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Brothers Jaydon and Kiaron Lad and their mum, Anjuna, are well past the half-way mark in their quest to run and cycle 300km to raise funds for the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s (FQE) charity.

Inspired by Kiaron’s success in raising money for the NHS during last year’s lockdown in a fundraising event created by QE’s Director of Sport, Jonathan Hart, the Lad family members set themselves the challenge of covering 100km each before this year’s FQE Founder’s Day on Saturday 19th June.

So far, they have successfully overcome near-freezing temperatures, illness and technical issues (a malfunctioning tracking app and bike speedometer) as they have clocked up the miles towards their ambitious target.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Sadly, as in 2020, this year’s Founder’s Day will have to be a virtual event. The Founder’s Day Fete, organised by FQE, is usually our single biggest annual fundraiser, bringing in around £20,000 to help us provide state-of-the-art facilities and increased opportunities for all our pupils. Last year, thanks to the sterling efforts of many across the Elizabethan community, we successfully reached that target.

“I commend the Lad family on their efforts on FQE’s behalf and wish them well as they seek to complete their ambitious challenge. As we look forward to the day itself, I hope many will sponsor them and will also back the exciting fundraising activities we are planning.”

Jaydon, of Year 7, said: “During lockdown, both the School and my parents stressed the importance of staying active and exercising (outdoors if possible) in order to look after our mental and physical health. We were keen to do something that would provide a challenge – so nothing too easy and straightforward, but then on the other hand nothing too difficult.

“My brother has been going out running and has also inspired our mum to take it up. Not being a fan of long-distance running myself, I thought I could join them on my bicycle, and, from there, the idea of raising money for the School was born.”

It was, said Jaydon, a challenge which fulfilled the desired ‘SMART’ criteria, since it was Specific, Measurable (using the speedometer and apps), Achievable, Realistic and Timely (if steady progress was maintained, they should have sufficient time to complete it before the Founder’s Day deadline).

Venturing out mostly at weekends, the Lad trio got off to a strong start, covering 31.76km between them on their first excursion.

It has not always been easy.  Jaydon initially found it difficult to adjust his speed to that of the runners, and, on week 2, in addition to his “not really feeling it”, his speedometer started displaying in mph instead of kph, necessitating a little mental arithmetic to make the conversion on the fly. A few days later, Kiaron, of Year 9, and his mum headed out again, but Jaydon felt unwell and stayed in bed, making up the distance missed with his own solo effort a few days later.

The three’s longest distance came the day after Jaydon’s 12th birthday when, in honour of the occasion, his mum suggested they try to cover 12km each. They duly hit this target, with a combined total of 37.01km.

Two days later, they were out again. “I was expecting another slow bike ride today, but boy was I wrong!” reported Jaydon in his fundraising diary. “As we were only aiming for 5km, my mum and my brother were looking at trying to beat their previous run times and were running faster than normal.” Both of them achieved it.

That speedy effort took the total for their first seven runs and rides to 183.63km, which leaves them well set to meet their overall goal of covering the 300km on or before Saturday 12th June, the weekend before Founder’s Day.

• To sponsor the Lad family, simply visit the Virtual Founder’s Day JustGiving page which has just been set up, mentioning ‘The Lads 300km’ in any accompanying message.

When his father told him he wanted to retire and invited him to take over the family coffee business, Colin Smith had already established a successful career in teaching.

There was no obligation for him to make the move – his father had always valued the fact that a QE education gave Colin (OE 1957–1964) opportunities that he had not enjoyed himself. And it was not a decision Colin wanted to take lightly – “I thought about it for around a year”.

But in the end, he was drawn by the challenge and duly made the move, working as the third partner alongside his father and uncle for about two years, before then taking the helm at the business his grandfather had established in 1936.

Since switching careers in 1980, he has not only greatly expanded Smiths Coffee Company, but has also established himself as an international award-winning expert in specialist coffee, while putting his expertise to use in charitable and philanthropic work, too.

“With the knowledge I have accumulated through many years of experience in the coffee industry, I am attempting to create a much better coffee world,” he says.

Colin has many happy memories of the education that his father so prized. He was a regular QE actor – appearing, for example, as the Dauphin in George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and as Mrs Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.

A Sub Prefect and a keen athlete, he was also editor of the Elizabethan magazine, sang in the School Choir and did Scottish dancing in a club run by Languages teacher (and Old Elizabethan) Derek Fry, where the boys enjoyed the chance to dance with their counterparts from Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School.

“John Todd and I were the first pupils to take A-level RE, under the personal supervision of John Pearce (Deputy Headmaster – Second Master), who gave up his free time to tutor us,” says Colin, who won the Broughton Divinity Prize.

Colin was heavily involved in scouting activities, representing Hertfordshire at the Marathon Scout Jamboree 1964 and becoming a Queen’s Scout – the highest award given in the movement.

He also secured his Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. “I remember asking Mr Edwards [Headmaster Timothy Edwards] for a day off to go to the presentation at Buckingham Palace, showing him the card from the equerry to Prince Philip. His comment was: ‘I don’t think I have much say in the matter; my authority doesn’t go that far.’”

After leaving QE, he went to St Luke’s, a teacher-training college that is now part of the University of Exeter, where he studied PE & Biology, took up fencing and sang in the college’s Chapel Choir.

Qualifying as a PE teacher, from 1967 to 1971 he taught at Beaumont School, St Albans, becoming head of department there.

He took a year out to study Laban Movement at the Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone and then moved to become Head of PE and head of year at Oldborough Manor School, Maidstone, Kent.

Even when he took over his father and uncle’s business, his links with education remained strong. He served as a Governor of Dollis School in Hendon for 15 years until his company moved from its factory in Mill Hill to new premises – a factory in Hemel Hempstead – in 1997.

“The company has developed from roasting coffee in a shop window at my grandfather’s grocer’s shop in Mill Hill in 1936. Smith’s Coffee Company now roast around approximately 10 tonnes of coffee per week for the retail and catering markets. I am also a partner in a small shop roasting business in Leighton Buzzard.”

Smiths Coffee Company specialises in quality coffees and teas and has an organic and Fairtrade branch, The Natural Coffee Company. “We also have a company, Arabica Espresso Services, which supplies & maintains espresso machines & coffee making equipment.”

Five years ago, Smiths developed a process for flavouring coffee to meet an ever-increasing market: “Now we are probably the biggest coffee flavourist in the UK”.

Having won major contracts over the years, such as roasting coffee for Whittard’s 125 shops, the company has grown and today it continues to expand: it recently secured a major account with Warner Leisure Hotels. As a result of this expansion, it is looking for new premises once again.

“I was a founder member of the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) in 1997 and was President from 2005-2007,” says Colin. He served on the board of directors until 2011 and in recent years has organised around 18 trips so that members can visit places where coffee is grown – around three a year. The countries visited include India, Kenya, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras, Sumatra, Tanzania, Panama, Papua New Guinea and the US (Hawaii).

“Visiting the farms and tasting the coffees at origin has expanded my experience and knowledge of the product, with its progress through the roasting, cupping and blending processes.”

He has also organised SCAE educational activities and assisted in the arrangements for the SCAE World of Coffee event each year. “I have represented the SCAE in Japan, Costa Rica, USA, Sumatra and many other countries and in 2006, I represented Europe on the panel of judges who cupped the coffees for the Costa Rica Cosecha d’Oro, at their invitation. I appeared on TV to discuss the importance of quality coffee to the European market. I am also asked occasionally by local radio to comment on various aspects of the trade. The last one was on Kopi Luwak, a very rare and expensive coffee!”

He is a member of a four-strong Which magazine panel which samples and assesses retail coffee products. In December 2011, he was awarded the Allegra European Coffee Award for outstanding contribution to the European Coffee Industry and in June 2013 the SCAE Award for Excellence: Lifetime Achievement Award.

“My extensive knowledge of the subject enables me to give many talks and lectures on all aspects of coffee, as well as training sessions on the use of coffee-making machinery. I am often asked to give advice on the setting up of roasting plants and coffee shops.

“The knowledge gained through all this experience has helped the company to focus on a range of coffees, from real speciality to good grade coffees for the selective market.”

In 2017, the SCAE combined with the Specialty Coffee Association of America to form the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), for which Colin is an Ambassador.

“My ethos is to educate members of the coffee industry and the consumer to understand the value of speciality coffee.  This will further the speciality coffee market and enable more people to assess the quality of better coffee.”

He also puts his expertise and knowledge to good use in serving wider society. He maintains close contact with the local Hospice of St Francis’s Corporate Partnership Committee on a voluntary basis, supporting many of their events with supplies of coffees. “I also give many talks on coffee and the money raised is used to support the St Francis hospices and the Peace Hospice in Watford.”

A qualified SCA trainer, he has worked with local prisons to train prisoners in a rehabilitation programme before release. “Until December 2019, at The Mount Prison and Bedford Prison, we had a café in the visitors’ room which enabled the prisoners to gain experience in communication with the public and to practise the skills learned in taking the Speciality Coffee Association (SCA) barista Foundation Course. Profits gained from the cafes were given to HACRO, the Hertfordshire Association for the Rehabilitation of Offenders.”

Colin lives in Berkhamsted and is married to Marina, his second wife. Between them, they have 13 grandchildren. He has two daughters with his first wife, Sue, and one with Marina.  “Also on a personal level, after 40 years I no longer play hockey for St Albans, but I am I am trying to play golf.”

When Fabio Castagno entered the world of finance after completing his engineering degree 11 years ago, it was definitely not the career path he had planned – yet today he is Chief Operating Officer of an alternative investment firm and has just launched his fourth hedge fund.

And while it is certainly an achievement to have become a COO so early in his career, Fabio (OE 1999–2006) says it is not the job title that means the most to him.

“I gain far more satisfaction from the respect and trust that I have from my colleagues who are generally veterans of the industry and have much more experience than I do. Opinions and decisions that I make are heard and acted on; this sense of responsibility is probably what I value the most.”

Fabio went from QE to read Civil Engineering at UCL, gaining a first-class Master’s degree and a Dean’s List commendation for outstanding academic performance.

“I really enjoyed studying civil engineering at university: I enjoy understanding how things work and making something that is greater than the sum of its parts. However, I graduated at the height of the financial crisis, and engineering jobs were scarce.

“I decided to apply for banking internships in my final year, so that I could work through the summer once I finished my Master’s and then take a year off.”

“The first internship I got, I took – which in hindsight, I regret: I think at the time I didn’t have enough confidence in myself.”

Nevertheless, Fabio did the internship. He was duly offered a job and started working for UBS Investment Bank in September 2011.

“I must also admit, I got very lucky at this point; I had a manager who took a liking to me and very much took me under his wing. I owe him a lot. When he left UBS, he brought me along with him to Cheyne Capital, where I got my first taste of the hedge fund world.

“And once again, I got lucky: the fund I moved to had been around for a long time, which meant that they had a lot of processes that they just did because no one had questioned them before. This gave me a lot of opportunity to streamline processes and make the most of what is available, which I really love doing.”

He remained there for two years, quitting in mid-2015 to go travelling for a year with Rhea Wolvekamp, who is now his wife. “We started in Thailand and went to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, India, China, Hong Kong and Japan.”

He secured a job at his current firm, London-based Blueglen Investment Partners, in January 2017 and was promoted to COO in February last year.

“I joined Blueglen with only four years’ experience working in a fund and having just spent 18 months travelling the world. The learning curve was extremely steep: I had worked at hedge funds before, but never launched one – and we have just launched our fourth.

“My ‘day-to-day’ is largely communicating with various stakeholders – we have quite a small internal team and outsource a lot of the functions that you typically find in a hedge fund. It makes it a very broad role. It’s generally managing projects or issues, which means that one week can look very different to another. It also means that I know every part of the fund, and how it functions, very well.”

Although Covid obviously brought a temporary halt to travelling – which has he says has proved a struggle for him and his wife – it remains his main hobby. “My wife and I met in Thailand while I was travelling with another QE ‘alumn’, Anand Dattani (OE 1999–2006), in 2011.” (He and Anand share happy memories of their A-level Geography classes with current Headmaster Neil Enright.)

“Since then, I have tried to go on holiday as often as possible – agreed that that’s not environmentally friendly, but we try as much as possible in our personal lives to offset the carbon emissions, a potentially futile attempt.”

 

 

Sixth-former Vineeth Rajan’s presentation on Indian linguistics has been announced as the winner in a national video essay competition run by the Cambridge Language Collective.

The collective – a collaborative blog written and produced by Cambridge University linguists – awarded Vineeth joint first prize in the senior individual category for his closely argued seven-minute film entitled Retroflexes: The linguistics of South Asia.

Danylo Gutsulyak, of Year 10, was awarded joint-second place in the junior individual category for his entry entitled Das Lagerfeuer, while two other QE boys – Year 10’s Darren Lee and Tejas Bansal, of Year 9 – were also shortlisted.

QE’s Head of Languages, Nora Schlatte, said: “My congratulations go to all our successful entrants and especially to Vineeth on his submission, which was not only impeccably researched, but also very attractively presented.”

Vineeth, of Year 12, put the video together over the first half of the Easter holidays, articulating his argument throughout with his hand-drawn illustrations, and making extensive use of time-lapse photography.

He described it as a “deep dive” into the history, phonology and sociolinguistics of retroflexes, which are the distinctive sounds that are formed by curling the tongue back behind the upper jaw’s alveolar ridge. It is, he says, a topic that has long fascinated him.

Vineeth explored the various academic theories about the origins of these sounds and how they developed. He looked at why retroflexes are common across hundreds of different languages throughout the Indian sub-continent, yet are relatively rare in other parts of the world.

He acknowledged that anyone seeking to track the origin and development of sounds faced a harder challenge than linguists tracking the written language, pointing out that all the theories he was explaining about retroflexes were necessarily speculative: “Although words can be securely etymologised to one source over another, phonological influence is often harder to trace back.”

After setting out the history, he took a look at the present-day situation, mentioning the “characteristic Indian English sound that Apu [from TV’s The Simpsons] is perhaps notorious for today” and how people have adjusted the way they speak to “try and elevate themselves from this lowly regarded pronunciation”.

Vineesh concluded: “This is what is amazing about retroflexes: the profound impact that they have on the complex sociology of south Asia, spreading across the tongues of people from a diversity of cultures, religions and backgrounds in a way that nothing else possibly could….Retroflexes seem to bind all of south Asia together. Despite making us seem homogenous and often risible to the western world, [their] history can give us a glimpse into the complex interactions between diverse cultures thousands of years ago.”

Vineeth, who aspires to be a biochemist and geneticist, published the video on his own YouTube channel, Genespeak, which focuses on both biochemistry and linguistics.

 

As an academic scientist and a world-renowned first responder to oil spills, Ed Owens has had a more varied life than most – and certainly one with more than its fair share of excitement.

He has worked on some of the world’s biggest and most infamous spills, such as Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989 and the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

At a rough count, Ed (OE 1956–1964) has travelled to more than 70 countries over his long career, including frequent visits to some of the planet’s most remote locations. He has survived involvement in “a couple of aircraft crashes”,  being chased by the Argentine army, and being kidnapped in the Amazon; he has run training for coastguards all over the world, and he has trained sniffer dogs to detect oil leaks underground.

In the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ed made five or six visits annually to work on the development of oil fields on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. “I have many stories about those trips!”

There was also the time he found himself stuck on an Arctic island without a radio: just one episode in his many visits north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been every year for more than three decades until 2020, when Covid put an end to this remarkable run.

Yet, in speaking to Alumni News, Ed said he prefers to reflect not so much on his own remarkable exploits, but on his origins, on his memories of QE in the 1950s and early 1960s – including what made it a good School even back in those culturally very different days – and on passing on some hard-won advice to the young Elizabethans of today.

“I’m 76 years old, still working full-time, still publishing multiple technical papers each year in scientific peer-reviewed journals, and still loving every day of my family and professional life. A full and productive life.

“How did I get here? My paternal grandfather was a shepherd in Rutland who spent most of his life living outdoors tending the animals year-round. Just coming home on Saturday night to have a beer in the pub, bath on Sunday morning, then church and Sunday lunch with the family and then back to the fields. My maternal grandfather was a ‘horseman’, which in those days meant that he looked after all the horses on the farm. He had Christmas Day off, when the farmer would start the morning routine.

“Out of all the many cousins – I think 15, to be exact – I was the only one that went to grammar school, then I was the only one to go to university until another cousin some 10 years later who, like me, went on to do a PhD.

“Luck? Good fortune? No, not really. As many people have said I wasn’t lucky, but I worked hard – and I also would have to add that many people worked very hard on my behalf: my parents and the teachers at QE, especially my House Master, John (‘Poker’) Pearce, and subsequently a couple of mentors who shaped my professional career.

“Needless to say, the School was very different in my day. While the buildings and grounds still appear familiar, there was a great focus on sport, with Wednesday and Saturday afternoons devoted to the range of seasonal choices, and with classes on Saturday mornings to make up for the ‘lost’ Wednesday afternoons! That did not leave much time for other things, though several of us made up a soccer team that played on Sunday at the Underhill Playing Fields.

“Those days, almost everybody lived in the Barnets or the Borehamwood-Elstree-Brookmans Park area: basically within a ½ hour bus ride of the school. It was a predominantly white Christian population, probably less than 5% non-Christian or otherwise ethnically diverse. And, like today, no girls of course!

“Did that prepare us well for the big wide world? On reflection, in my own very personal situation, for some reason I have been quite oblivious to the ethnicity or the sexual preference of people with whom I interact. Quite often when a third-party says something about that topic, my reaction is ‘oh, I didn’t notice that’. I certainly did not get that from my parents. who were very Victorian and “straight”, so it must have come from the School and the tolerant and intelligent teachers that we were fortunate to have.

“Most of the group at that time were Arsenal supporters because that was the nearest football ground from Barnet by British Rail. I don’t understand why, but a couple of our contemporaries actually supported Chelsea or, even worse, Tottenham! Sadly, Charlie Eggington, the Underne House Captain who followed me, is a Spurs supporter – clearly I failed in that part of mentoring him.

“The point is we still support those teams today when we have our Zoom conference calls. It’s not about football, it’s not about the team; it’s about just following and believing in those things that have some value. The great thing about sports is that the results are totally unpredictable. That gives enjoyment to following whatever sport, whatever team, whatever person one might be interested in following.”

Ed stayed on into the Seventh Form and was a Prefect and the House Captain for Underne. On leaving QE, he took his first degree, in Geology/Earth Science at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth – “three amazing years of playing rugby, rock climbing and mountaineering”.

After that, he wanted to take a postgraduate degree – “go to grad school” in American parlance – but there were limited opportunities at that time in the UK, a country which, as Ed points out, was still recovering economically from the Second World War and had yet to develop North Sea Oil. So, in 1967, he went to Canada on a graduate student fellowship to take his Master’s in Physical Geography at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His new life got off to an exciting start: “On Day 7 in North America, I was on a four-engine Super Constellation flying to a remote field camp in the High Arctic, north of the 60^th parallel!”

That first Arctic trip set a travel of pattern which was to become the norm in the decades to come. “Some years, I was in more than ten countries – a whirlwind life.”

His first experience as an oil spill first responder came in March 1970 at an oil tanker spill in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was five years after this that he completed his PhD at the University of South Carolina in 1975.

In 1993, he established his own company, Owens Coastal Consultants, which for the past 28 years has been providing worldwide scientific and technical support for spill response operations and spill response planning and training. Today, he is based on Bainbridge Island in the State of Washington, with a rural office from where he can look east towards nearby Seattle.

“My roles in all of this are as a response operations planner, a first responder to develop strategies to accelerate environmental recovery, and a scientist to monitor that recovery. While major spills can certainly have a disastrous on nature in the very short term, long-term studies have shown how remarkably well and quickly the environment recovers from even large oil spills.”

His most recent spill was in late November 2020 at a pipeline break in the suburban San Francisco Bay area, where he had to contend with Covid constraints and where he used dogs – ‘Oil Detection Canines’, in the industry jargon – to find the leak.

Over the years, he has been called out to destinations as far flung as Arctic Russia, the Amazon and the Middle East (he cherishes memories of seeing Dubai Creek in its pre-development days).

“But,” he adds, “I always seemed to managed to arrange my schedule to be on a business trip so that I could be in London during the first week in December for the Annual Brewer’s Dozen Dinner, joining a motley group of 15 friends – mainly 1962-65 First XV rugby players – which included two School Captains, multiple House Captains and even one person who did not go to QE!  Such was the bond formed at the School – quite remarkable. The chain was not broken even in 2020, but then it had to be by Zoom.”

Sadly, since that last meeting, the group has been depleted by the death within a few days of each other of two of Ed’s very close friends – Richard Newton (School Captain 1963-64 and First XV and First X1 Captain; Head Boy of Harrisons’: School Governor in the 1980s) and Roderick ‘Rod’ Jones (Prefect and First XV Captain 1964-65; Head Boy of Staplyton).

As he looks back on a career that now spans more than half a century, Ed counsels patience for current pupils and recent alumni of the School: “It’s important to remember that your first job is not your last job. I went through a progression of working in government, university and then private sector consulting. My real career path really did not emerge until I was 35 years old! Which, if you put in perspective, it means that I had been working after graduation for 14 years. I’m now over 75, 40 years later.

“So, there’s no need to be in a hurry – to think that when you leave QE or leave university or college that this is going to be the single path that you’ll follow for the rest of your life. There are many twists and turns; the important thing is to understand when choices present themselves to go with your heart. If you’re never happy in your work, you’ll never be happy in your life! That’s why I’m still working at 75-plus – and all the other aspects of a balanced life – family, social activities, and so on – are reinforced by that solid foundation.”

• Pictured, top to bottom: a winter beach survey on Unalaska Island, Alaska, in April 2005; presenting a paper at the 2017 International Oil Spill Conference in Long Beach, California; in front of QE’s Main Building in July 1962; at Resolute, North West Territories, Canada, August 1967: Ed (wearing the red cap, centre), briefing Admiral Yost, the United States Coast Guard Commandant, to his right, during a shoreline inspection following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Prince William Sound, Alaska, May 1989: Colville Delta, North Slope, Alaska August 2002.