shared prize of 1 million euros on 1 May.

This is the Society's highest award and is for "significant and original contributions by a professional zoologist to the development of zoology in the wider applications".

The film – Finding My Way– was made by a group of young people in Cambridgeshire who were themselves facing the challenge of leaving care. As well as helping them explore their own thoughts and feelings, the film will give social workers and foster carers a better insight into the issues involved.

According to Valerie Dunn of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry and NIHR CLAHRC East of England, who led the project: “We talk very casually about coming into care and leaving care, but only those who have been through it can tell us what it’s really like.  Our research focuses on the emotional health of young people leaving care, so we thought that inviting them to make a film would give us – and perhaps them too – a deeper understanding than traditional tick-box questionnaires.”

Working with a team of professionals, seven young care leavers produced the film at a four-day summer school organised in partnership with the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium.

A cinephile herself, Dunn felt that film would be the ideal way for the young people to tell their own stories. “You start from what you love, and I love film,” she said. “Animation offers a novel and imaginative way of talking indirectly about sensitive, personal experiences, and because the young people don‘t appear on screen their identities could be protected.”

As well as providing time and space for the group to share their stories and experiences, the process also gave them an opportunity to learn new skills – from acting and directing to filming and team work – and to have fun.

“The young people really enjoyed the film-making process, particularly the day in the TV studio. Although it was extremely hard work and the schedule tight they did a great job and invested a great deal in the project.”

The young people wanted to portray an accurate picture of their experiences and were keen to avoid conforming to stereotypes or being misrepresented. “One afternoon, a small group worked tirelessly just to get three or four sentences exactly right. And they succeeded; they’ve expressed themselves incredibly well.”

The judges at the Future Film Festival – where Finding My Way beat strong competition from 400 other shorts – clearly agreed. “The panel of actors, directors and producers at the awards ceremony were incredibly complimentary about the film,” Dunn said. “They liked the combination of playfulness and seriousness, they liked the narrative structure, they thought the young people knew who their audience was and what they wanted to say. When they announced the winner there was a loud whoop! from the Cambridge corner.”

The win follows success for the project’s first film, My Name Is Joe, which describes what it’s like being taken away from your family and placed into foster care. Since its release in 2012, it has over 3,500 YouTube views, and is being used across the UK to train foster carers.

Dunn hopes the same will be true for Finding My Way, and she is already fundraising for a third film, about residential care. And as well as benefiting youngsters in care, and their foster carers, the film has also had a positive impact on her own research at Cambridge.

“As a researcher – whatever area you work in – it’s easy to become blasé about your field,” she said. “This project has given me a real insight into the huge challenges facing some young people, and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege working with them. They are learning a lot too, and this mutual learning is great.”

Finding My Way was funded by the National Institute of Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, now CLAHRC for East of England.

A collaboration between the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire County Council and a wide range of Cambridgeshire and East Anglian health and social care providers, the CLAHRC aims to undertake applied health research to build an evidence base to inform and improve service provision.

As well as CLARHRC, the project involved Ryd cook and Trish Shiel of the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium, animator Lizzy Hobbs, sound designer James Rogers, Tom Mellor from Cambridgeshire Youth Offending Service and Michelle Dean and Mary Ogden from the Children’s Participation Service.

Finding My Way: Behind the Scenes

My Name is Joe: Behind the Scenes

The global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca will contribute both funding and a post-doctoral scientist to work within the laboratory of Professor Kevin Brindle at the University of Cambridge in the area of tumour targeted therapies (TTTs).

TTTs encompass antibodies that are ‘armed’ to kill tumour cells, including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that selectively aim powerful drugs at cancer cells.

The University of Cambridge is developing novel clinically relevant approaches -- using magnetic resonance-based molecular imaging -- to detect the earliest signs of a tumour’s response to treatment, including cell death. 

These technologies may help MedImmune identify effective therapies earlier in the development process, allowing for more rapid delivery of drugs to patients. 

“MedImmune is committed to collaborative partnerships with academia that drive the discovery and application of novel technology to enhance oncology research and development,” said Yong-Jun Liu, M.D., Ph.D, Head of Research, MedImmune. 

“We’re delighted to embark on this partnership with the University of Cambridge and partner with Professor Brindle in this important area of oncology research.” 

Professor Brindle and his group bring extensive expertise in advances in molecular imaging that produce more sensitive pictures of cells within patients’ tumours, particularly through the use of 13C hyperpolarised molecules.

These advances will help MedImmune identify biomarkers to support future clinical trial design, such as optimising dosing schedules and identifying appropriate patient populations in clinical trials.  

“We are fortunate to partner with our local neighbor MedImmune, an organisation with an outstanding track record of innovation,” said Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge.

“We look forward to combining our academic and their industrial expertise to combat cancer and to help further advance Cambridge as a center of biomedical research.”

MedImmune is developing a comprehensive oncology portfolio with an emphasis on two key areas in oncology development: antibody-drug conjugates, which combine the specificity of antibodies to deliver potent tumour killing molecules, and immune-mediated therapy for cancer (IMT-C), which aims to harness the power of the patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. 

Kevin Brindle is Professor of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and a senior group leader in the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

He became involved in magnetic resonance in 1978 when he started a D. Phil. on 1H NMR studies of cells with Prof. Iain Campbell FRS at the University of Oxford, where he was also an undergraduate.

He joined the laboratory of Prof Sir George Radda FRS at Oxford in 1983 and in 1986 became a Royal Society University Research Fellow.

In 1990 he moved to a Lectureship at the University of Manchester and in 1993 to a Lectureship in Cambridge, where he was elected to his professorship in 2005.

Since 2006 he has been working on metabolic imaging with hyperpolarised 13C-labelled cell substrates to detect treatment response in tumours.

The fictitious adventures of a 17th century con artist, who fooled London society for years with his made-up travellers’ tales, are being put on public display at St John’s College, Cambridge for the first time as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

The 1704 work, The History of Formosa, describes in great detail the culture, language and customs of the island nation of Formosa, modern-day Taiwan. The book was supposedly written by a native of Formosa who was brought to Europe by Jesuit missionaries, but all is not as it seems.

The catch is that the author, who called himself ‘George Psalmanazar’, was actually a white, blond-haired Frenchman who had never left Europe. Every detail of Formosan life that the book describes is completely made up. Psalmanazar was a fantasist who, like an early Walter Mitty, spent his life in a world of his own imagination. His hoax was so successful that to this day, we still don’t know his real name.

The exhibition – much of which can also be seen online– places Psalmanazar’s fantasies in the context of the real history of exploration, map-making and travel; not because anything he wrote was true, but because he provides an insight into the early modern European craze for discovering new places, people and cultures.

Even today, we still know very little about who Psalmanazar really was, because his posthumously-published autobiography deliberately obscures the details. He was probably born in Languedoc or Provence somewhere between 1679 and 1684 and educated in a Jesuit academy. Psalmanazar describes himself as a child genius with a gift for languages, who had no need of formal education.

His career of forging identities and crafting fantastic tales began when he was a young man. With the aid of a pilgrim’s staff and cloak stolen from the reliquary of a local church, he set off on a walking tour of Europe, claiming to be an Irish Catholic pilgrim. This story soon fell apart as many people he met knew Ireland well and could easily see through his lies. Psalmanazar then shifted his imaginary origins to somewhere more remote: first Japan and then Formosa.

To give his story more credibility, he began to follow a ‘pagan’ calendar, eat raw meat and even speak a language of his own creation. His suspiciously French accent, he explained, was simply due to the way he had been taught to speak French and English by the Jesuit missionaries who had brought him to Europe.

When Psalmanazar reached England, news of this strange foreign traveller spread quickly and he soon became a favourite of London society. It was at this time he wrote his completely fictitious History of Formosa. Psalmanazar’s version of Formosa is a sensationalist fantasy where the nobility live in underground palaces and dine on vipers’ blood for breakfast, while criminals are killed and eaten, and priests sacrifice thousands of children a year to bloodthirsty horned gods.

To modern readers, Psalmanazar’s stories seem far-fetched but they successfully fooled an English audience with little or no experience of other cultures and a view of the world that saw foreign people as primitive and savage. Psalmanazar’s book was an unqualified success. It was published in two English editions, the first of which will be on show at St John’s College. French and German editions also swiftly followed. After its publication, Psalmanazar was invited to lecture upon Formosan culture before several learned societies, and it was even proposed that he teach his invented language to students at Oxford University.

Psalmanazar was frequently challenged by sceptics, but for the most part he managed to deflect criticism of his main claims. He explained, for instance, that his pale skin was due to the upper classes of Formosa living underground and never seeing the sun. Jesuit missionaries who had actually been to Formosa and who contradicted Psalmanazar’s claims were not believed due to the general anti-Jesuit attitudes prevalent at the time.

Psalmanazar’s Walter Mitty-style fantasies became increasingly unbelievable and were ultimately discredited as British explorers actually began to travel to Formosa (sometimes equipped with a dictionary of Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosan’ language) and found it was not as he described at all. Jonathan Swift, author of his own fantastic tale Gulliver’s Travels, satirised Psalmanazar’s graphic descriptions of cannibalism in his Modest Proposal of 1729.

Psalmanazar eventually grew tired of his forged life, and assumed a quiet existence in London as a clerk and writer of theological pamphlets. In his final years, he wrote a frank confession with instructions in his will for it to be published after his death in 1763. This account, entitled Memoirs of XXX, Commonly known by the name of George Psalmanazar, a reputed native of Formosa, is also amongst the items on display in the St John’s exhibition.

Dr Mark Nicholls, Librarian at St John’s College, said: "Psalmanazar's fraudulent description of Formosa was so successful because it first appeared at a time when interest in exploration and strange new lands was at its height across European society. His tales, imaginative as they are, fit into a wider genre alongside travellers' accounts and maps featuring grotesque creatures, sea monsters and alien, exotic peoples, images that enthralled audiences who had never left their home country."

"Other items on display represent the adventures and work of real-life explorers such as James Cook, Marco Polo and James Clark Ross. These intrepid travellers increased the sum of human knowledge immensely, and the College is delighted that such items will be on display for all to see as part of the Cambridge Science Festival."

The exhibition, World of Wonders, is to be held in the 17th century Old Library at St John’s College, Cambridge and will be open to the public on Saturday 15 March from 10:00-16:00. Entry is free and there is no need to pre-book. There will also be a digital gallery on the College website featuring images of the exhibition, available here: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/science-festival-exhibition-2014

Visit the College website www.joh.cam.ac.uk or the Science Festival website www.cam.ac.uk/sciencefestival for more details.

For more information about this story, please contact Ryan Cronin, St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Tel: +44 (0)1223 338711, Email: rcc40@cam.ac.uk