Old Boy and Director Guy Unsworth (1998-2005), has won ‘Best New Musical’ with his show Fresher The Musical at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year. The show won the award at the Musical Theatre Matters/What’s On Stage awards.

The hilarious musical, which ran for 24 performances, charts the arrival of Baz, Ally, Tuc, Rupert and Haley, five fresh-faced teenagers, at start a voyage of self discovery as they enter the world of university. Not only was the show given Best New Musical by a panel of industry professionals, it was also nominated for Best Lyrics and Best Music. It received four 5* reviews, six 4* reviews and was rated the number one musical by The List (through official review averages).

Reviews called the show ‘hilarious’ (The Guardian). The Scotsman describe it as having “All the makings of a real Fringe hit – and a show that runs the risk of giving musicals with silly, attention-grabbing titles a good name” and Maria Hodson of The Stage said “Guy Unsworth’s dynamic direction ensures fluid transitions between script and song, maintaining momentum on stage and the appreciative audience is swept along by the show’s good-humoured exuberance.”
Southport born Guy said: “We redrafted the show 24 times before the final product: sometimes a new scene or new song would arrive at the beginning of a day with a performance in the evening to a paying audience. It was at times an excruciating process but ultimately a very productive experience.”

Guy, who is now based in London, originally completed a degree in Industrial Economics at the University of Nottingham. He started off acting on the side, before taking up directing student shows. In his final year, he had already decided he wanted to work in the Theatre industry after directing a play called ‘Proof’ which was shortlisted for the National Student Drama Festival Finals. The play won 6 of the 12 awards, competing against the 12 other finalists and Guy won the Directors Guild award for Best New Director and Stage Electrics Award for Best New Designer.

He went on to do a year at Mountview Academy Theatre Arts doing a postgraduate diploma in Theatre Directing. Since then Guy has been working freelance, directing and teaching undergraduate students at drama schools.

“My work has ranged from directing casts of 32 young actors in a musical, to three middle aged actors in a modern play, or 13 American Students in a classic play. It changes all the time, that’s the fun of it.”

The acting bug started early for Guy who was involved in school acting in West Side Story with many of his close friends, including Chris Cooper and Bex Hinds who are now in the industry too. (“I’m just waiting for an opportunity to work with them.”)

“I won the Mellor-drama prize in my final year, which I remember was somewhat embarrassing. At speech day it was as if I’d won the prize for Melodrama – probably not too far wrong to be honest.”

Guy was heavily involved with the Southport Dramatic Club, cast in Margaret Mann’s Pantomime when he was only four. He claimed he got the part because he was so upset that his sister was in it but he wasn’t, a tactic which probably wouldn’t continue to serve him well. He was in about 30 shows between his first and turning 18. “SDC was a huge part of my childhood, and without them I can’t begin to imagine where I’d be today. The Youth Theatre at the SDC is second to none. I frequently wish I could work in a theatre as good as the Little Theatre Southport – venues in London’s West End are dingier, very expensive, and harder to get audiences to! Stephen Hughes-Alty, Robinb Hirsh, Judith and Arnold Gorse, and Margaret and Ray Mann to name but a few, played such a huge part in my experience there and continue to thrust their enthusiasm and expertise into the life of that building and its youth theatre.

Ultimately Guy’s plans for the future are to build up my work. He says he’d love to do some more work in the North West regional theatres so that his home friends can see it without travelling too far. “There are some very exciting plans in the pipeline including big names and big theatres, but I’m keeping my mouth shut for now…Watch this space…”

John Lewis – “A better place to work”

The great thing about retail is that we never stand still, so no two days are the same, especially in a co-owned business such as John Lewis. Recently I have been in India supporting the business expansion plans, I have also been driven at speed by a world champion Horse Carriage Driver (as part of our work to combine sport and leadership development), and then I have celebrated our 18% profit sharing bonus announcement with my team. So you can see why I really enjoy my work!

Retail provides a wealth of choices if you have ambition and I worked across a number of roles/shops before becoming Personnel Director in 2008. The common thread in John Lewis is a passion to make a difference, to the business and those working in it.  I take great satisfaction from leading the function that is responsible for ensuring we have a Partner (employee) environment which sets us apart from other organisations. This is based on the principles of our founder Spedan Lewis, who believed in ensuring the happiness of Partners, which then drives a more successful business model.

My Personnel Team are key to this success, through the learning and development opportunities we provide, the input we give to business planning and through enabling our expansion plans by opening new branches.  The accolades John Lewis has won over the past year for outstanding Customer Service reflect the personnel strategy to develop and support Partners to be the best they can be. However, we will not be resting on our laurels as we constantly seek to improve our business whilst still ensuring John Lewis is a different, and better place to work.

Laura Whyte (nee Brown) 1971-1977

Learning to Lead starts at School by Professor Sharon Turnbull (1970-76)

Writing this article has cast me back many years to the exciting seventies when I was at MTGS. In my memories I am often in the old library where I first found my passion for books, or sitting in the front row of the classroom, curious for learning and asking the difficult questions. (I have never given up this trait!). Most importantly, I remember the wonderful and often eccentric teachers who dedicated their lives to helping us to develop our inquiring minds, as well as our values and character. These teachers undoubtedly sowed the first seeds of leadership capability in our fertile minds, trusting the process, despite rarely seeing the long term results of their efforts. Together, we learned to share knowledge and debate ideas – skills that I have valued every day of my life since.

My career has followed many unexpected turns. A language degree led me to a job as a graduate trainee with an airline. From there, I moved into Human Resource Management at an airport, then a manufacturer, and a retailer. When finally frustrated with life in the corporate world, I decided to become an academic and to study organisations and management in order to teach others. Today, as Director of the Centre for Applied Leadership Research at The Leadership Trust I talk to many managers about how they first learned to lead. There is no doubt that this journey is very powerful when it starts at school. For me this is certainly true. My years at Merchant Taylors’ gave me one of the most precious and highly valued gifts that I could ever have wished for – the gift of self – confidence. At MTGS, through the many opportunities on offer to take early responsibility, I built the self – confidence that has carried me through my career and has been an essential foundation for my life.

Sharon Turnbull

Christine Liu (2000 Leaver) – Freelance Broadcast Journalist, Sky News, London

It was actually a careers questionnaire that I filled out at MTGS which helped me realise I wanted to get into journalism. After a disappointing work placement at a PR company, I arranged my own work experience at the BBC. They advised against a journalism degree and told me to study something I enjoyed and would do well in.

So I took up physics at Imperial College, London and maintained my interest in journalism at the student newspaper, TV station and hospital radio. After that, I did a year-long postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism at City University. I was lucky enough to win sponsorship from the BBC, which paid tuition fees and included more work placements, which really helped my fledgling CV.

My first job was at Russia Today, an English-language news channel based in Moscow, which started up just as I graduated. I lived & worked in Russia for two years before being persuaded by colleagues who’d left Russia to move to Al Jazeera in Qatar – that led to two years in the Middle East.

When I finally got homesick, finding a staff job in London was tough. But through more ex-Russia Today colleagues, I secured freelance work at Sky News and have been there for almost 5 years. I also do freelance work for Al Jazeera in their London Broadcast Centre, and have worked for ITV London and Bloomberg business news.

My advice for getting in to journalism: get as much experience as you can, be it paid or voluntary.

I was always interested in the sciences and it was natural to choose medicine as my lifelong career.  Despite a love of dance music, and a first ever live DJ gig in the Williams Hall at MTBS in 1996, the DJ career never went global!  After graduating from the University of Liverpool in 2002, I started my medical training as a junior house officer at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital (RLUH). To complete basic training, I rotated through a wide variety of four month rotational jobs in hospitals within Manchester and Liverpool.  After working at Liverpool Cardiothoracic Centre (now Liverpool Heart and Chest) and in the then newly formed chest pain unit in the RLUH, I chose to pursue a career in cardiology.

I completed membership for the Royal College of Physicians in 2005, and accepted a cardiology clinical fellow post at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire.  Spurred on by an interest in heart failure and implantable cardiac devices, I moved to one of the largest international heart failure units at Castle Hull Hospital, Kingston-Upon-Hull.  I worked as a research fellow under the supervision of Professors John Cleland and Andrew Clark, and have recently completed my doctoral thesis (MD).  After starting cardiology speciality training in 2010, based in East Yorkshire, I am now half-way to consultancy.  From 2013 onwards I will be moving for the penultimate time to train in adult congenital heart disease based at Leeds General Infirmary, then to the USA or Canada and beyond!

Damien Cullington

Tim Roberts (1975 Leaver) – Managing Director, Good Measures Limited

With Tim’s background in ecology, he has successfully managed to combine a strong scientific and environmental understanding with those of a seasoned management consultant operating internationally. Tim has spent over 29 years communicating employee initiatives in the UK and further afield, including 17 years as founder and managing director of Talking People (1991 – 2008) and Wyatt (1987 – 1991, now Towers Watson). He has provided internal communication and employee research services to over 100 clients with some partnerships exceeding 26 years, including multinationals/household names in the financial services, consumer, retail, pharmaceutical, (petro)chemical and heavy engineering/manufacturing as well as public sectors. Overall, over 60% of projects focused on pensions alone.

Many of these projects were trailblazers (e.g. the first, global all-employee share plan – Guinness; women serving on board operational ships – The Royal Navy; the modernisation and harmonisation of all group employees’ terms – Lloyds TSB Group; and, balanced-risk pension arrangements for Barclays, Centrica, Bank of Ireland and the UK civil service).

Tim also communicated the first DC pension scheme in the UK for Chase Manhattan Bank in 1987. He also sponsored many trends in employee education and wealth creation leading to multiple, international awards including 13 for Barclays afterwork and over 15 for AstraZeneca’s LifePlanner. Tim has also worked with the UK government on major workplace/public education exercises and personally invented the Combined Pension Forecast (CPF) for Alistair Darling MP, then Secretary of State for Social Security at the DWP.

After reading Environmental Science at London University, Tim became one of the first corporate ecologists in the UK with Redland (now Lafarge). He was then a pioneer environmental consultant with Environmental Resources Limited (now ERM).

Old Boy Philip Ingham (1973 Leaver) made a spontaneous visit to his Old School recently as part of a visit to the UK from his home in Singapore. It was the first time that Philip had been back to Merchant Taylors’ Boys’ School in many years.

Philip is Lee Kong Chan School of Medicine’s Vice-Dean for Research, Professor of Developmental Biology and the inaugural Toh Kian Chui Distinguished Professor. Philip made the trip over to the UK as he has been awarded the highly prestigious Waddington Medal.

The Waddington Medal is the only national award in developmental biology in the UK. It is awarded for outstanding research performance as well as services to the subject community. The Medal is named after Conrad Waddington, who was a leading British embryologist and geneticist highly influential in the development of both subjects during the 1930s through to the 1960s. Nominees are outstanding developmental biologists who have made a significant contribution to UK developmental biology and who are still currently active in the field. Previous winners include Professor Jim Smith, Director of the UK Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), in 2013, and Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics, in 2012. The medal is awarded annually at the British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) Spring Meeting, where the recipient presents the Waddington Medal Lecture.

I remember reading articles written by alumni when I was still a pupil at Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School. The smiles of successful doctors, lawyers and vets beamed out from the pages of the school magazine. Their careers were impressive, but they weren’t pathways I aspired to. I hated (and I mean absolutely despised with a vehement passion) every single P.E. lesson I ever had, so I couldn’t relate to the women who had gone on to great sporting achievement either. I found out later that it didn’t matter – just because I wanted to do something that no one else had done before, didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.

My career in fashion journalism started in the classrooms of five teachers. Miss McWatt was happy for me to spend my lunchtimes sketching fashion illustrations in her studio. Mr Donnan taught me how to write news stories (I still have a piece I wrote age 13, pretending to be a reporter for The Sun newspaper, which is part of the News Corporation that I now work for!) Madame Mistry, Mrs Whalley and Mrs Doyle taught me French and Spanish, the languages I would go on to study at Durham University and still use today when dealing with foreign fashion houses. It was an amalgamation of their skills, and of their encouragement, that allowed me to forge a career that none of us had any experience of.

It wasn’t hard, however, to come by the experience I needed.  Fashion is an industry where you learn the ropes by shadowing as many people as possible, and enthusiasm will get you everywhere. I interned at magazines in my breaks from University term time, and it helps if you can write as much as possible on small platforms too – whether that’s a blog, a website, or contributing to independent magazines. My first paid writing job paid me just 1p per word! After leaving University I went on to obtain a Master’s degree in fashion journalism from London’s Central Saint Martins, whilst doing a full time one year internship at ELLE magazine. It took me a while to get a ‘proper job’ as a fashion writer at The Times, but persistence paid off.

The skills and values instilled at Merchants can be applied to any career – little things, no matter how unusual, do grow in harmony. At school, I wasn’t one of the cool kids; I certainly never imagined I would have the chance to sit front row at Milan fashion week. But that’s the great thing about growing up – who and what you become, is entirely up to you.

(2006 Leaver)

Medicine Presentation – ‘You can have it all’

Dr Vidhi Taylor-Jones (MTGS 1990-97)

Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School were delighted to have former student Dr Vidhi Taylor-Jones deliver a presentation to Year 11 and L6 girls about medicine. Vidhi is passionate about girls having careers in medicine and she dispelled any myths about what a career in medicine would be like. Vidhi spoke at length about the broad and diverse range of careers in medicine, and gave useful advice about work experience and UCAS applications. Vidhi is a Consultant Anaesthetist at Aintree Hospital and Medical Instructor at the Centre for Simulation and Patient Safety.

After leaving Merchant Taylor’s Lindsay studied Hotel and Catering Management in Manchester, following that with many years running restaurants and latterly a wine bar and private room in Mayfair.  It was during this last position that Lindsay was inspired to further her knowledge of wine by attending two courses run by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, which she loved!

In 1989 Lindsay married and moved out of London to live in Warwickshire and decided to further a career in the wine trade.  She joined Grants of St James Specialist Wholesale division selling wine into the restaurant trade, where her knowledge of that industry proved very useful.

Whilst pregnant in 1994 she took voluntary redundancy from Grants when they were taken over by Matthew Clarke.  Not wishing to work full time whilst her children were young Lindsay decided to become self employed working out of someone else’s portfolio.

In 2007 Lindsay and her family had the opportunity to spend five months living near Barcelona, which was the perfect opportunity to develop some relationships with Spanish wineries.  Lindsay and her two daughters learnt Spanish, though the girls found it easier than Lindsay did and it certainly made her wish that she had been offered the opportunity of learning Spanish in place of French at Merchant Taylors’!

Having returned to the UK, Lindsay set up Wine Poole which she has continued to grow steadily and organically.  In addition to importing direct from four wineries in Spain, Wine Poole also buys from three major UK importers plus two specialist importers of New Zealand and Argentinean wines.  They supply local hotels and restaurants as well as individuals all over the UK through their website.  Lindsay runs a number of local wine clubs and they hold two large open tastings each year.

Wine Poole allows Lindsay to indulge her passion for tasting wine, with managing a flourishing business and having close contact with local hotels and restaurants, an industry which is still close to her heart.

Contact:

Lindsay Poole (nee Ryder)

1976 Leaver

Wine Poole Ltd

Tel:  00 44 1926 490970

[email protected]

www.winepoole.co.uk