Varsity (Cambridge) - Famous Contributions

Famous Contributions

Many of those who wrote for the paper during their student days have since gone on to achieve distinction in later life. Famous ex-editors include the BBC news presenters Jeremy Paxman and David Frost, film director Michael Winner, the late television presenter Richard Whiteley, Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers, novelist Robert Harris, novelist and biographer Graham Lord, historian Jonathan Spence, Factory Records founder Tony Wilson and BBC1's EastEnders executive producer Matthew Robinson. International Herald Tribune fashion writer and author Suzy Menkes was the newspaper's first female editor.

Some of Sylvia Plath's earliest poems and J. G. Ballard's first published story were written for the paper. Plath also posed in a bathing suit for an article she wrote about summer fashion-wear for the ladies. Meanwhile, comic Peter Cook met his first wife while posing for a Varsity May Ball photo shoot.

The paper has also launched the careers of many news journalists, including in recent times Observer Political Editor Gaby Hinsliff, Guardian New York correspondent Oliver Burkeman, Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis, author and columnist Iain Hollingshead, Independent News Editor Oly Duff and Foreign News Editor Archie Bland and columnist Amol Rajan, the paper's New York business correspondent Stephen Foley and Independent columnist Johann Hari. Controversial BBC and Evening Standard reporter Andrew Gilligan, later famed for a row with 10 Downing Street, was once a news editor. Other notable contributors who have had later success in other fields include Michael Frayn, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Gavin Lyall and even the Prince of Wales.

Stories first revealed in Varsity have often gone on to receive coverage in the UK's national press. In recent years reports to capture wider attention have included the leak of the name of Cambridge's latest vice-Chancellor, news about student protests concerning higher education funding, and a host of lighter reports about undergraduate excesses.

Other stories have had a more lasting significance. In May 1953, Varsity was only the third newspaper in the world to carry a report on James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, after The News Chronicle and The New York Times. The discovery was made in Cambridge on February 28, 1953; the first Watson/Crick paper appeared in Nature on April 25, 1953. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday, May 14, 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in The News Chronicle of London, on Friday, May 15, 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life." The news reached readers of The New York Times the next day; Victor K. McElheny, in researching his biography, "Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution", found a clipping of a six-paragraph New York Times article written from London and dated May 16, 1953 with the headline "Form of 'Life Unit' in Cell Is Scanned." The article only ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important. Varsity ran its own 130-word front-page article on the discovery on Saturday, May 30, 1953 under the headline "X-Ray Discovery".