Viewing archives for

After qualifying as a GP, Dr Joseph Besser is now combining his practice of medicine with a passion for educating people about health – and enjoying married life in the sun in Australia.

Joe (OE 1997–2004) went on from QE to read Medicine at Nottingham. After graduating in 2009, he worked at some of the UK’s best-known hospitals, but also spent long periods in Australia, including 18 months in Melbourne as a junior doctor working in Accident & Emergency.

“Obtaining a medical degree permits you a great freedom to travel and work overseas,” he says. “I returned to London to complete GP training at St George’s in Tooting, and once completed, returned to Australia, this time to Sydney to work as a GP.

“I am now settling into life as a GP in Australia. I currently live and work in the Northern Beaches of Sydney in a beach town called Manly. I find myself on the beach almost every day. On the weekends, I spend my time playing as much beach volleyball as is humanly possible.”

His particular medical interests include psychiatry – he has worked both at The Priory and at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital – and innovations in general practice.

In 2018, he started a medical blog, Teach Me GP, and an article from it (What advice should we give to patients about their consultation?) was published in the British Journal on General Practice. “The year was full of accomplishments as I also passed my final GP exams and finished the year by getting married to my wife, Emma, who is also a doctor.”

“I hope some day to be a teacher, to emulate my favourite teachers from QE, Nottingham University and then St George’s Hospital in Tooting, those who have inspired me in the past. I am therefore undergoing training to become a GP trainer.” Joe also hopes one day “to promote better health education in primary and secondary schools. Our health is precious and yet we do not do enough to formally educate people on how to look after it.”

Those “favourite teachers” include Neil Enright, the current Headmaster, who was his Geography teacher through A-levels and who led a “memorable field trip” to Swanage.

“Although I stopped studying English after GCSE, I recall with great fondness classes with Mr [David] Ryan. I wish I had been lucky enough to live closer to the School so I could have remained in contact with more of the staff after leaving,” he adds.

Among his many other QE memories, the “lively” end-of-season rugby dinners stand out, as does the annual cross-country run, with its infamous ‘elephant dip’. “It was so wet and boggy that some unfortunate souls would lose the shoes right off their feet.”

“I made lifelong friends at QE. The best man at my wedding was a fellow lieutenant, Matt Houghton, and the old head boy [School Captain], Ashish Kalraiya, was an usher. Both were in my year.”

Scott Lesner switched careers after initially training as a lawyer – and has never looked back.

Now a recruitment specialist, Scott (OE 1987-1992) has carved out a successful career, while raising a family and maintaining his longstanding enthusiasm for football, as both player and fan.

“I didn’t love being a lawyer (and I think it’s really important to enjoy what you do at work), so I switched to legal recruitment,” he explains.

Scott joined QE in the middle of Year 8 in 1987. “I had some magnificent teachers,” he says, mentioning especially Eric Houston (who retired as Second Master in 2010 and is a Foundation Governor), History teacher Mr Oulton and Dr John Marincowitz (who went on to become Headmaster in 1999, retiring in 2011). “I didn’t just learn from them academically, but I was also moulded by them as a young man. I’m very conscious of that and grateful for it.”

Notwithstanding the School’s focus on rugby, football, including his beloved Spurs, has always been Scott’s passion: “I travelled an hour to school on the 107 bus from Kenton with a group of friends – mostly it was also a fun, social time. Once, after a particularly heated north London derby between Spurs and Arsenal, we were a bit rowdy on the bus and got in trouble for it at School.”

Such rare instances aside, he made a positive impression in both the classroom and on the sports field. “I won a number of academic prizes – if I remember rightly, for History and Latin – and I was good at sport. Cricket was my strongest and I think I played once for the First XI.”

A member of Stapylton House in an era when Stapylton was on a winning streak, he was also a prefect: “I still have my tie in a memories box.”

After A-levels in 1992, Scott progressed straight to Nottingham University to read Law and was then sponsored through Law school, training with the firm that is now CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang. “I spent a further two years there as an energy lawyer, advising clients on electricity market liberalisation and power projects.”

In 2000, he took the plunge and made his move into legal recruitment, joining Deacon Search, a firm that had been established only the year before. After a spell with another legal recruiter from 2005-2009, he returned to Deacon Search and has been there ever since.

“I’ve spent the last 18 years advising partners moving between the major UK and US law firms and conducting headhunting assignments. The highlights are always the team moves, as clients really appreciate those and, to be candid, they’re the big fees! It’s a fascinating business, as, being people-centric, no two situations are the same.”

On its website, the firm salutes him as its ‘search oracle’, highlighting his ‘photographic memory for partner moves (and for football trivia)’.

Scott adds: “Our company is doing well. We’re continuing to grow and we’re hopeful that 2019 will bring some significant international expansion.”

He is married to Katy and has three children: Jake, aged 14, Jasmine,12, and nine-year-old Max. The family live in Elstree.

A volunteer contributor at the School’s Careers Convention during the autumn, Scott remains close friends with one of his QE contemporaries – Adam Sherling (OE 1985-1992) – and is in contact occasionally with others, mostly via LinkedIn. “Recently, I exchanged messages with Khairul and Hisham Hussain for the first time in years.”

His passion for football is undimmed. “I still play five-a-side. I’m a season ticket-holder at Spurs with my dad, my sons, my cousin and some friends. I also manage my youngest boy’s Sunday league team,” he says.

Best-selling author Tim Marshall told A-level Politics and Geography students about the worldwide renewed rise of nationalism and identity politics in a talk on his latest book.

The former diplomatic editor and foreign affairs editor for Sky News was visiting South Hampstead High School, which invited QE to send along boys with an interest in the subject.

In an early-evening event, he spoke for 45 minutes on Divided: Why we’re living in an age of walls to an audience that included 11 QE boys, as well as QE’s Head of Geography, Emily Parry, Head of Politics, Liam Hargadon and Geography teachers Helen Davies and Nilisha Shah.

Miss Parry said: “In his talk, Tim discussed how we feel more divided than ever and how nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Thousands of miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are redefining our political landscape.

“He highlighted how the proposed wall between Mexico and the USA isn’t the only wall which should have our attention, but how many walls and other physical divisions exist throughout the world, such as the wall between Israel and the West Bank and the fence separating India from Bangladesh.

“He argues that understanding what has divided us, past and present, is essential to understanding much of what’s going on in the world today.”

Miss Parry added that he also told a few Geography-themed jokes, including: ‘Where do all pens come from? Answer: Pennsylvania!”

In the Q&A session following the talk, there was a discussion about topics such as whether the rise of nationalism means we are seeing an end to some forms of globalisation. Mr Marshall was also asked whether, in the context of the mass migration movements seen around the world, open borders should exist: he felt that they should not.

At the end of the event, he signed copies of his books, including his 2015 best-seller, Prisoners of Geography.

In a colourful life, triple BAFTA-nominated Martyn Day has enjoyed an illustrious television career that ranged from working on much-loved children’s programmes to making documentaries in locations as disparate as the Arctic and India.

Martyn (OE 1956–1963) has socialised with the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. He has played at Glastonbury.

And, in 1965, in one never-to-be-forgotten evening, his mod band supported The Who – then just on the brink of international stardom.

Yet before all that, it was two teachers at QE who inspired this artistically inclined Leicester House pupil and helped set him on to his preferred path in life – although not everyone at the School was so supportive of his ambitions, as he recalls.

“The QE that I went to was very different to the School today. Under Ernest Jenkins’s rather stuffy headship, the place was not geared up for us off-beat souls who did not want to become accountants, lawyers or colonial administrators. I was told that I was not suitable for university (i.e. Oxford or Cambridge) but ‘Not to worry!’ There was an ‘interesting future’ for me in: a) the City, b) the Armed Services or c) the Church. This was of little use as I wanted to work in TV.

“Fortunately, there were two teachers who helped me out: ‘Jerry’ Reid, my English teacher, who introduced me to a world of literature way beyond the School curriculum, and Kaye Townsend, Maths, who heard my complaint and introduced me to a film production accountant. Maybe not lunch with Stanley Kubrick, but a welcome step in the right direction.

“I left QE in summer 1963, just as the Beatles released She Loves You, and started work as a wages clerk at MGM Studios in Borehamwood.”

Alongside his career, he was also regularly taking to the stage with a beat group called The Trekkas, based in Welwyn Garden City. “We were only an amateur band but good enough to be regularly booked to support established acts like Manfred Mann, Amen Corner, Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck. We even got to play alongside Elton John when he was plain Reg Dwight.”

But the most memorable night of all came on 17th June 1965, when The Trekkas (pictured here at around the same date) had been booked to play support at Bowes Lyon House in Stevenage. “What we didn’t know was the name of the band we were supporting. All we knew was they came from West London.

“We got there about 6.00pm to set up and were surprised to see that the other band – the unknown ‘stars’ – had already been into the hall, set up their own equipment and left. There was a drum kit and two huge amplifiers, bigger than anything that we had seen before.

“Everything was battered. The drum kit looked like it had been dropped off the back of a lorry. One of the amps, the one on the right, was missing the cloth covering the speakers. This had been replaced by a union flag. The gear looked expensive but it had been trashed.”

As a local band with many fans in the audience, Martyn and his bandmates were initially confident that “we’d blow them off the stage” – until the main act [The Who] actually walked on.

“The guys coming on after us weren’t neat at all. There were four of them and they didn’t bother with matching outfits like most other bands at the time…One [Keith Moon] wore a t-shirt with an RAF roundel on the front. Another, the singer [Roger Daltrey], had an arrow point-striped shirt. The bass player [John Entwhistle] was wearing a jacket covered with military insignia. The guitar player [Pete Townshend], carrying a beaten-up Rickenbacker, had a jacket made from a Union Jack.

“There was definitely something about them – a kind of ‘flash’ arrogance perhaps – but they were certainly cooler than us, sharper than us, angrier than us. In 1965 there was a word for people like them. They were ‘faces’ – out in front setting the trend.

“They didn’t bother with any of that ‘Hello, Good Evening’ nonsense. They just plugged in their guitars, looked at each other and let rip.

“They didn’t play their music, they attacked it. The volume was incredible. The bass line thudded against you, rattling your entrails. The drummer, RAF roundel man [Keith Moon], ignored most of the percussion niceties, and set out to beat his kit to death. On top of all this turmoil the guitarist in his Union Jack jacket [Pete Townshend] was chopping and hacking at his guitar, his arm windmilling in the air and slashing down to punch out chords.

“This wasn’t the usual ‘beat group’ crisp solos and chanky-chank rhythm. This was six-string Armageddon with every frustration they had ever felt compressed into three-minute musical hand grenades.”

“…And just at the point when it couldn’t get any crazier, it suddenly did. The guitarist started bayoneting his amplifier with his guitar, smashing the neck against the speaker board. Every rule about caring for your instrument disappeared in a screeching, splintering, crashing, cracking tsunami of sound. Then the drums went too, kicked forward and over off the stage. Tumbling, clanging into the audience. No ‘Thanks and goodbyes’. No “Goodnights and see you agains’. Just noise and fury and destruction – and then they were gone, leaving us, the audience and the world of pop music changed forever.”

The photo here shows a gig Martyn played at Goffs Oak while still at QE. He is pictured with fellow Elizabethan colleague Guy Hewlett (1954-1962), backing Tommy Moeller. Moeller later became the lead singer with Unit 4 plus 2, who had a No. 1 hit with Concrete and Clay.

Away from his music, Martyn’s television career was progressing well, as over the years he moved into special effects and then trained as a film editor, working in this era on the second and third series of Dr Who and, in 1973, as a researcher on the children’s TV magazine, Magpie.

By 1982, Martyn was a producer at Granada TV, where he worked until the early 1990s, finishing his period there as a writer/producer/director.

He spent two years in Macedonia producing a teen drama written to reduce ethnic tension to prevent the war in Kosovo spreading south (“It did – and it didn’t!”). He retired in 2010 after producing two series of the BAFTA-nominated game show, Jungle Run.

Reflecting on this career, Martyn says: “I have researched, set up and filmed fascinating stories all over the world, from the Giant Pingo [a mound of earth-covered ice] in Tuktoyaktuk in the Canadian High Arctic to the three-eyed Tuatara ‘lizard’ in the Cook Straits in New Zealand. On the way I have also met some really interesting people – the Waorani in the Ecuadorean rain forest and the Garos who live on the border between Burma and India are just two. I’ve also ridden an elephant in the wettest place on earth – Cherrapunji in Meghalaya, India – faced down a very miffed alligator in the Florida swamps and ‘borrowed’ a giant tortoise in Mauritius.”

Today Martyn, who lives in Twickenham, retains his keen interest in music, playing bass guitar in a band performing 1950s rock’n’roll. He writes a regular local history strand for the St Margarets Community Newsletter and St Margarets Magazine. He is also a warranted Cub Scout Leader.

In October, he was among the OE guests who came to the School to pass on their expertise at the Year 11 Careers Convention.

The first Elizabethan ever to go to California’s Stanford University sang the praises of studying stateside when he returned to speak to senior pupils at QE.

Stanford comes at or near the top of most global university rankings, with Times Higher Education naming it as one of its six world ‘super-brands’, together with Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT.

Valavan Ananthakumaraswamy OE (2009-2016), who chose to follow a mixed Liberal Arts programme for the first two years of his degree, told the current QE pupils that he had been particularly attracted by the wide range of subjects available through the US university system and by the closer relationships with professors.

He appreciated the excellent facilities and also the flexibility available to students when choosing classes, giving them more control over their own workload.

Valavan applied to Stanford after winning a place on the Sutton Trust’s US Programme – a scheme delivered by the educational charity in partnership with the US-UK Fulbright Commission to give bright British state school pupils a taste of life in American higher education. His profile for the programme recorded that his family originally come from Sri Lanka, but were displaced by the civil war.

The report also stated that Valavan saw his community service as “the most important part of him”. In 2014, Valavan helped found The Youth Project, a global movement of young people striving to make the world a better place, which now operates in 14 countries.

Extensive extra-curricular opportunities are a feature of the American system, he told the QE puipls on his recent visit, recalling his involvement with charity work while at QE and saying that this is something he has been keen to continue with at Stanford.

Palo Alto’s 300 days of sunshine each year were undoubtedly another attraction, as was the campus culture and the sense of community that this fosters. Valavan said he has been enjoying ‘dorm life’, adding that in his first year, he went on a skiing trip that was actually funded by the dormitory.

Valavan offered guidance on the application process, covering the nature of the aptitude tests, including SATs and ACTs (the two different tests that applicants are required to take for admittance to a US university). His main piece of advice was that applicants should just keep practising!

He advised boys to look into the possibility of financial aid for study in the US, covering the difference between ‘need-blind’ and ‘need-aware’ – terms used in the US, with the former meaning a university admission policy under which an applicant’s financial situation is not considered when deciding admission. A big advantage for those able to secure such financial aid was that, unlike in the UK, there was then no need for a student loan, Valavan said.

When asked about challenges he had faced, Valavan spoke about how he had to adapt to the culture of America. TV shows, shops and sports are all different there. He mentioned that President Trump was elected in first the two months of his studying there. He added that he likes the challenge of adapting and finds it exciting.