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This is around 8 miles from central Cambridge.  Unless your walking’s really adventurous, you’d reach the camp more readily by bus or bike than on foot.

Oakington Immigration Reception Centre was used by the Home Office from 2000 to detain asylum seekers while their claims for refugee status  were assessed; it also held foreign prisoners.  The harsh conditions and management were repeatedly strongly criticised.   Local volunteers actively endeavoured to support those held there.  This centre was closed in 2010, but other UK detention centres remain.

Oakington Immigration Reception Centre had previously been a barracks, and before that an RAF airfield.  Present plans are to incorporate it into the new village of Northstowe, some streets of which have been built around it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law was founded in 1987.  The name commemorates its first Director, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht (1928-2017) and his father Sir Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960).

Hersch Lauterpacht was born to a Jewish family in a small town in the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In 1915 he began studying Law at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), but he was unable to take his final exams there because the university became closed to Jews.  He moved to Vienna, and then to London, where he gained his PhD and began practising as a lawyer.  He was a member of the prosecution team at the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis, and from 1955 to 1960 a judge of the International Court of Justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture of Peterhouse by Matt Brown.  CC BY 2.0

Peterhouse was the college to which Max Perutz belonged.  He was originally from Austria — one of the many scientists of Jewish descent helped in their flight from Nazi oppression by the Academic Assistance Council.  This didn’t prevent his being rounded up on Winston Churchill’s orders as an enemy alien and interned for a few months in Newfoundland.  His contribution to Britain’s war effort, after his return to Cambridge, drew on his expertise in glaciers, but his enduring scientific reputation was made after the war in the field of molecular biology.  He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Sir John Kendrew.  In the final year of his life he was an eloquent advocate for restraint following the 11 September attacks on the United States. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pembroke College Chapel by John Lord.  CC BY 2.0

Inside Pembroke Chapel — not accessible to visitors during Refugee Week because of student exams — is a bent wooden cross, sculpted by Francesco Tuccio from the timbers of a refugee boat that had been abandoned on the island of Lampedusa in 2016. 

 

Photo of cross by Pembroke College Cambridge.  Used with permission

The college continues to respond to the challenge that this cross represents: fundraising for refugee causes, welcoming a Visiting Scholar from a place of danger, sending baby slings, supporting a studentship for a refugee, and a studentship for refugee studies.

 

 

 

 

 

The wording on the plaque reads:  “Cavendish Laboratory. 1874-1974.  Established by the Duke of Devonshire and extended by Lord Rayleigh (1908) and Lord Austin (1940), the Cavendish Laboratory housed the Department of Physics from the time of the first Cavendish Professor, Jame Clerk Maxwell, until its move to new laboratories in West Cambridge.”  From 1919 to 1937, the Director of the Cavendish Laboratory was Ernest Rutherford.  

 

Under the plaque recalling Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory, spare a thought for his leading of the Academic Assistance Council, a body set up to help scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.  And spare another thought for people who need that body’s help today.  With the name CARA — the Council for At-Risk Academics — it is still going strong and has, alas, still got work to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Picture of Great St Mary’s church by David Short.  CC BY 2.0)

Great St Mary’s has played host to many refugees over the years.  The theologian and ecumenical pioneer Martin Bucer fled to England from Strasbourg in 1549, and spent his final years in Cambridge.  He died in 1551, and was buried in Great St Mary’s.  

 

He had come to Strasbourg as a refugee from Wissembourg, and his adopted English homeland was to grow inhospitable towards him as Strasbourg had done.  A few years after his death, Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) had his body dug up for posthumous execution — burning at the stake on a pyre of his own books.  He was formally rehabilitated during the reign of Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth I.  His memorial in the church is not accessible to visitors.  

 

The church is marking Refugee Week 2021 with prayers — streamed and face to face — every day at 12:00.