Showing 1139 results

Authority record

Brooke, Sir Charles Vyner (1874-1963), colonial ruler

  • Person
  • 26 September 1874 - 9 May 1963

Son of Charles Johnson Brooke, 2nd Rajah of Sarawak, and Margaret de Windt. He was educated at Winchester and Magdalene College (matriculated in 1894). He failed to take a degree as his main interest was horse-racing.

He succeeded his father in 1917. His rule ended in 1946 with cession to the Crown.

Arms in Hall glass, W3.

Bruce, Charles Granville (1866-1939), army officer and mountaineer

  • Person
  • 7 April 1866 - 12 July 1939

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.

Bruce, John Geoffrey (1896-1972), army officer and mountaineer

  • Person
  • 4 December 1896 - 31 January 1972

Geoffrey Bruce was a member of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions.

He was an officer in the British Indian Army, eventually becoming Deputy Chief of General Staff, who participated in the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition. Bruce, who had never before climbed a mountain, had been appointed as a transport officer, but chance led to him accompanying George Finch on the only summit attempt that used supplemental oxygen. Together they set a new mountaineering world record height of 8,300 metres (27,300 ft), only 520 metres (1,700 ft) below the summit of Mount Everest.

Bullock, Guy Henry (1887-1956), diplomat and mountaineer

  • Person
  • 23 July 1887 - 12 April 1956

Guy Bullock was a member of the 1921 British Mount Everest Expedition.

As expedition mountaineers, Guy Bullock and George Mallory found a northern access route to Everest by climbing the 6,849-metre (22,470 ft) Lhakpa La col above the East Rongbuk Glacier and by going on to reach the North Col at 7,020 metres (23,030 ft). They did not, however, reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Shortly before the 1921 Everest expedition was due to embark, one of the climbing team was asked to drop out (Finch) and Mallory suggested Bullock as a replacement. The Foreign Office rejected Younghusband's request to grant leave to Bullock, who was in Lima at the time, to join the expedition but he gained a special dispensation from the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, so he could have leave on half pay until the end of 1921 but with no chance of this being renewed.  Bullock and his wife sailed for Bombay on the SS Naldera, arriving on 30 April 1921. The expedition had a climbing team of four but, of the two most experienced members, one died doing the march-in (Kellas) and the other was taken ill (Raeburn). This left only two main climbers, Mallory and Bullock. Bullock was a well-organised person, able to get on well with almost everybody. He was steady and cheerful, and so was a very good companion for Mallory (the better climber). Bullock was reunited with his wife at Lachen in the Teesta valley in Sikkim on 8 October and they eventually sailed home from Bombay.

Bullock's diary of the expedition was published in 1962 in the Alpine Journal. Bullock had previously declined to lend the diary to Mallory who had been wanting to make use of it for his lectures after the expedition.

He died in a London hospital in 1956.

Burnet, John Forbes (1910-1989), Bursar of Magdalene College, Cambridge

  • Person
  • 1910-1989

Educated at Christ’s College. Bursar of St George’s Choir School, Windsor.
Fellow, 1949-1989; Bursar, 1949-1977.
Director of A & C Black, publishers. For forty years editor of the Public and Preparatory Schools Yearbook/Independent Schools Yearbook. A bibliophile who was well read in the history of the Victorian church. The University Fives Courts are named after him.

Obituary by R. Hyam in the College Magazine vol. 34 (1989-90) pp 2-6

Burton, Hezekiah (1632-1681), Anglican cleric and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge

  • Person
  • 1632-1681

Admitted to Magdalene as a sizar in 1647, aged 15.
Made a Fellow in 1654 on Parliamentary authority, in place of the ejected John Dacres. He was respected and well liked and his contemporaries considered him an 'eminent tutor' [Cunich, P., Hoyle, D., Duffy, E., Hyam, R., *A History of Magdalene College Cambridge8, 1428-1988, pp. 128-129]

Chaplain to Lord Keeper Bridgeman; Canon of Norwich; Rector of St George’s Southwark, 1668-1680; Vicar of Barnes, 1680.
He died aged 49. Archbishop Tillotson described Burton as of ‘incomparable sweetness of temper’ (Preface to Discourses, 1684).

Busby, Thomas (1754-1838), composer and music critic

  • Person
  • 1754 - 1838

Composer and music critic. Pupil of Battishill. Organist of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard St, 1798.
Entered Magdalene as a sizar in 1800. MusD, 1801, for a thanksgiving ode on British naval victories.
Composer of various stage-works and oratorios, beginning with The Prophecy (after A. Pope, The Messiah), first performed in 1799. Author of A Complete and Comprehensive Dictionary of Music (1805) and A General History of Music, from the earliest times to the present (1819).
He would appear to have been more successful in writing about music than composing it. Was said to have had ‘loose notions on religious subjects’.

Bussy, Albert Simon Aimé (1870-1954), French painter

  • Person
  • 30 June 1870 - 22 May 1954

Albert Simon Aimé Bussy was a French painter who married the English novelist Dorothy Strachey Bussy. He knew and painted many members of the Bloomsbury circle and was friends with George Mallory.

Bussy was born in Dole and came from a family of shoemakers. He went from the drawing school in Dole to Gustave Moreau's studio in the École des beaux-arts de Paris, where he met and became friends with Henri Matisse. He received an honorable mention in 1894 at the Salon des artistes français for his Le Joueur de clarinette and Saint Georges terrassant le dragon. He showed a Portrait of Albert Machado in 1896. In 1897 he had his first solo exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris.

In 1901 Bussy visited London, where he came into contact with members of some English artistic circles, especially the Bloomsbury Group, and where he met Dorothy Strachey, who he married in 1903. Shortly after the wedding Simon and Dorothy moved to Roquebrune Cap Martin, in the south of France, where they bought a small house that soon became a meeting point for both French and English artists, writers and intellectuals. In addition to Dorothy's brother, the historian Lytton Strachey, and his cousin, the painter Duncan Grant, others included Rudyard Kipling, André Gide, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Mark Gertler, Paul Valéry, Virginia Woolf, and Bernard Berenson. The painters Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault also visited.

Bussy was successful in the 1920s and 1930s, but his appreciation by both the public and critics declined after this time. He died in London in 1954, at the age of 88.

Calcutt, Sir David (1930-2004), lawyer and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

  • Person
  • 2 November 1930 - 11 August 2004

Master of Magdalene College, 1986-1994

Educated at King's College Cambridge. Lawyer of the Middle Temple (Bencher, 1981; Master-Treasurer, 1998); QC, 1972; chairman of the Bar, 1984-1985; knighted, 1991.
Member and chairman of numerous legal bodies and committees of inquiry, and author of government papers, eg. Report of the Committee on Privacy (1990) and Review of press self-regulation (1993).
Fellow-Commoner, 1980-1985
Master, 1986-1985
Made an Honorary Fellow on his retirement from the Mastership in 1994.

Married Barbara Walker, 1969; she was a JP and a Freeman of the City of London. Lady Calcutt was a particular supporter of the Magdalene Boat Club.

College Magazine

Article by R.W.M. Dias, College Magazine, No. 29 (1984-85) pp. 3-6
Article, College Magazine, No. 38 (1993-94) p. 4
Article, College Magazine, No. 48 (2003-04) pp. 8-15 (A.D. Rawley, D.J.H. Murphy, Sir D. Oulton)

Results 121 to 150 of 1139