New Master of Sidney Sussex continues in a long tradition

Morning sunshine on the Master’s Garden and the Master’s Lodge in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

Each morning this week, I am strolling past the Master’s Garden and the Master’s Lodge in Sidney Sussex College on my way from my rooms in Blundell Court out to the Morning Eucharist on Saint Bene’t’s before breakfast, or between my rooms and the Mong Hall, where the IOCS Summer School lectures are taking place.

Earlier this month [July 2013], a new Master took off office in Sidney Sussex College and moved into the Master’s Lodge. Professor Richard Penty, who was elected as the 27th Master of Sidney Sussex earlier this year, succeeds Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

Professor Penty is a distinguished electrical and electronic engineer, and before becoming Master he was a Fellow and Vice-Master of Sidney Sussex College. He read engineering and electrical sciences as an undergraduate and was a post-graduate student at Sidney. He was then was elected a Junior Research Fellow in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

He later became a Lecturer in Bath University and Bristol University, and then Professor of Photonics in Bristol, before returning to Cambridge where he has been Professor of Photonics since 2002.

His current research interests include optical data communications, MMF systems (digital and analogue), high-speed optical communications systems, optical amplifiers, and optical switching. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering last year.

After his election as Master, Professor Penty said: “It is a great honour to be elected as Sidney’s next Master, and I look forward to serving the Fellows, Students and Staff of the College to the best of my ability.”

Inside a house in Pompeii … Andrew Wallace-Hadrill says we are “wreaking a damage far greater than Vesuvius” (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The outgoing Master, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, is a distinguished classical scholar with a particular interest in both Pompeii and Herculaneum – I visited both sites about ten days ago. He is standing down as Master of Sidney Sussex to give more attention to the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

So he can concentrate on this major opportunity, Professor Wallace-Hadrill is becoming Director of Research in the Faculty of Classics in the University of Cambridge from 1 October. But he is keeping his links with Sidney Sussex College, where he has become a Fellow.

Some years ago, in an interview on an Australian television programme 60 Minutes, he was caustic in expressing his views about the neglect of the archaeological site at Pompeii. He was described as an “angry archaeologist” when he argued that the conservation issues that need to be acted upon urgently at Pompeii are being neglected and that the site is suffering from a “second death.”

Commenting on the deterioration of Pompeii, he said: “Man is wreaking a damage far greater than Vesuvius. The moment of Pompeii’s destruction was also the moment of its preservation. The public needs to understand that unless constant efforts are taken to arrest the decay, the site will, within decades crumble to nothing.”

The Knox-Shaw Room in Cloister Court is named after another former Master of Sidney Sussex College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

I was also interested to learn that another master of Sidney Sussex College, Thomas Knox-Shaw (1895-1972), who was Master from 1945 to 1957, was associated with some of the mission agencies whose work is continued by Us – the new name for the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

Knox-Shaw was a trustee of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi and an active member on the committee of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), which amalgamated with SPG to form USPG. He is credited with doing much to beautify the chapel in Sidney Sussex and to increase its importance in the life of the college.

The son of a Harley Street doctor and homeopath, Knox-Shaw went to school at Blundell’s School, whose founder is also remembered in the name of Blundell Court, where I am staying this year, and where I stayed in 2011.

Knox-Shaw’s name is commemorated in Cloister Court in the Knox-Shaw Room, which is one of the principal meeting rooms in the college. He also gave his name to Tomminox, one of the Sidney Sussex Boat Club’s racing shells. His gifts to the college include the picture of Oliver Cromwell which hangs in the Hall, under which I have dined for the last two evenings.

Herculaneum provides an insight into life before the eruption of Vesuvius

The frescoes in the richly decorated east wall of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

On the programme for this week in the Sorrento area, Friday [5 July 2013] was listed as a “Day at Leisure,” or a free day to relax at the hotel pool, or to explore the bustling town of Sorrento, with its shops, cafés, restaurants and views, with a transfer to and from the town centre.

Instead, almost two dozen people signed up for a morning’s visit to Herculaneum, a town that is less well known than Pompeii, but which gives a more intimate opportunity to understand the devastation and human tragedy of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD.

Herculaneum is smaller than Pompeii, but the site is more intimate and more accessible (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The enclosed site at Herculaneum is close to the modern town of Ercolano, south-east of Naples. Compared to Pompeii, this was a small city, of about 20 hectares and 4,000. Only a tiny proportion of the site – about 4.5 hectares – is accessible to the public, but in many ways this a far more tangible, and so much less cluttered a site than neighbouring Pompeii, which is better known and has a constant flow of tourists and sightseers each day.

In Herculaneum, it is easy to imagine how the ordinary people lived and worked, shopped and worshipped, relaxed and were governed.

There are private houses with gardens and courtyards; shops and pubs; men’s and women’s baths; public fountains and latrines; boarding houses

The Hall of the Augustals is richly decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from the legends of Hercules (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The Hall of the Augustals has frescoes depicting scenes from the legends of Hercules, including a depiction of Hercules accompanied by Jupiter, Juno and Minerva; and an illustration of the battle between Hercules and the Etruscan god Acheelo.
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The House of Neptune and Amphitrite takes its name from the themes in the mosaics in the richly decorated east wall. The food shop next door almost looks like it is closed for a siesta and ready to reopen in a few hours’ times.

A house with overhanging eaves on a street in Herculaneum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The Trellis House is a boarding house with an overhanging balcony. The House of the Wooden Partition displays the comfortable lifestyle of the prosperous ruling class.

Outside the Cucumas Shop, you can still see a listing with the different prices for the four varieties of wine once on sale here. At the large taberna or pub, it was possible to realise how like Europeans today these people were in so many aspects of life and lifestyle.

We were back at the Grand Hotel Moon Valley shortly after mid-day, and two of us took the Circumvesuviana from Seiano to Vico Equesne, where we strolled through the streets and along the sea front, looking down at the beaches and across the bay to Naples.

Piazza Umberto I is a quiet and shaded corner of Vico Equesne (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Sadly, the two churches we tried to visit were not open, not was the famous Da Gigino pizzeria, where the claim to fame is that there they invented the idea of “Pizza by the Metre.”

We made our way to a shady corner of Piazza Umberto I, with its fountain, foliage and trees, and had lunch in Wembley, a pizzeria on the corner of the square, before returning to the hotel to swim and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine.

Looking out on the Bay of Naples in Vico Equesne (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Walking beneath the clouds of Mount Vesuvius

Looking into the crater on the top of Mount Vesuvius (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

For most of Thursday [4 July 2013], Mount Vesuvius was wrapped in rain clouds, pouring rain down intermittently on Pompeii below. The clouds spread out over the Bay of Naples, and this afternoon blocked the view across the bay as we climbed Mount Vesuvius.

But we began the day with a morning walking through the streets, houses, theatres, temples, baths, the forum, the markets and the open areas of Pompeii, the city destroyed – and preserved – by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the afternoon 24 August 79 AD.

Walking through the paved streets of Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Pompeii attracts about 5,000 visitors a day, or about 2.5 million visitors each year. There almost 50 people on this tour group, and for some it was an interesting reminder that Pompeii too was a holiday or weekend destination for many wealthy Romans almost 2,000 years ago until the city was buried under 4 to 6 metres of ash and pumice that fatal day.

Time has stood still in Pompeii ever since. It was good to be reminded too that apart from some modern inventions such as the internal combustion engine, the railway, electricity and the internet, many of the 20,000 residents of Pompeii lived very much like us, with two-storey houses, a clean water system – and a problem with producing too much domestic waste.

The walls of a house in Pompeii Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

The mosaics, frescoes, gardens, rooms and domestic shrines could only begin to tease our imaginations about life in Pompeii. Everyone says a morning there does not do it justice.

Throughout the morning, as we walked through the town, Vesuvius, wrapped in clouds, loomed above us in the distant background.

After lunch below the town in Lucullus, we continued on to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. From the car park it was a 20-minute climb to the rim of the crater at the top, and most of us managed the steep ascent in about 20 or 30 minutes, but the clouds still blocked a complete view of the Bay of Naples and the islands.

It was quicker coming back down the mountain path. There were no burns or injured limbs.

Back at the Grand Hotel Moon Valley, the pool also has a perfect view of Mount Vesuvius, the only active volcano in Europe. They say Vesuvius should erupt every 30 years – but it has not done so since 1944.

Mount Vesuvius looms in the background behind Pompeii (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)