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Paske, Thomas (1581-1662), Master of Clare College

Person · 1581–1662

Oley, Barnabas (1602-1686), Church of England clergyman and Fellow of Clare College

Person · 1602-1686

Born at Kirkthorpe, Yorkshire, and was baptised on 27 December 1602 in the parish church at Wakefield. He was the son of Francis Oley, clergyman, and his wife, Mary Watterhouse.

In 1607 Oley entered Wakefield grammar school.
In 1617 he was admitted to Clare College as a Cave Scholar.
Graduated BA in 1621.
Having been elected a probationer fellow of the foundation of Lady Clare at the college on 28 November 1623, he proceeded MA in 1625 and was elected a senior fellow in 1627.

In 1633 he was appointed to the college living of Great Gransden, Huntingdonshire, which he held for the rest of his life, but due to his duties as a Fellow he continued to live in Cambridge for many years.

In 1634–5 he served as taxor (price regulator), for the university, and in 1635–6 as proctor.
He started the rebuilding of Clare College on 19 May 1638, although work was not finished until 1715.

Oley was a Royalist and on 8 April 1644 he was ejected from his Fellowship by Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester on the grounds of non-residence in Cambridge and failure to appear before the commission of visitors. All his personal and landed property was confiscated and he was forced to leave Great Gransden.

During the late 1640s he led a wandering and impoverished life.
In 1643 and 1646 he was in Oxford.
During the sieges of Pontefract in 1644 and 1645 he preached to the Royalist garrison defending the castle.
By 1647 he had been sequestered from the impropriate rectory of Warmfield, Yorkshire, which his father had resigned in 1643.
Having helped Sir Marmaduke Langdale to escape in 1648 from prison and a death sentence, the following year Oley had to compound for delinquency in assisting the forces against parliament, and was fined £30. A further £50 was added in 1652, in lieu of which he was required to settle £5 a year on the minister of Warmfield.

In 1659 Oley returned to Great Gransden and on 9 July 1660 he was restored to his Fellowship at Clare College by order of the same Earl of Manchester.

On 3 August 1660 he was presented to the third prebendal stall of Worcester Cathedral.

In 1663 he left his Fellowship.

In 1664 he was the leading benefactor of the brick school house at Gransden, which he endowed with £20 a year. He built brick houses for six poor people on his own freehold land, leasing them for one thousand years to the churchwardens for the time being at a peppercorn rent, and he erected a vicarage.

He had given a pulpit to Gransden church in the first months of his incumbency in 1633 and in 1681 he provided wainscot seats for the chancel.

On 8 November 1679 he was nominated to the archdeaconry of Ely, but the following year he resigned this preferment because of doubts of his ability to discharge its duties. However, he retained the stall at Worcester until his death.

Oley died at Great Gransden on 20 February 1686, and in accordance with his will was buried there on the night of 22 February.

In his will he left 100 marks (£67) to Clare College for building a library, and £10 to the descendants of John Westley, the builder of the College.

A charity was set up in his name, with assets in Warmfield, Kirkthorpe, and Great Gransden, overseen by the fellows of Clare College and still operating with limited resources in the late twentieth century.

Odell, Noel Ewart (1890–1987), geologist, mountaineer, and Honorary Fellow of Clare College

Person · 25 December 1890 - 21 February 1987

Career

Born on 25 December 1890 in St Lawrence, Isle of Wight, the son of the Revd Robert William Odell, rector of St Lawrence, and his wife, Mary Margaret.
He was educated at Brighton College and at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College, London, where he studied geology.

First World War - he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers and was wounded three times.
In 1917 he married Gwladys Mona (d. 1977), daughter of Robert Jones, rector of Gyffin, north Wales. They had one son.

After the war Odell embarked on a career in the petroleum and mining industries.
1922-25 - geologist with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company
1927-30 - consultant in Canada

He then moved into academia.
1928-1930 - lecturer in geology and tutor at Harvard University
1931-1940 - research student and lecturer at Cambridge, where he stayed on as a Fellow Commoner and supervisor of studies at Clare College
His research for his PhD (awarded in 1940) investigated the geology, glaciology, and geomorphology of north-east Greenland and northern Labrador.
1940–42 he served as a major in the Bengal Sappers and Miners.

After the Second World War he took up various appointments at universities in Canada, New Zealand, and Pakistan. He lectured at McGill, was visiting professor at the University of British Columbia (1948–9), and was professor of geology at the University of Otago (1950–56) and at Peshawar University (1960–62).

When he retired he returned to Clare College and in 1983, at the age of ninety-two, was made an Honorary Fellow, an event which much pleased him.

Mountaineering
Although he published several important academic papers on the geology of the Himalayas, and other mountain regions it was in mountaineering that he made his name.

He began climbing at the age of 13 in the Lake District and soon gained wide climbing experience in Britain and the Alps. He participated in the Oxford University Spitsbergen expedition in 1921 and led the Merton College Arctic expedition in 1923.

In 1924 Odell was a member of the Everest expedition. He spent two weeks living above 23,000 ft and twice climbed to 26,800 ft and higher, without supplemental oxygen. On 8 June 1924 George Mallory and Andrew Irvine attempted to summit Mount Everest via the Northeast Ridge route. Odell reported seeing them at 12:50 p.m. climbing one of the major "steps" on the North-East ridge, and "going strongly for the top." There is no evidence to prove they reached the summit, or that they ascended above the major second step. They never returned and died on the mountain.

There followed several visits for geological research, mountaineering, and exploration in the Canadian Rockies (1927–47), north Labrador (1931), north-east Greenland (1933), and the St Elias Mountains in Yukon and Alaska (1949 and 1977).

An ice route he pioneered in the White Mountains bears his name, Odell Gully, and two mountains, a lake, and a glacier are also named after him.
Odell's greatest mountaineering achievement was the first ascent of Nanda Devi (25,695 feet) in 1936. He and H.W. Tilman reached the summit, which for fourteen years remained the highest peak climbed.

In 1938 he joined Tilman in an attempt on Everest, but deep powder snow made the last 1,500 ft impossible to climb.

He was a founder member of the Himalayan Club and an honorary member of the Alpine Club and similar clubs in North America, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Norway.

In 1944 he received the Livingstone gold medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and, unusually, a star in the constellation Lyra was named after him.

He died suddenly on 21 February 1987 at his home, 5 Dean Court, Holbrook Road, Cambridge, and his body was donated to medical science at the Cambridge anatomy department.

Newton, John Millard, Fellow of Clare College

Person

NEWLING, Jonathan

Morgan, Charles (1678-1736), Master of Clare College

Person · September 1678 - 30 April 1736