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A message from The Master
The new academic year 2021-22 brought with it a welcome return to an array of activities and events redolent of pre-Covid times. There was much to celebrate and we have been delighted to celebrate individual and team successes for Alleynians in the fields of Sport, the Arts and academic endeavour. While progress towards normalcy was punctuated with 10 days of ‘amber measures’ ahead of Michaelmas half term in late October, we managed to stem an increase in Covid cases and salvage a run of end of term events. Thanks to the collective diligence of pupils, staff and parents we were able to go ahead with Christmas Jazz , courtesy of the Big Band and Jazz Band, at Pizza Express Soho and a rehearsed reading of the School Play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I have been pleased to be able to welcome back to the College an increasing number of guests, including Paralympic medallist, Oliver Lam-Watson who graces the cover of this magazine. I was pleased so many Past Presidents of the Alleyn Club and Fellows of the College were able to join us when the whole College community came together at the War Memorial for the first time since 2019 for our Act of Remembrance on 11 November. As you will read in this magazine, Dulwich College Eco Week, later in November, was an important launch pad for our commitment to sustainability, just as Black History Month, rather than being tokenistic, has spurred us on to a sustained commitment to racial equity. Similarly, as I write we are holding our third Dulwich College Identity Awareness Month (DC IAM), with the focus this year being on celebrating our LGBTQ+ pupils and giving them a platform to talk about their hopes and concerns at Dulwich and in the wider world in 2022. In the wake of Everyone’s Invited and an Open Letter to the Master of March 2021, which brought to my attention the testimonies of those who had been the victims of sexual abuse or harassment or serious social media misuse at the hands of Alleynians or OAs, I can also assure you that the College’s – and most importantly the pupils’ – commitment to gender Allyship and the work outlined on the Equality and Respect page of our website continues. I have written of the return to near-normality at school and I have also been delighted to see the restoration of a programme of events for Old Alleynians. It’s been a great pleasure to see so many of you re-engaging with us – in person or online and from afar. The addition of a cultural programme of events has been widely welcomed, and has encompassed Archives lectures on Sir Ernest Shackleton, Edward Alleyn and notable OA authors of the early 20th century, a private screening of Oscar-winning film The Father followed by a Q&A session with its producer, Dulwich Governor and past parent David Parfitt, and a webinar about the life and work of Anthony Kersting . Kersting’s extraordinary photographs of Kurdistan in the 1940s feature as one of the exhibitions with which the Courtauld Gallery reopened in November 2021 after its substantial renovation. We look forward to building on our cultural programme. Indeed, again courtesy of David Parfitt, our next event in this series is a preview screening of a film of the Poulenc one-woman opera La Voix Humaine which will be staged at the screening room of the May Fair Hotel on Thursday 10 March. We are delighted that we will be joined there by the star of the film, the internationally acclaimed lyric soprano Danielle de Niese who has agreed to take our questions after the film has been shown. As many of you know, Lent 2022 sees me on a part-sabbatical, the main focus of which was to have been a voyage to the Antarctic as part of the celebration of Shackleton 100. That was cancelled just before I was due to set sail, falling foul of omicron, but I am enjoying days away from College visiting our partner and feeder schools. Fiona Angel, the Senior Deputy, is Acting Master during this Lent Term and I know she’s enjoying representing me at OA events at and beyond the College, not least at the AGM and Annual Lunch of the Alleynian Sailing Society, held at the College in mid-February. This hope has been expressed before, but nevertheless I reiterate that I hope we will find this to be the year in which things return to normal in terms of the extent of our activities and our openness to visitors. We are certainly looking forward to our next OA Reunion here at the College in June, at which we hope to welcome many of you back to see us after so long.
As ever Dr Joe Spence The Master
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