SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TREVOR WEST MRIA

Abstract

The Trevor West I knew was called Tim, and he stayed that way for the first two years of our acquaintance, until his brother John arrived to set the record straight. He and I stayed yoked together through four years in Trinity and three more in Cambridge. We started off on an uneasy footing: Trevor had been expected to take the First Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics in 1956, and I, brash Northerner, came steaming down on the Enterprise and snatched it from under his nose. I went on to compound the offence by sitting the Foundation Scholarship in the same year: thanks to the innocence of Ludwig Bass, who set a Mechanics paper that completely floored the Senior Freshmen, I walked away with it. The following year, however, while Trevor and the rest of the class attended Schol classes, I was clearly above that sort of thing now. Of course Schol and Mod Part I were essentially the same, and I got my come-uppance the following September when Trevor scored a healthy First while I stumbled home with a II. 2. The year after we were a class of three: Trevor, myself and Michael Robinson, brother-in-law of President Mary. One year later, and the looming threat of fellow student John J. Miller brought Trevor round to combine efforts with me to keep him at bay. Trevor was always very savvy: when he told me afterwards T.S. Broderick approached him in Front Square to ask, 'What shall we do about Harte', he was quick to reply, 'If he's going to Cambridge he's going to need a First'. Savvy as ever, when we set out for Cambridge, Trevor was determined that we should on no account allow the Brits to see the depths of our ignorance. It was true that several recent Trinity exports to Cambridge had faltered: John Killen had been taken ill in his Moderatorship exam and been awarded a temporary Pass degree, historian Stephen Barcroft, who had elected to take his degree by thesis had had it rejected, and then P.A. Olagunju had died in Nigeria while rewriting his Cambridge dissertation.