Eminent Old Perseans
Sir Robert Tabor
Was an apothecary whose medical skills saved the life of Charles II in 1679 with what was deemed to be “Jesuit Powder”. Tabor also cured King Louis XIV of France’s son of malaria using the drug. The French king rewarded Tabor with 3,000 crowns, a good pension and a title. This mystery drug was later identified to be the bark of the cinchona tree, brought to Europe by the Jesuits in 1640.
Bishop Jeremy Taylor
1613 – 1667
Famously said “Nothing is greater or more fearful sacrilege than to prostitute the great name of God to the petulancy of an idle tongue”. After leaving the Perse, Taylor studied at the University of Cambridge and was ordained in 1633. He was imprisoned three times under Puritan rule and retired to Wales. After the restoration in 1661 he became bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. He wrote many religious works, including works against popery.
Sir Arthur Marshall
1903 – 2007
Educated at the Perse and then Tonbridge School, Sir Arthur learned to fly in 1928, creating an airstrip at his family’s home in Cambridge. A year later he turned his airstrip into a fully fledged airfield, buying the land six years later with his father David and creating Marshall Aerospace. He was also a talented sportsman, earning a place in the 1928 British Olympic team. He was knighted in 1974 having been awarded an OBE some years previously.
F R Leavis
1895 – 1978
Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge, the son of a piano shop owner. He won a scholarship from the Perse to Emmanuel College Cambridge, going up in 1914 to read History. He joined the war effort on the western front in the autumn of 1915 becoming, on conscientious grounds, a nursing orderly and stretcher bearer with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. On return to Cambridge in 1919 he changed tripos to English, later taking one of the first PhDs in the subject. In 1931 he was appointed Director of Studies in English at Downing College. He became a Fellow of Downing in 1936 and remained in the Fellowship until his retirement as University Reader in English in 1962. He was an Honorary Fellow from 1962 to 1964, when he resigned in a disagreement over his succession. He published many volumes of criticism and was editor of Scrutiny from its foundation in 1932 until its demise in 1953. During his years at Downing he became the most influential literary critic of his time. He was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's New Year list for 1978.
Sir Mark Potter
b. 1937
Lord Justice (Mark) Potter became President of the Family Law Division and Head of Family Justice at the beginning of April 2005. He was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1996. He was called to the bar in 1961 and took silk in 1980. From 1988-1996 he was a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division and from 1991 to 1994 he was a Presiding Judge on the Northern Circuit. From 1998 to 1999 he was Chairman of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct. He has been Chairman of the Legal Services Advisory Panel since 2000 and a trustee of the Somerset House Trust since 1997.
Sir Peter Hall
b.1930
Sir Peter Hall was head boy during his time at the Perse School after WW2. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1953, staging his first professional play in Windsor the same year. He has achieved great success as a director of theatre and film, coming back to the school in the early sixties with wife Leslie Caron to present prizes for the School’s annual Speech Day. At the age of 26 he founded the Royal Shakespeare Company with which he has enjoyed a lasting success. He was appointed a CBE in 1963 and knighted in 1977. He is also an honorary fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
Sir George Paget Thomson
1892-1975
Sir George Thomson was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered the wave properties of electrons by electron diffraction. He was the son of Nobel Prize-winning J.J. Thomson. After attending the Perse School, he joined Trinity College, Cambridge to read Mathematics and Physics until the First World War broke out in 1914 where he joined the army. In 1952 he became master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and was knighted in 1943.
Sir Donald Tebbit
b. 1920
British politician and diplomat, Sir Donald attended the Perse School between 1931 and 1939 as a contemporary of Douglas Brown. He was the British High Commissioner to Australia from 1976 to 1980. He is a Former president of the Trinity Hall Association (a Cambridge college alumni organisation).
Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne KBE FRS
b.1930
Dr Polkinghorne attended the Perse School just after WW2 between the years of 1945 to 1948. A renowned particle physicist and also respected theologian, John has written many articles concerning the links between science and faith. After his undergraduate course at Trinity College, Cambridge, John played a key park in the scientific discovery of the quark. Polkinghorne has been a member of the BMA Medical Ethics Committee, the General Synod of the Church of England, the Doctrine Commission, and the Human Genetics Commission. He is a current Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge and was for 10 years a Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He is a founding member of the Society of Ordained Scientists and also of the International Society for Science and Religion, of which he was the first President.[3] Polkinghorne was selected to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1993-4, which he later published as The Faith of a Physicist. He has an official website including a questions-and-answers page where people from all over the world send him questions on science and religion.[4]
In 2006 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Hong Kong Baptist University as part of their 50-year celebrations.
Group Captain William Neil McKechnie
1907 – 1944
McKechnie earned the Empire Gallantry Medal (now known as for an act of bravery in saving Flight Cadet C. J. Giles after an airplane crash on 20th June 1929 whilst still a Flight Cadet aged 22. He was killed in action in 1944.