I remember summer Students’ Union meetings on the slope outside. We passed some great resolutions, including support for Nelson Mandela and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and protests against Thatcher!GARETH NEVITT(ENGLISH LITERATURE 1979) I was taken on as one of a team of four to apply a barcode to every single book in the Library. This was a ground-breaking computerisation project initiated by the Deputy Librarian Peter Stone, and one of the team was Kitty Inglis who eventually became University Librarian! Just completing her year’s SCONUL traineeship at the same time was my fiancée Jill Gray who became my wife the following July in the Meeting House chapel.ROGER WALKINTON(FRENCH STUDIES 1977)Nadia Ponts (Life Sciences 1999) and I organised a treasure hunt across campus for Anna Perrenoud and Arnaud S. Weatherbeaten’s birthday in 2000, which included some clues hidden in very old books in the Library. They might still be there!ANNE-SOPHIE MARSH (MEDIA STUDIES 1999)I well-remember architect Sir Basil Spence addressing the opening of the new Library, recollecting how he mused on a great tongue slurping-up students as they strolled past. I also recall The Queen during the same ceremony stopped and asked me as she passed, ‘Are you working – or just pretending to?...’BILL COWIE (AMERICAN STUDIES 1964)When I returned as a lecturer in 1985, most of the Library was unrecognisable inside, but the toilets looked just the same, complete with graffiti. My original flatmates Teresa Madden (Sociology 1966) and Stephanie Lang (Anthropology 1966) and I returned for a visit in 2016, 50 years after we had started, and asked a current student to take a photo of us by the Library steps. VIVIENNE GRIFFITHS (ENGLISH 1966)ABOVE: Vivienne, Teresa and Stephanie revisit the Library in 2016.
Beneath the canopyFrom the mighty oaks and rare English elms that pre-date the University to those planted in memory of loved ones, we celebrate some of the beautiful trees populating the Sussex campus.WORDS BY JACQUI BEALINGTrees. They are the lungs of the Earth and of the University of Sussex campus. More than 1,200 grow on the University’s 200-acre estate, creating a living, breathing, beautiful canopy. Dozens of varieties thrive in the Sussex soil, from stately elms and ancient yews to the more exotic Indian bean trees and fruit-bearing mulberry trees.They may not be the thing you notice when you first encounter Sir Basil Spence’s startling architecture. But remove them and you would soon see how vital they are to the character of campus.In fact, Spence ensured that the “dominant spine” of trees that runs through the valley was preserved before the first brick was laid in 1959, and he designed the original buildings to complement the landscape. He stipulated that no building should be taller than the tree line.Anyone who has spent time on campus will have developed a relationship with the trees. They’ll have taken shade beneath them during hot months to relax – or revise. They’ll have ‘forest bathed’ in the woodland that skirts campus. They may even have climbed them or strung tightropes between thetrunks for some challenging recreation.Over the years, many more trees have been planted, and all are treated with great care. Sussex Estates and Facilities conduct a five-yearly survey of trees on the estate, which involves recording details of individual tree height, spread, age, diameter and any signs of disease. “We recognise that the trees here are important for all sorts of reasons,” says Grounds Manager Ashley Wilcox. “They are lovely to look at, they’re helping to protect our planet, they encourage wildlife and they create a sense of peace and protection.” This is one of the reasons why more than 70 trees planted in the past few decades have been dedicated to those who have studied and/or worked at the University, or to mark special occasions. They include one for Richard Flint, a charismatic Students’ Union president at Sussex in the 1970s who went on to become communications director at the International Transport Workers’ Federation. Richard died in 2007 from the degenerative condition cerebellar ataxia. His friends organised a commemorative paving stone in the Arts pathway and planted a mountain ash in front of Falmer House – the location for many scenes of protest – with the inscription, ‘The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.’Those planted to remember staff include a copper beech, now growing near Bramber House, dedicated to Dr Lucy Solomon. Lucy, who arrived at Sussex as a sociology undergraduate in 1997, continued working at Sussex as an academic administrator. She died in 2015 at the age of 48 and is remembered by staff for her “gregarious and larger-than-life personality.”A plaque beneath a silver birch outside the Sussex Centre for Language Studies remembers senior technician Robin Lee, who was “loved by all for his kindness and generosity.” Robin joined the University in 1974 and was instrumental in introducing new and innovative technologies to campus (such as satellite TV back in the day). He died in 2010. Some of the trees commemorate occasions rather than people. The University’s first Chancellor, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, planted a tulip tree in 1963 in between Falmer House and Fulton Court (also known as Library Square) to celebrate the development of campus.Outside Jubilee Building is an oak sapling cultivated from an acorn collected from The Crown Estate and planted in 2012 to mark Her Majesty The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.Sadly, some trees are just shadows of their former selves. A hollow stump is all that’s left of an elm that succumbed to Dutch Elm disease. It had to be pruned in February 2019 to prevent the spread of the disease. Campus has a rare population of 31 English elms, 22 of which have been classified as mature.BACK PAGES | BENEATH THE CANOPYThe great storm of 1987 also saw many tree casualties. More than 300 were uprooted across campus, including oaks, sycamores, giant beeches and elms. Some were more than 200-years-old – so much for Spence’s efforts to preserve them.But the good news is that, as part of the University’s Sustainability Strategy, trees are constantly being replaced. “We know that trees are vital for the planet and our strategy focuses on preserving the environment,” says Sustainability Manager Sam Waugh.One exciting new project is a forest food garden at the far northern end of campus. Set up by Dr John Parry, a lecturer in the School of Education and Social Work, with the help of volunteers, staff and students, the idea is to create a woodland with species at different levels providing food: from fruit and nuts at the top of the canopy to fungi at soil level. There’s been a surge of interest from students wanting to take John’s Forest Food Garden undergraduate module, ensuring that trees in all their shapes and forms stay firmly rooted in campus life.BACK PAGES | BENEATH THE CANOPY44 — 45Spence ensured that the ‘dominant spine of trees’ that runs through the valley was preserved before the first brick was laid in 1959.
In 20 years of researching corruption – starting off in Eastern Europe, later working in Africa and the Caribbean, and in my home country, the UK – it has become clear to me that cleaning up public procurement should be our global priority. All over the world, procurement is a prime target for those hoping to siphon money out of the state because it’s a major way in which governments spend money. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s member) countries spend about one-third of total government spending through public procurement, and that can be as much as one half in lower-income countries. When that money is spent corruptly, it undermines economic development, and the public get shoddy basic services and unsafe infrastructure. The difficulty for corruption researchers has always been pinpointing when procurement is the result of a corrupt deal. It is quite easy for government officials and companies to rig the process while maintaining the illusion of open and fair competition, or for them to come up with excuses for why they are avoiding competition to source from a sole supplier. The Covid-19 pandemic is a classic example of how there can be good reasons to avoid competition, such as needing to buy personal protective equipment rapidly in an emergency. But such reasons can also be exploited by people who want to give out contracts to cronies while bypassing the normal levels of scrutiny.Public procurement is a hotspot of corruption all over the world. Professor Liz David-Barrett discusses how her research helps policy-makers to pinpoint the risks and clean up public spending.My research aims to make it easier to spot corruption risks in public procurement. It takes advantage of the fact that governments are now more transparent about how they spend money, while improvements in technology have made it easier to collect and analyse large datasets – or ‘big data.’ Working with Dr Mihály Fazekas at the Central European University, and funded by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, we collate data that governments publish about their spending patterns and analyse it for a set of ‘red flags’ that often indicate a corrupt manipulation. Looking across vast datasets, we can spot which parts of government spending are highest risk and identify suppliers that regularly win under suspicious conditions. Our method doesn’t tell us definitively whether corruption has occurred, but it provides a risk analysis that can be used to prioritise audit resources or to help NGOs ask questions of governments. In fact, in Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, we have organised ‘hackathons’ that bring together Maths undergraduates and local civil society activists to analyse local spending data for corruption patterns.We have also worked with the World Bank to help them control spending that they finance, and with the governments of Jamaica and Uganda, where innovative local regulators are interested in using our tools to better control government spending. We can use the method to test the impact of reforms, observing how the risk pattern changed following the introduction of new rules. Spoiler: reforms often simply displace corruption, rather than reduce it.For me, this kind of research is a reason to be optimistic about the future. Tackling corruption is always going to be highly political and it takes broad local coalitions to fight the vested interests that benefit. But there is an important role for researchers too. We can develop tools that empower brave local reformers with evidence about what is going wrong and how to change it.The fight against cronyismSee more podcasts and publications authored by alumni in the past year at www.sussex.ac.uk/falmerWe are HistoryHope HighMind on the matterThe RezScript ApartAsk the ExpertsOPINION |THE FIGHT AGAINST CRONYISM46 — 47OPINIONBACK PAGES | ALUMNI LIBRARYAlumni libraryP O D C A S T S ANGELA BARNES (LINGUISTICS 1996), We Are History. The podcast for those who want to hear about history but laugh at the same time. Angela and co-presenter John O’Farrell discuss interesting and quirky chapters of history.ANNABEL DEAS (ENGLISH 2002), Hope High. Annabel’s award-winning podcast on the real-life story of a year spent with a community in Huddersfield fighting county lines drug gangs’ exploitation of children and violence. TOOBA KHAN (NEUROSCIENCE 2014), Mind on the Matter. Medical student Tooba interviews healthcare professionals and people who have had experiences of mental illness to discuss the mental health issues that we all encounter in life. AL HORNER (FILM STUDIES 2007), Script Apart. Al speaks to the screenwriters behind iconic films to hear about their initial screenplays and explore the adjustments made en route to the silver screen. Ask the Experts. This University podcast series offers a chance to hear leading Sussex experts discuss topics ranging from Covid-19 to Quantum Physics, in a series of live events. The Rez. An exciting sci-fi podcast adventure co-created by Professor Martin Spinelli and designed to help young people’s emotional health. BOOKS JOHN ALTMAN (ENGLISH 1968), Hidden Man, Equinox Publishing. In this compelling memoir John reflects on his half a century in the world of popular music. Named the ‘Hidden Man’ by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, most people will be familiar with music that John has composed, with scores in films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Goldeneye and Titanic, though it’s likely many people will not know the composer.ANIL SETH (INFORMATICS 1995), Being You, Faber & Faber. After over 20 years of researching the brain, neuroscientist Anil Seth discusses a revolutionary new theory of consciousness and what it means to ‘be you’. Being You will challenge your understanding of perception and reality!CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS (MEDIA STUDIES 2007),Empress & Aniya, Knights of Media. Empress & Aniya is the first Young Adult novel from the bestselling author of Queenie. It’s the story of two teenage girls who accidentally cast a spell on their sixteenth birthday and end up switching bodies. In this novel, Candice investigates the importance of real friendship and the ups and downs of being a teenager. IAN CROFTON (ENGLISH 1975), Fringed With Mud & Pearls, Birlinn. Embarking on a personal odyssey to the islands encircling England, Ian explores how some are places of refuge or holiness, while others have been turned into personal fiefdoms by their owners or locations for prisons, rubbish dumps and military installations. He also looks at the varied ways in which England’s islands have been formed and how they are constantly changing.RAJSHEKHAR MADDIPATLA (ENVIRONMENT DEVELOPMENT ANDPOLICY 2006), Despite the State, Context. Reporting from six states over 33 months, award-winning investigative journalist Rajshekhar looks at democratic policy in India and how it is affecting its states. In doing so he highlights what he argues is a crisis that has largely gone unexamined, which impacts India’s schools, companies, citizens’ rights and access to water. PHILIPPA GREGORY CBE (HISTORY 1975), Dark Tides,Simon & Schuster. In this gripping sequel to Tidelands, Dark Tidestracks the story of a fictional family in London, Venice and New England over 21 years. Opening in the poverty and glamour of 1670 Restoration London, where after years of civil war the monarchy has been restored and Charles II is on the throne, the novel explores the themes of greed and desire: for love, for wealth, for a childand for home. LIZ DAVID-BARRETTProfessor Liz David-Barrett is Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption. She leads the Centre’s activities in research, teaching and policy impact and engages with anti-corruption practitioners in governments, the private sector and NGOs.
Housed at The Keep in Falmer, alongside the archives of East Sussex Record Office and Brighton and Hove City Council, exists a collection of documents, pictures, photographs and books pored over by academics, students, writers, researchers and those just curious to explore the past.“Archives are often the building blocks of original research,” says Richard Wragg, the University’s Special Collections Manager. “As centres of learning, it’s essential that universities develop collections, not only to further our understanding of the past, but to help train the researchers of the future. This fantastic resource means that our students have access to unique and precious collections and can explore them through seminars and independent study.”There are more than 70 collections in the care of the University. They include the papers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, personal correspondence of Rudyard Kipling, an archive of German-Jewish life from several different sources, and the much-loved Mass Observation Project: an ongoing collection of personal diaries that has captured the lives of people in Britain since the 1930s.Among the most recent acquisitions by the University is the archive of the late Jeremy Hutchinson QC, Baron Hutchinson of Lullington, who died in 2017 at the age of 102. He was one of the most high-profile criminal defence barristers of the 20th century and said to be the character inspiration for John Mortimer’s 1970s television series Rumpole of the Bailey.From an original 15th century Caxton-printed version of a Benedictine monk’s chronicle to the electronic submission of hundreds of people’s diaries documenting what they did on 12 May 2021, the University of Sussex’s Special Collections, archived at The Keep, is a varied and wondrous collection. In a long and celebrated career, Hutchinson’s clients included Christine Keeler, who was tried for perjury during the Profumo affair. He also represented the infamous cannabis smuggler Howard Marks, the art forger Thomas Keating, and the MI6 spy George Blake, who was convicted in 1961 for being a double agent working for the Soviet Union.Most notably, Hutchinson was part of the team that successfully defended Penguin Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Loverin 1960. The novel had been printed in France and Italy since 1928 but, because of its preponderance of sexual references and lewd four-letter words, had been banned in England. Hutchinson looked to the support of the literary establishment, including writers such as E. M. Forster and Cecil Day-Lewis, to be witnesses for the defence on the grounds of the novel’s cultural and literary importance. The archive contains a letter to Hutchinson from the poet John Betjeman, who wrote that Lawrence “is earthy but not in the least salacious.” The acquittal of Penguin Books (by a jury which unusually included three women) not only led to a change in the UK Obscenity Laws but was seen as a watershed moment for literary and sexual liberalism. The novel went on to sell three million copies in its first year of publication and Hutchinson was hailed a hero. The archive contains an original 1928 copy signed by Lawrence and given to Hutchinson by his mother, Mary, with the inscription: “To Jeremy, in remembrance and honour of the great victory and your part in it. Old Baily October-November 1960.”“One of the interesting aspects of the Hutchinson archive is that it’s a family collection, with documents and correspondence from all manner of significant figures of the 20th century,” says Richard.Hutchinson’s father, St John, was also a QC and was, coincidentally, giving D. H. Lawrence advice in 1917 when a selection of Lawrence’s poems was confiscated by the authorities. Mary Hutchinson was a writer on the fringes of the so-called Bloomsbury Group and known to have had a lengthy affair with Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, Clive Bell. The archive contains correspondence with Vanessa and Clive Bell at Charleston, along with T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. In 1940 Hutchinson, then a Royal Navy officer, married the actress Peggy Ashcroft after introducing himself to her when she was appearing at Theatre Royal Brighton. Peggy had been married twice before and was seven years Jeremy’s senior. The archive includes largely unseen correspondence between Hutchinson and Ashcroft from the war years, during which she wrote about the birth of their daughter, Eliza, detailed her theatre work with the likes of John Gielgud, and hoped for her husband’s safe return from war.In fact, in 1941, while serving under Lord Mountbatten, Hutchinson was a signals operator on board the destroyer HMS Kelly when it was sunk by a German bomber. He was lucky to survive as half the crew perished. The tragedy is said to have inspired In Which We Serve,the 1942 film drama directed by playwright Noël Coward, who was also a family friend.The archive has significant overlaps with the University’s existing archives, particularly those related to the Bloomsbury Group, which is invaluable for scholars and researchers looking to piece together the past.“New acquisitions such as this can further the work of academics near and far,” says Richard. “They also complement our existing collections and, of course, the record of the University of Sussex’s own story. Through them, impactful research takes place.”BACK PAGES | TREASURES OF THE KEEP48 — 49The University of Sussex is grateful to have benefited from gifts in wills throughout our 60-year history.From life-changing research to developing our beautiful campus or supporting the next generation of students, our alumni and friends are ensuring the University continues to thrive in the future. By leaving a gift to Sussex in your will, you will play a vital role in our next 60 years and beyond. Even a small donation can make a big difference. If you have fond memories of your time at Sussex, please consider remembering us with a gift in your will.Visit www.sussex.ac.uk/yourlegacy for more information or, for a confidential discussion about your intentions, contact Ben Loxton at b.loxton@sussex.ac.uk or +44 (0) 1273 872820The University of Sussex is an exempt charity, which means that any gift left to us in your will is free of UK inheritance tax.Treasures of The Keep
What an oral history project of the scale, depth and humanity of Sisterhood & After can teach us is the power of coalitions – across class, race, sexuality,gender – of overcoming pride and polarisation.MARGARETTA JOLLYFROM ‘HISTORY LESSONS’PAGES 36-38
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