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Daniel Cobban, an aficionado of the gothic genre, has had a horror novel published, based on a ghostly tale from Lancashire folklore.

The 251-page book, The Curse of Peg O’Nell: or The Demon of the Well, has already been attracting five-star reviews online.

According to the local legends, Peg O’Nell was a servant who worked at Waddow Hall, home of the prominent Starkie family, in the 1800s. A spirited girl, she often argued with her mistress. On one occasion, her mistress sent her to fetch water and added that she hoped Peg broke her neck. Some time later, on an icy night, this wish came true, with Peg falling into the nearby Ribble.

After that, not only did the Starkies suffer hard times, with many believing it was Peg’s curse on the family, but other ghostly stories also entered local folklore.

Daniel (OE 1994–2001), who currently lives in Clitheroe, Lancashire, said: “Peg O’Nell is perhaps the most talked-about and iconic piece of folklore in the county. She is a mysterious water spirit who dwells in the River Ribble and, although usually dormant, is said to return every seven years, demanding her septennial sacrifice – animal or human, she doesn’t mind – but either way, no one is guaranteed any safety on Peg’s night.”

“I’m a big fan of the Victoriana and gothic genres of literature, and I couldn’t resist fleshing out a full gothic/folk story about Peg O’Nell,” said Daniel, who wrote under the pen name, Daniel Nicholas Cobban and was published by Scottish house, Beul Athris Publishing, who specialise in folklore, among other genres. “It took a lot of research and patience!”

Looking back at his school days, Daniel especially remembers his A-level English classes with great fondness. “Mr [Eric] Houston and Miss [Victoria] Maule were both amazing at helping us get to grips with challenging texts such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

“Also, as a writer, I deeply appreciated the fact that the School encouraged creative writing: I remember participating in a creative writing competition in Year 8 (or the second year, we called it back then!) and I achieved the runner-up position.”

After QE, Daniel studied English and film at Glasgow University. He qualified as a TEFL teacher and spent some time teaching English to elementary school children in Mexico a few years ago.

“I’m currently a supervisor at a restaurant in my home town Clitheroe, and the flexibility of the hours helps me to continue embracing my passion for writing.”

Having experienced the highs and lows of life as an élite rower, paralympian Tom Aggar is now revelling in his new career as a teacher.

Tom (OE 1995-2002), who until he retired was the longest-serving member of the GB Para-rowing squad, won the gold medal in the Arms-Shoulders Men’s Single Scull at the Beijing Paralympics in 2008, and was crowned World Champion in the same discipline in 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011. He bowed out of rowing while still competing at the highest level, having taken bronze at the Paralympics in Rio in 2016.

He is now teaching full-time at Claires Court Senior Boys, an independent day school in Maidenhead, and has heard during lockdown that, following his successful final submissions under the teacher-training process, he is now fully qualified as a teacher.

“After retiring from competitive rowing, I worked for a pharmaceutical firm for a short time, before taking the plunge and training as a teacher,” he says. “I had always thought about teaching, but for one reason or another had talked myself out of it. I should have trusted my instincts as I have thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching so far.”

Tom who read Bio Sciences at Warwick University, teaches Chemistry and Biology.

“It’s a fairly small school (by QE standards) of around 450 boys, but very sporty and a really great environment to work in. It’s funny now, as a teacher, how many of the QE standards I find myself holding the boys to here!”

Tom was an accomplished sportsman at QE and has fond memories of his time as a pupil. “I played rugby for so many years with a great group of friends; I really enjoyed my studies, particularly into the Sixth Form. I also had the opportunity to represent the School at so many sports throughout my time there.”

Tom was injured in a non-sports related accident in 2005 and took up rowing as part of his rehabilitation programme. “[Former Headmaster] John Marincowitz and the whole School were so very supportive of me after my injury and it has been great to still keep in touch with QE,” he says.

When Tom stepped down from competitive rowing, he took a break from sport and all the training for a while. But now he tries to keep fit and trains before work most mornings. “I guess old habits are hard to break, and although I don’t miss the pressure that came with being on the team and competing, I still enjoy keeping active.”

Tom is married to Vicki and they have three children, two boys and a girl. He enjoys spending his spare time with them, going for walks and swimming.

“Both the boys have started playing rugby now at Maidenhead in the U7 and U6s, so most of my Sunday mornings are spent on the side of a rugby pitch now!”

Fired up by his own struggles in getting into Law, Izzet Hassan, who now works at one of the five so-called Magic Circle City firms, has set up his own online network to advise others seeking to follow in his footsteps.

While at QE, Izzet (OE 2005-2012) was captain of the tennis team and a noted rugby player. He then read Law at Warwick before going on to take a Master’s degree in Philosophy at Cambridge.

After working at various law firms as a paralegal and in their vacation schemes, Izzet won a training contract with Slaughter and May, where he started in September 2018.

Today, as well as his job as a Future Trainee Solicitor, he runs the Aspiring Commercial Lawyers Network (ACLN), which he set up on Facebook during the autumn of 2019.

“ACLN is a platform designed to help students, graduates and aspiring lawyers break into the legal profession,” he says. “As the first member of my family to go to university, I had to learn the hard way how difficult it is to secure an entry-level position in the field of commercial law.

“My aim is to use the knowledge I have accumulated over the years to help others break into this field.”

The group has expanded rapidly and in its first four months topped 1,000 members.

Izzet is also becoming very well-known on LinkedIn, dispensing nuggets of both general life advice based on his own experience as well as specific guidance for those aiming for a top career in Law.

Writing in February, Izzet said: “My exposure on LinkedIn has grown exponentially over the last two months. Following a few viral posts which have been viewed by almost half a million people, I have become very active in the legal sphere.

“I believe that LinkedIn, as a social media platform, offers an organic reach that is second only to Twitter.

“This, combined with its academic/professional exposure, allows me to advise aspiring lawyers and chime into legal discussions on a much larger scale than would be possible otherwise.”

Here is one recent example of his posts:

• “I am delighted to announce that I have passed my Stage 1 LPC exams.

The LPC happened to coincide with a very difficult time in my life; at times, it felt as though I was being attacked from every possible angle.

When you’re experiencing adversity, sometimes it is very difficult to see beyond the pain you are suffering.

During times like these, I often think about my greatest fears in life and draw strength from the fact that no matter how bad things may seem, they are still nothing compared to what I fear most.

I don’t believe that life gets any easier; I believe we just become stronger and more resilient over time.

How do you deal with adversity?”

Izzet also pays tribute to the support he received from the specialists at Rare Recruitment, billed on their own website as ‘leaders in diversity graduate recruitment’.

“Rare Recruitment were a great resource for me when I was applying,” he says. “The organisation aims to help aspiring lawyers from less privileged backgrounds break into the legal sphere. I benefited greatly from their support, application reviews and mock interviews.”

Having had a long-term interest in investing, Izzet has developed expertise in property and in CFD (Contract for Difference) trading.

“CFD trading is a relatively new form of derivatives trading which allows investors to speculate on the price of the underlying assets. For example, trading gold has historically been very expensive, however, trading CFD gold contracts allows investors to speculate on the price of the underlying gold assets, without actually having to buy the gold itself.

“I am currently developing an algorithm which will allow me to automate the trading process so that I can trade ‘passively’.

“In terms of property, I am very early in my investing career and have spent a lot of time educating myself on various models, particularly the ‘serviced accommodation’ model. By attending regular networking events, I have formed connections with a number of investors and other property investors which I believe will facilitate my progress.”

Izzet visited the School in 2018, along with his QE contemporary, Suraj Sangani, to speak to boys in Years 11-13 as part of the Senior Lecture Programme about how to pursue a career in Law.

Izzet was scheduled to be the guest speaker at the 55th Annual Elizabethan Union Dinner Debate, which had to be called off because of the pandemic.

Simon Dyton went on to become a School Captain under Eamonn Harris and then to gain a Double First and a PhD studying English and History at Cambridge – but his first encounter with QE’s then-Headmaster was far from auspicious.

“He largely ignored me and spoke to my parents,” says Simon (OE 1997–1994; School Captain 1993). “My father said, ‘Why don’t you talk to Simon?’ Mr Harris said to him sternly: ‘I can fix a naughty boy, but I cannot fix a naughty parent.’”

Later, however, Simon learned lessons both from Mr Harris and from other QE teachers that have stood him in good stead for his current role as an English teacher in the Upper School at the Marymount School of New York, a nursery-to-high school for girls on Fifth Avenue.

“The students at Marymount recently voted to have me speak to my school’s National Honor Society and share some scholarly advice. I was immediately reminded of a lesson I learned from Eamonn Harris. He once told me that the most important thing in life was ‘kissing the plan’, by which he meant that ‘doing a little bit’ every day was the best way to get a job done. That has stuck with me.

“I never thought that I’d be using my experiences of English lessons at QE to design my own classes, but the experiences of being taught by Mr [Eric] Houston and Mr [David] Jones proved very useful.

“Mr Cossey was also a fantastic example of passionate teaching. His furious roaring (and slamming of desks) over Harold II’s anger at William the Conqueror stayed with me for years. I love sharing my enthusiasm for storytelling and my enjoyment of language and literature with my students.”

“I remember Mr Houston making a boy stand against a wall in the Science block for ‘not behaving like a good chap’. This is when I started to sense that the school was being hoisted up by its socks into a new kind of institution. I loved the school trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg with Mr [Tom] Guthrie. I met my first Russian gangsters, held my first handgun, and — in a more trusting age of air travel — sat in the cockpit and lowered the landing-gear when we landed back in England.

“I loved being School Captain: organising Founder’s Day was a fantastic challenge.”

After A-levels, Simon took up a place at Gonville and Caius College. “When I went up to Cambridge, my main model for life at university was The Young Ones television show. I had been looking forward to learning alongside girls for the first time, but Caius didn’t admit any female students to read English that year, so I was stuck with more boys. I played rugby and rowed.”

Following his graduation, he stayed on at Caius for an MPhil and a PhD. “My doctorate involved exploring representations of early modern religious radicalism and grew out of a love of John Milton, whose Paradise Lost I first read in A-level English with Mr Houston.”

In those post-graduate years, he recalls enjoying lunch and drinks with Eamonn Harris in The Eagle, the 17th-century Cambridge pub where, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously first spoke of their discovery of the structure of DNA. “He was excellent company and was really enjoying retirement.”

Simon served as the MCR [Middle Combination Room] President and introduced graduate seminars that continued, in one shape or another, for years. “I loved my time at Gonville and Caius College. I made some excellent friends, and friendships have been the source of memories that I value the most.

“As a graduate student, I really enjoyed teaching undergraduates, but I loved working with teenagers on summer schools—first on a Cambridge University outreach scheme and then for a New York-based company that operated academic summer schools all over Europe. After several years, I visited New York to work for that company on a short-term work visa, which ultimately turned into a Green Card, by which time I was running summer schools and hiring teachers from all over the world to teach everything from Anthropology to Zoology—mostly in Oxford and Cambridge.

“Eventually, I decided that I wanted to teach full-time, so I looked into teaching and joined the Marymount School here in New York. I’ve had no real masterplan or strategy behind my career path. I’ve always enjoyed studying, writing, coaching, and teaching. I am a long-time believer in reading widely, thinking broadly, and finding the happiness in life. I’ve pursued a career that I enjoy and that I find satisfying.”

Among the many highlights of this career, he recalls one recent, somewhat “terrifying”, example: “The students voted for me to take half-court shots during the high school’s Spirit Week pep rally. (Spirit Week, by the way, is a week of morale-boosting activities designed to help the students through the post-Christmas gloom.) I think it was Mr [David] Maughan and Mr Clarke who coached basketball, but nothing prepared me for hundreds of students chanting, ‘Dr. D, Dr. D!'”

Another highlight of his life stateside recurs daily as he savours his walk home each day across Central Park.

“When I arrived in New York, I was told that it was a great place to spend some of my 20s (I was 28) and all of my money, but—now that I’m in my 40s—I’ve found a happy place on the Upper West Side with my wife, Meredith, and dog. I feel very fortunate that I can live and teach in a city that’s incredibly diverse. I recall that I did a project on Kyrgyzstan for Mr Guthrie in A-level Russian, but it’s only in New York that I finally met a Kyrgyz horseman, who was stunt-riding for the circus. You never know who you’ll meet, and everyone has an interesting story.”

He is now a US citizen. “My wife and I spend our vacations in the deserts of southern Utah, on the beaches of the Virginia coast, and in the forests of upstate New York. I appreciate hard work, good fortune, personal wellness, and physical fitness.”

After graduating from Cambridge, Marco Miglio took a long, hard look at the opportunities open to him in the commercial world – and decided to go in another direction altogether.

He recently began a new post working for an NHS Crisis Resolution Team, which involves directly helping people suffering from severe mental health problems.

Marco (OE 2007-2014) says: “Every day feels like an opportunity to make an impact on someone and I wake up looking forward to going into work, which I never thought could be possible.”

He first became interested in this area while studying for his undergraduate degree in Human, Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and taking a few psychology modules. After he graduated and came back to London, he took a Master’s degree in Social and Cultural Psychology at LSE.

“Whilst doing my Master’s, I did short stints at big consulting companies such as Bain and PwC – and found corporate culture unfulfilling. Many of my friends from university were contemplating careers in law, banking and consultancy, and none of these felt like a natural fit for me.

“I felt so lucky to have received some of the best education in the country and wanted to utilise this to empower and benefit those most in need, and so I tried to get as far away from corporate life as possible and found a job in mental health.

“My first job in mental health was working for a charity for a year-and-a-half that runs care homes for men with criminal histories who also have mental health problems. This job felt like a perfect fit for me, and over time, I realised that the work that came most naturally to me was dealing with acutely unwell, violent and risky patients.”

His new post, as an assistant practitioner within Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust’s Crisis Resolution Team, felt “like a natural progression” from his previous role.

Marco explained a little about what his job entails: “Each NHS trust commissions multiple crisis teams, and at the minute I work in the North Camden Crisis Team, based in Belsize Park. The crisis team work with some of the most acutely unwell people in the local area: usually our caseload tends to have up to 40 people, most of whom are actively psychotic and suicidal.

“My working week is split between conducting home visits to our caseload, and working on the Crisis Team Single Point of Access phone lines. When I’m out doing home visits, a major part of this is to assess the risk levels of our patients (which is usually very high and so needs to be monitored in case it changes and they become too risky to keep themselves safe), provide brief supportive counselling, supervising their medication and helping them get referred to local mental health services offered by the NHS or charities.

“Unfortunately, sometimes our patients are so suicidal that they are beyond our remit and we have to push for them to be taken to A&E or to be sectioned for their own wellbeing.

“The remainder of the week I work in what is called the Single Point of Access phone line, in which we triage and accept referrals from patients, their GPs, family members, and the police. We take these clients on and then work with them to get them out of their mental health crises.

“A small part of this role is de-escalating our distressed patients and effectively ‘talking them off the ledge’, as it were, to try to keep them safe until our team is able to work with them. Ending a phone call with a patient who initially phoned saying they were about to take their own life but now says that they feel able to keep themselves safe makes me truly appreciate the importance of the work that we do, and despite how emotionally demanding it can be, I know it’s one of the most necessary jobs, especially in a time when mental illness affects more of us than ever before.

“Whilst working in mental health is incredibly rewarding, it’s not a job I’d recommend to everyone. (All the teams I’ve worked with so far have joked that the job is so stressful and draining that you’d have to be slightly mad yourself to want to work in the sector.) Rotating shift patterns are exhausting; verbal abuse and death threats from patients are extremely common; I’ve seen colleagues get attacked, and have been in quite a few sticky situations myself. That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way and feel lucky to have a job that I genuinely enjoy.

“In terms of my long-term goals, I’m thinking of becoming a child and adolescent psychotherapist. Most of my work so far has been with severely unwell people, and in future I’d really like to start working with patients at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are experiencing their first symptoms of mental illness and to try and help them explore the reasons behind these symptoms and work with them to help them recover before they develop chronic mental illnesses.”

Marco spoke of the important role fellow QE alumni continue to play in his life. “Given the intense nature of the job and how understaffed and overworked NHS staff are, having a good support network outside of work has been really important in maintaining my own wellbeing.

“I’m extremely lucky to have such a supportive network of family and friends around me, some of whom are Old Elizabethans. There are a group of about ten of us who still see each other most weeks, and we go on holiday every summer, and it has been a privilege to remain so close to them and watch them go into jobs where they’re making a difference.”

Jake Nielen is revelling in his role within an industry enjoying explosive growth and operating at the forefront of a technological revolution.

Jake (OE 2004–2011) is a London-based account manager with Amazon Web Services, helping financial technology (FinTech) startups rapidly achieve global scale and huge customer growth through applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

On graduating from Cambridge, he joined Egon Zehnder, a top-three executive search firm focused on board-level appointments for FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 customers.

“After two years working across various industrial and financial services clients, I moved to do the same role at Amazon, ultimately specialising in finding and convincing some of the best technical minds around the world to build some of the largest distributed technical systems in the world, and solve some of the hardest AI/ML challenges across Amazon Retail, Amazon Prime Video, Alexa, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even Amazon’s Operations business.

“Whilst in that role it became obvious that AWS was exploding in terms of growth. It currently stands at $36bn revenue globally, growing at 36% year-on-year, which has never been done before in the history of technology services. (We have 19k in the sales team with 12k open roles for next year!).

“In addition to that, we are adding a new feature or product every three hours (2500-plus last year alone), and the pace of change and ability to work in an industry that is revolutionising and democratising how millions of customers around the world consume and process data was too good to pass up.

“I’ve since joined the Startups team, focusing on helping FinTech customers (Monzo, Transferwise, Nutmeg, etc.) get the best out of our services and support those types of customers as they scale globally and offer new services to millions of new customers around the world.”

Among highlights from earlier in his career he would include working on the process to appoint the new Chairman of the Government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland. Another was rebuilding the Prime Video technical leadership team, which last year launched live-streaming of the Premiership in the UK.

“More recently, it has been helping two of my customers win deals with FTSE 100 businesses and supporting [banking start-up] Tide to grow to over 100k small-business users in the UK as well as [helping them towards] international expansion in the near future.”

At School, Jake was a notable sportsman, playing for the First XV and also involved in athletics, water-polo and cross-country.

He vividly recalls “the trials and tribulations of the U16 Sevens and XV rugby teams – the wins and losses and the team-building that came about as a result of an ‘aggressive’ fitness regime based on a strategy that if we couldn’t run through or round our opponents, we would just have to run further and work harder”.

“More generally, I’ve got good memories of constantly being flagged down in the corridor for having my top button undone, the pain of the ‘elephant dip’, the relentless number of A3 grids in Geography.” He confesses to having occasionally been guilty of putting off difficult homework – “deferring it all to an hour before and having to work in the atrium on top of the lockers”.

“But,” he says, “most of all, I have good memories of the dedicated teaching staff who worked above and beyond to provide a top-tier education to anyone, regardless of background, for free.”

He especially praises current Headmaster Neil Enright, who taught him Geography, and his form teacher, Tahmer Mahmoud. Jake, who went on to take a First in Geography at St Catharine’s College, continues to apply Mr Enright’s “organisational capabilities and standards” to this day. “I still colour-code and underline headings on my work.”

“Mr Mahmoud…taught me to intellectually stretch myself to think bigger during form time (‘If you drop a ball, how can you be sure it will always fall to the ground? On what basis do you think the colour red looks the same for you as it is for me?’).”

At Cambridge, his dissertation was on community perceptions of volunteer ‘gap year tourists’ in Ethiopia (“which I loved”).

He remains close friends with a group of OEs – “essentially everyone you see in this picture” [right], taken at Allianz Park, home of Saracens, for the QE First XV’s match against Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in 2017. Old Elizabethans pictured are top row, left, to bottom right: Alex Grethe, Jake, Anton Bridge, Ioannis Loupas (all 2004-2011); Anoop Raghaven and Max Hassell, (both 2002–2009); Alvin Bombo (2002–2007); Gideon Levitt (2004–2011); Aaron Levitt (2002–2009); Matteo Yoon, Adam Kuo, Alex Goring (all 2003–2010), and Francis Vu (2000–2008).

“The other photos show us all wearing our QE First XV tops in Japan when we went to visit for the Rugby World Cup.”

Jake’s ambition is, he says, “to continue to learn and always be curious, to push myself out of my comfort zone every day, and to continue to do the hard things well. I’ll probably stay at AWS until I come across a Fintech that seems interesting enough to leap in to (in the interests of being curious).”