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Alasdair Rennie is an award winning artist who paints portraits, landscapes and still-life, he is an accomplished figurative sculptor and muralist.

An English painter of portraits and historical scenes. Briggs was born at Walworth, County Durham, the son of a post office official. His cousin was Amelia Opie (née Alderson), the wife of artist John Opie (whose portrait was later painted by Briggs). While still at school at Epping he sent two engravings to the Gentleman's Magazine and in 1811 entered as a student at the Royal Academy, London, where he began to exhibit in 1814. From that time onwards until his death he was a constant exhibitor at the annual exhibitions of the Academy, as well as the British Institution, his paintings being for the most part historical in subject. After his election as a Royal Academician (RA) in 1832 he devoted his attention almost exclusively to portraiture. Briggs died, of tuberculosis in London on 18 January 1844, aged 50/51.

Of Milanese Jewish descent, Limentani left fascist Italy in July 1939. He joined the Italian Dept of the University in 1945, and became the Professor of Italian, 1964-1982; he was particularly well-known for his work on Dante. He was a professorial Fellow of the College from 1964, and an Honorary Fellow in 1988. He was awarded the gold medal of the Italian Government for services to scholarship (1982). He gave a wonderful rendition of the Crowland grace before dinner.

Anglo-Hungarian painter known particularly for his portraits of royal and aristocratic personages. In 1900, he married Lucy Guinness of Stillorgan, County Dublin, and he became a British subject in 1914

Irish artist, painter and designer. He was born in Dublin and studied architecture at the Bolton Street College of Technology. His painting style was strongly influenced by pop art. He is particularly well known for his hyperrealistic renderings of well known Irish literary, historical or establishment figures.

University Serena Professor of Italian (1929-1933), and formerly Professor of English at Naples. A stylish scholar, translator and poet, who died aged 46 from tuberculosis.
Made a Fellow in 1929.

‘Piccoli had it in him to be one of the dominant men of intellectual Europe – perhaps to bring English thought and feeling into that living touch with Europe (not Paris) we have so long needed’ (College Magazine vol. 70 (1933) pp.65-67).

‘By temperament he was a Neapolitan and he liked to explain his bold almost mask-like features – out of which the prominent mobile eyes piercingly, kindly, ironically, pensively, but always livingly, glanced – as proof of the survival of the ancient Numidian Mediterranean race, the race of Hannibal and Augustine’(College Magazine vol. 70 (1933) pp.65-67).

Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi was an Italian mountaineer and explorer known for his Arctic explorations and for his mountaineering expeditions, particularly to Mount Saint Elias (Alaska–Yukon) and K2 (Pakistan–China). In 1906 he led an expedition to the Ruwenzori Range (5,125 m), in Uganda. He scaled sixteen summits in the range, including the six principal peaks. One of them, Mount Luigi di Savoia, bears his name. The highest peak was reached on 18 June 1906.

In 1909 he aimed to climb K2 in Karakoram and he and his team reached a height of 6,250 m. The standard route up the mountain (formerly known as K2's East Ridge) climbs today on the Abruzzi Spur.

In an attempt on Chogolisa he and his companions again failed to reach the summit, but set a world altitude record, a height of approximately 7,500 m (24,600 ft) before turning around just 150 m below the summit due to bad weather.

An old friend of George Mallory's, whom he had known since the climbing days at Pen y Pass in Wales.

A British portrait painter, landscape artist and print maker. Dodd was born in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art. During World War I, in 1916, he was appointed an official war artist by Charles Masterman, the head of the War Propaganda Bureau, WPB. Serving on the Western Front, he produced more than 30 portraits of senior military figures.

Ivor Richards was born at Hillside, Sandbach, Cheshire , and was he son of William Armstrong Richards, a chemical engineer originally from Swansea, and his wife, Mary Anne, daughter of William Haigh, a Yorkshire wool manufacturer. On his father's death in 1902 Richards moved with his mother and brothers to Bristol, where he attended Clifton College from 1905 to 1911. In 1907 he had an attack of tuberculos which kept him away from school for over a year.

In 1911 he matriculated from Magdalene College with an exhibition to study history. Within a few months he switched to moral sciences and studied ethics, logic, and psychology.

In 1922 he became a College Lecturer in English and Moral Sciences.

In 1926, when a separate English faculty was created as part of a general restructuring of the University's teaching arrangements, he was appointed a University Lecturer. In the same year he was made a Fellow. He immediately took a year's leave and travelled to America, Japan, and China. In Honolulu, on 31 December 1926, he married Dorothy Eleanor (1894–1986). The couple had first met on a climbing holiday in Wales in 1917, and they shared a lifelong passion for mountaineering.

In 1944 he became a Professor at Harvard, but returned to Magdalene in his retirement. He became an Honorary Fellow in 1964.

In 1979 he returned to China again for a lecture tour, but was taken seriously ill there and had to be flown back to England. He died in Cambridge on 7 September 1979.

He was a founding father of the English Faculty and originator of ‘practical criticism’. He was a brilliant literary critic and linguistic philosopher, a very good poet, a distinguished mountaineer, a tireless promoter of ‘Basic’ English (on which he collaborated with C. K. Ogden, a Magdalene man slightly his senior), and something of an intellectual guru in the USA.

Commemorative tablet at Wentworth House.

Further reading:
College Magazine, No. 23 (1978-79) pp. 1-7 (Sir William Empson, W. Hamilton)
Book Review, College Magazine, No. 34 (1989-90) pp. 60-63 (R. Luckett and J. E. Stevens)

Educated at St Paul's and matriculated from Trinity College in 1905.
He came to Magdalene to teach history (his main field being sixteenth-century economic history) and was elected a Fellow in 1910.
He was a Tutor from 1927 to 1945 and President of the College from 1951 to 1957.
Appointed University Lecturer in History in 1926.

Unsuccessfully contested the Cambridge constituency seat as a Liberal in the 1924 Election. Warden of Madingley Hall, 1954 - 1961.

Obituary: College Magazine, No. 12, 1967-68 pp. 2-6 (F. McD C Turner)

Educated at Christ's Hospital. Matriculated in 1940. Awarded BA (English) starred First in 1946, PhD; Bye-Fellow 1948, Fellow 1950, College Lecturer in English 1954; Tutor 1958–1974; sometime Precentor, Librarian, and President (1983–88).
University Lecturer in English 1954, Reader in English & Musical History 1974, Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English 1978–1988. Chairman of the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society 1988–1995.

Obituary: College Magazine, vol. 46 (2001-02) pp. 18-22 (S. Barrington-Ward)

An undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, who matriculated in 1817. Smith was invited by the Master of Magdalane College to transcribe Samuel Pepys's diary in readiness for publication - a task which he commenced in 1819 and completed in 1822. A clergyman by profession, Smith became Rector of Baldock in 1832 and continued there until his death in 1870.

In the College Magazine
Photograph - a much later photograph (full length and bearded) as frontispiece - this photograph was presented to the College, but is now lost, College Magazine, No. 52 (1926) pp. 65-66

Latham, R. C. Pepys and His Editors (Occasional Paper No. 6, 1992) p. 2.

A successful British landscape and portrait painter who served as a war artist during World War II. Carr was born in Leeds and trained at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art, under William Rothenstein. During World War I, he served in France with the Royal Field Artillery. After the war his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1921, in other British galleries and in Paris. He painted portraits of, among others, Aldous Huxley and Olivia Davis and landscapes of the English south coast.

London line and mezzotint engraver, exhibited at the RA from 1864 to 1905.

Matriculated in 1866 and took his degree in Classics in 1870. In 1871 he obtained a second class in the Theological Tripos.

Archdeacon of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, having taken up a post in Grahamstown in 1873; canon of Grahamstown Cathedral, 1899; royal chaplain; on active service during the Boer War. Author of many books including Storm and Sunshine in South Africa: with some Personal and Historical Reminiscences

College Magazine
Obituary: College Magazine, No. 26, December 1917

Visitor of Magdalene College, 1572-1626

Grandson of Lord Audley. Member of St John's College.
Visitor, 1572–1626. Six masters were appointed during his visitorship, but the earlier appointments were made by Lord Burghley while Howard was a minor; however Barnaby Goche, 1640, was his own choice.
Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, 1598–1626.
High Steward and then Chancellor of the University, 1615.
Served as Lord Chamberlain to James I, 1602–1613
Created 1st Earl of Suffolk 1603.

Although a prolific portrait engraver over a number of decades, little is known of Robert Cooper. His first recorded work as an engraver was for the Biographical Magazine in 1795. He went on to contribute extensively to the periodical press, producing prints for, among others, La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, European Magazine, Dramatic Magazine, and Evangelical Magazine. The most significant books to feature his work include Cawthorn's Modern British Theatre series, Edmond Lodge's series of Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, Tresham's and Ottley's British Gallery of Pictures (1808), Chamberlaine's edition of Holbein drawings (1812), the Culloden Papers (1815), Memoirs of the Kit-Cat Club (1821), and Colburn's edition of Pepys's Diary (1825). His last recorded engraving dates from 1826, but, according to Samuel Redgrave, he was still living in 1836. He is probably identical with the 'R. Cooper' who exhibited miniature portraits at the Royal Academy between 1793 and 1799.

South African painter who has exhibited extensively in South African and abroad specialising in landscapes and portraits (including portraits of Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk and concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz) in a photo-realist style. More recently he describes his work as falling into what he terms a "narrative genre" where paintings are often part of a series (usually three to six) of chronological scenes. He has exhibited at the Slater Memorial Museum (Connecticut) and the Everard Read Gallery (Johannesburg).

Educated at Queens’ College Cambridge (double starred first in History). University Reader in History, Royal Holloway College, London (1942-1968), Professor of History, University of Toronto (1968-1969), Research Fellow of Magdalene College (1970-1972), Official Fellow and Pepys Librarian (1972-1982), Honorary Fellow (1984).
Editor of the definitive edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols (1970-1983).

College Magazine
Obituary by R. Luckett, College Magazine, No. 39 (1994-95) pp. 3-6

Educated at the Central School (later the Grammar School for Boys, now part of Netherhall School). Apprenticed as a carpenter. For many years he worked in the College while employed by the local builders Nunn, acquiring an unrivalled knowledge of the College buildings and infrastructure from 1958, before formally being employed by the College Maintenance Department from 1971, where he remained (long after the retiring age) part-time from 1978 until 1991, at one time acting as Clerk of Works.
He brought ingenuity and dexterity to the solution of a variety of problems throughout this time.

College Magazine
Obituay in College Magazine vol. 43 (1998-99) p. 24

A well-to-do Huntingdon attorney, descended from John Ferrar (1588–1657), merchant and politician. He married Love Beverley; their eldest daughter Martha married Peter Peckard. He was the custodian of the family papers, which he left to his son-in-law (now the Ferrar Papers in the Old Library, Magdalene College).

George Finch was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition. He was a proponent of the use of oxygen at high-altitude, a controversial topic at the time.

George Finch was born on 4 August 1888, near Orange, New South Wales, the eldest son of Charles Edward Finch, farmer and land court judge, and his wife, Laura. From an early age he was a keen explorer of the local countryside; it was a view of Orange, from a nearby hill, that inspired his desire to see the world from the tops of mountains. In 1902 the family moved to England as his father thought that a British education would benefit his sons. However, the discipline of public schools was incompatible with his desire to instil in them independence and self-reliance. It was agreed that Laura Finch would oversee the boys' private tuition in Europe, while their father returned to Australia to manage the family property.

In 1905 Finch entered the École de Médecine, Paris, but soon decided the subject was not to his liking. From 1907 he studied physical sciences at Zürich Polytechnic, graduating DTechChem in 1911. While in Switzerland he spent much time climbing in the Alps with his younger brother Maxwell, who was also studying in Zürich. George Finch was regarded locally as a very talented climber.

Finch moved to England in 1912; he worked briefly at the Royal Arsenal but the following year was appointed demonstrator in the newly formed fuel department at Imperial College.

During the First World War he served in France and in Salonika, where he developed an aerial mine to combat enemy spotter aircraft. He was mentioned in dispatches and appointed MBE. While on leave, on 16 June 1915 he married Alicia Gladys but the marriage was short and unhappy, ending in divorce about 1919.

After the war Finch returned to Imperial College. On 28 December 1921 he married Agnes Isobel Johnston. In the same year Finch was appointed a lecturer in electrochemistry. He became professor of applied physical chemistry in 1936. In 1952 he was appointed director of the National Chemical Laboratory in Poona, India. He retired in 1957, returning to England.

Throughout the 1920s Finch was an active mountaineer. Though his Australian unorthodoxy did not go down well with the climbing establishment he was selected for the 1922 British attempt on Everest. He was one of the earliest advocates of the use of oxygen. With George Mallory he reached 27,235 ft, at that time a record altitude, and the following year he was the first to climb the north face of the Dent d'Herens in the Swiss Alps. Yet, despite his achievements, he was excluded from the 1924 Everest team.

In 1929 he founded the Imperial College Mountaineering Club, but following a gastric illness and the death of three club members on the Jungfrau in 1931, he gave up climbing himself. Many years later, in 1959, he was elected president of the Alpine Club.

During his subsequent career Finch received many honours. He was elected FRS in 1938, and awarded the society's Hughes medal in 1944. He was president of the Physical Society in 1947–9 and Guthrie lecturer in 1950. He was appointed commander of the Belgian order of Leopold II in 1938, and made a chevalier of the French Légion d'honneur in 1952. A keen sailor from the time he had given up mountaineering, he moved in his last years to The Grange, East Hanney, Berkshire, where he died on 22 November 1970, survived by his wife.

Dr Howard Somervell was a member of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions.

Howard Somervell was born on 16 April 1890, the eldest of three children and elder son of William Henry Somervell, of Brantfield, Kendal, and his wife, Florence Howard. His father worked for Somervell Brothers of Kendal, later more widely known as K Shoes. He was educated at Rugby School (1904–9) but was unhappy there. When he was eighteen he became a member of the Keswick-based Fell and Rock Climbing Club and thus started a lifetime's devotion to the mountains of the English Lake District.

Somervell went to Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained first classes in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos (1911 and 1913). He then served with the British Expeditionary Force in France (1915–18) as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was mentioned in dispatches. After the war he graduated from London's University College Hospital (MB, BCh, 1921) and became FRCS in 1920.

Somervell's Everest ambitions were stimulated in 1921 during mountaineering trips in Britain and Europe. He realised that the Himalayan region called for constant movement above 20,000 ft. Everest was to be his physical test in 1922 and 1924, but his colleagues commented too on his mental endurance.

Somervell wrote of Mallory that his outlook on life was "lofty and choice, human and loving and in a measure divine".

In 1924 Somervell was in danger of choking to death, E. F. Norton wrote: 'Somervell very nearly choked, and was handicapped for three days. Only saved by coughing up the obstructing matter with a lot of blood. That he achieved what he did in this condition was a remarkable performance'.

After the 1922 Everest expedition he set out to see India. He saw that it was ill-equipped medically and poorly provided for in the skills which he possessed. When he visited the main hospital of the south Travancore medical mission and its group of outstations centred on Neyyoor, he found only one qualified surgeon, Stephen Pugh, struggling with a queue of waiting patients which would take ten days to reduce. Somervell offered to perform those overdue operations. He returned to London and told his friends in London hospitals that he had decided to devote his life to India after another attempt on Everest. He joined the 1924 expedition on which Mallory and Irvine died.

From 1924 to 1949 Somervell worked for the south Travancore medical mission which, with its branch hospitals, could claim to be the largest of its kind in the world. He attracted young surgeons to work with him, especially in the surgery of the stomach. Somervell also pioneered the modern treatment of leprosy believing that it could be cured. His home for leprosy patients had four big dormitories for eighty patients, and there was also a leprosy settlement for permanent residents. By 1936 several scores of patients had been sent home cured and free from all symptoms of the disease.

In 1938 he was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, and was appointed OBE in 1953.

He accepted the post of associate professor of surgery at the Vellore Christian Medical College (1949–61), then at a crucial stage of its development as a teaching hospital. It was a fitting climax to his forty years' service in India.

He died on 23 January 1975. Sir Francis Younghusband described him as 'a man of science, a man of art, a man of warm humanity and of strong religious feeling'.

Dr Arthur Wakefield, a general practitioner from Cumbria, was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition.

Edward Strutt was born in 1874, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and Innsbruck University. He spent his holidays climbing, and he joined the Alpine Club at the age of 21. He was also a member of Sektion Bernina of the Swiss Alpine Club.

During the Boer War Strutt served with the Royal Scots, 1900-02 (dispatches, Queen’s Medal and four clasps, King’s Medal and two clasps).

He married Florence Nina Hollond in 1905.

In the period 1916-17 he was Field-Marshal Milne’s principal liaison officer with French headquarters at Salonika, and for his services in the war received many decorations and honours (D.S.O., 1917; C.B.E., 1919). In March 1919, as an officer of the Allied Council in Vienna, he escorted the Austrian Imperial Family to safety in Switzerland. In 1920 he became High Commissioner at Danzig.

On the Mount Everest expedition of 1922 he was second in command to General Bruce.

He was editor of the Alpine Journal from 1927 to 1937 and president of the Alpine Club from 1935 to 1938. His last visit to Switzerland was in May 1946, when he addressed a gathering of mountaineers at Zürich.

Beridge Ruth Mallory was known as Berry. She was George and Ruth's second child and youngest daughter. Her older sister was Clare and her brother was John. Berry married David Robertson, who later published a biography of his father-in-law, George Mallory.

Frances Clare Mallory was known as Clare. She was George and Ruth's first child and eldest daughter. Her younger sister was Beridge (Berry) and her brother was John.

She married Glenn Millikan who died in a climbing accident in Tennessee in 1947. They had three sons, George, Richard, and Mark.

Brigadier General Charles G. Bruce was the leader of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions.

Charles Bruce was born in London on 7 April 1866, the youngest son of Henry Austin Bruce, first Baron Aberdare (1815–1895), politician, and his second wife, Nora Creina Blanche, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier. He had three brothers and eight sisters. They lived at Dyffryn, an estate in Glamorgan, and at Queen's Gate, London.

He was educated at Harrow School (1879–80) and Repton School (1881–4), and spent two years in the militia in York, where he was a noted wrestler and runner. He was commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light infantry in 1887; and he served briefly with an Indian regiment in Madras and Burma before moving in 1889 to the 5th Gurkha Rifles, the regiment with which he served for most of his career. During the Tirah campaign Bruce cut the Gurkhas' tight-fitting breeches off above the knee, an improvisation that was once said to have introduced shorts into the Indian and British armies. In 1891 Bruce studied the equipment of Italian mountain troops in Turin, and he ran a training course for frontier scouts from 1891 to 1913. He taught staff college instructors in his training methods on the slopes of Snowdonia in 1910.

Bruce travelled widely in the Himalayas and organised porters for several important mountaineering expeditions. In 1907 and 1910 Bruce developed serious proposals for the ascent of Mount Everest that were abandoned for political reasons.

On 12 September 1894 he married Finetta Madeline Julia, daughter of Colonel Sir Edward Fitzgerald Campbell, second baronet; and their only child, a son, died in infancy in the Himalayas.

After being adjutant and second-in-command of the 5th Gurkha Rifles he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in May 1913, and in May 1914 he was appointed to command the 6th Gurkha Rifles. He went with them to Egypt for the defence of the Suez Canal at the outbreak of war in 1914. In Gallipoli he commanded the depleted battalions of the 29th Indian Brigade, including the 5th and 6th Gurkhas at Gurkha bluff, for which he was mentioned in dispatches three times and was promoted to Brevet Colonel in November 1915. Severely wounded in the leg, he was evacuated before the withdrawal, and on discharge from hospital was appointed general officer commanding the independent frontier brigade at Bannu, a position he held from 1916 to 1919. He commanded the North Waziristan field force in 1917, and served in the Third Anglo-Afghan War (May 1919). In these operations he was mentioned twice in dispatches. His health deteriorated in the heat, and he was invalided out of the service with the honorary rank of Brigadier-General in 1920.

When Tibet unexpectedly granted permission for a Mount Everest expedition, Bruce could not obtain leave to join the first reconnaissance in 1921, but he was appointed leader of the next expedition in 1922. He was too old to take part in the climbing, but his knowledge of Himalayan languages and military organisation, his cheerfulness and joviality, and the Gurkhas he brought to organise the porters all contributed to the expedition's success. Captain John Geoffrey Bruce (his cousin) and George Finch reached a record elevation of 27,300 ft using oxygen.

In 1924 Bruce was again appointed Everest leader, but contracted malaria on a tiger hunt immediately before the expedition. On the march to Everest he became seriously ill and turned the leadership over to Colonel E. F. Norton. Bruce became the model for later Everest leaders.

After his wife's death in 1932 he wrote his autobiography, Himalayan Wanderer (1934), and moved to 27 St Mary Abbot's Terrace, London, where he died on 12 July 1939.