Category Archives: Cambridge

Elite Cambridge club asks members for £50,000 to keep it open

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Pitt Club, founded in 1835, faces financial crisis after losing rental income from Pizza Express

It has survived a wartime recruitment crisis, a disastrous fire and a “horrible scarcity of whisky”. Now a Cambridge University members’ club is facing a surprising new challenge to its survival: the lockdown misfortunes of Pizza Express.

One hundred and eighty-five years after it was founded, the university’s Pitt Club – whose alumni include John Maynard Keynes, John Cleese and the Prince of Wales – is so close to financial catastrophe that it has been forced to make a desperate appeal to its lifetime members.

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Toppling Edward Colston’s statue is unlikely to be enough to stop public anger

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Few imperial icons, including Churchill, will escape the need to reappraise Britain’s past

The toppling of slaver Edward Colston’s statue has electrified a longer term – and already deeply polarised – debate among British historians and academics, with some celebrating a “moment of history” as others warned of dark consequences for society.

Inaction over figures such as Colston had bred anger that would be felt “all over Britain”, said Andrea Livesey, a historian specialising in the study of slavery and its legacies and who described the events in Bristol as “wholly justified”.

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Sheikh’s daughter called UK police after kidnap, lawyer claims

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Revelation fuels calls for investigations into Cambridgeshire force and Foreign Office after high court bombshell

There are demands for independent inquiries into the roles of the Foreign Office and Cambridgeshire police after an investigation into the abduction of a princess on a British street was allowed to lapse.

Princess Shamsa Al Maktoum of Dubai was snatched two decades ago by men working for her father, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, the billionaire ruler of Dubai, who is a friend of the Queen.

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Police to review inquiry into 2000 disappearance of Dubai ruler’s daughter

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Family court ruled this week that Sheikha Shamsa al-Maktoum was probably abducted by her father

The lapsed investigation into the disappearance of the ruler of Dubai’s daughter from the streets of Cambridge 20 years ago is to be reviewed, police have said.

Confirmation that detectives could revive their criminal inquiries follows a damning family court judgment that found – on the balance of probabilities – that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum orchestrated the abduction of two of his daughters, Sheikha Shamsa in 2000 and her sister, Sheikha Latifa, who was seized off a yacht in the Indian Ocean in 2018.

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Students slam Cambridge over handling of sexual misconduct cases

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Don in charge of student welfare at Trinity Hall gave evidence on behalf of male student accused of rape

Hundreds of Cambridge students have accused the university of “a complete failure” to deal with complaints of sexual misconduct after an investigation that raised concerns about a conflict of interest among academics.

In a letter signed by more than 500 current and former students, Cambridge University Students’ Union Women’s Campaign has called for colleges to be stripped of their powers to investigate sexual misconduct complaints against their own members.

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Bronze cockerel to be returned to Nigeria by Cambridge college

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Benin bronze statue at Jesus College to be repatriated after 1897 theft by British forces

A bronze cockerel taken by British colonial forces and donated to Jesus College Cambridge is to be returned to Nigeria in an unprecedented step that adds momentum to the growing repatriations movement.

The Okukor, described by the college as a “royal ancestral heirloom”, will be one of the first Benin bronzes to be returned to Nigeria by a major British institution since the punitive expedition in 1897 when thousands of bronzes were stolen from Benin City by British forces.

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From Bodmin to Berlin, crowds vent their fury at Boris Johnson’s ‘coup’

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Protesters ranged from students at the prime minister’s old Oxford college to retired teachers, children and activists

In Cambridge’s Market Square, a crowd of families, young people and silver-haired academics listened as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy was read out. Many joined in, from memory, making a collective appeal for non-violent resistance: “Rise, like lions after slumber... Ye are many – they are few.” There were moments of more garrulous protest too. During a speech criticising Boris Johnson, someone shouted: “Off with his head!”

From Bodmin to Berlin, Bristol to Oxford, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in towns and cities across England, Scotland and Wales on Saturday to vent their fury at Johnson’s plan to suspend parliament. Around 1,200 people attended the rally in Cambridge, where they booed the prime minister and his adviser Dominic Cummings as though they were pantomime villains.

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