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Over the years, Laurie Weitzkorn has DJ-ed to huge crowds, staged lavish parties in exotic locations across the globe, and worked with royalty, the super-rich and the famous.

By his own admission, his event design company, JustSeventy, is not the cheapest, but that, he says, is because they offer a service that is second to none.

“A lot of potential clients come and sit in our office and say we are expensive and go away. But after trying cheaper competitors and being disappointed, they come back to us for their second or their third party. We say we are kind of like Selfridge’s, compared with Aldi or Lidl.”

Yet Laurie (OE 1993–2000) has not always been in the glamorous world of international event management; in fact, his own career really began with another titan of the retail world known for low prices – Costco.

He took a job at Costco Watford while he was still in the Sixth Form at QE. “I started by pushing trolleys. The great thing about Costco was that it is a multinational company. If you are ‘hungry’ and have a brain, you can progress.”

As a QE boy, he definitely met the latter criterion and so received some good training and mentoring, in the process becoming the company’s youngest-ever forklift driver and goods inward junior supervisor. “With £2m of merchandise coming through the big door at the Watford warehouse from at least 12 articulated lorries a day, it was a busy, bustling place to work. They gave me a lot of responsibility. “

After leaving School in 2000, he carried on at Costco in a gap year and then went to Birmingham City University to read Business Management in 2001. After concluding that university wasn’t for him, he left 18 months later.

From the age of 16, he had also been DJ-ing, and in this period he won a DJ residency at a high-profile Birmingham venue that had both student and non-student nights, where he was often playing to 1,000 people.

(“I started DJ-ing as a hobby, but it turned into a career,” Laurie explains. “At one time, I was earning several thousand pounds just for five hours, although it’s worth saying that when I started I was getting £75.” He now describes himself as a semi-retired DJ, turning out only on special occasions.)

“Costco then opened up Costco Birmingham.” After his experience at Watford – Costco’s second or third-biggest warehouse globally – he found himself “being treated like a supervisor, but not paid like one. I clashed with the senior management and was a bit of a thorn in their side.”

News of his ability was spreading, however, and one day a call came from the national CEO of Costco: would Laurie transfer to the national depot in Lutterworth, Leicestershire? He eventually went there, but the work involved 4am starts and 12-hours days. His time was filled with firefighting issues amid the continual pressure of getting all the incoming fresh produce out on the road to Costco’s warehouse stores around the country within 24 hours. “It was brutal: it drove me to the brink and one day I got home and imploded. They gave me two months sick leave on full pay.”

After he had transferred to Milton Keynes to help open Costco’s 17th location, he found that he was, in fact, more experienced than many of the senior management there. When he was asked to take on more responsibility, but without a commensurate increase in salary, he quit Costco for good.

He had been with the company for six years and nine months, and today he can see that this time stood him in good stead for what would soon become his new career. “Looking back, I gained a lot of commercial experience with Costco – procedures, audit, handling pressure, transport.”

During a period of career limbo, he spoke to a friend who worked at event management company Banana Split, founded in 1976 by industry legend (and fellow DJ), Julian Posner. Laurie met Posner and set out what he could do.  “After 15 minutes, he said: ‘Name your price’. I said: ‘What – salary?’ and he said: ‘Yeah, tell me what you want.’”

The reason he had won him over, Laurie believes, is that Posner wanted “people who could sell, who were creative, who could talk to a client, who could unload a truck, if necessary” – and he recognised that Laurie fitted the bill.

It could hardly have been more different from Costco, but Laurie loved it. “We were travelling the world and living the high life – organising parties for royalty, celebrities and a number of billionaires.”

One of Laurie’s “more random” events for Banana Split involved organising a party for a group at the country shooting estate of a famous restaurateur. He brought along the singing duo, the Cheeky Girls, who proved a hit with the 12-strong, all-male shooting party. On another occasion, he was involved in organising two lorries that were going all the way to Azerbaijan for a party.

“It was a good learning curve, but we were there during the hard times, too, after the 2008 financial crisis.” There were other downsides – “the company was a bit archaic and old-school in terms of the management style”.

And so Laurie and a colleague, Stas Anastasiou, decided to take the plunge and strike out on their own. Launching JustSeventy in January 2011, they brought with them several clients they had worked with at Banana Split.

Taking on their first additional employee after a year, the company embarked on a period of continuous growth that lasted for several years.

Highlights included running the biggest bar mitzvah in the country in 2015.

One particularly memorable job was a cruise organised for a client living in France. In just eight weeks, JustSeventy planned an itinerary around Corsica and Sardinia, chartered a fabulous cruise ship in Cannes and sourced everything from the flowers and lighting to the on-board entertainment.

And then, five days before it was due to set sail, the ship caught fire. A replacement was found, but it was in Dubrovnik in Croatia. “Working with the client, we agreed that guests would arrive in Cannes as planned, travel by privately chartered flight to Dubrovnik board the ship and sail an alternative route to the Amalfi Coast in Italy. The guests would be none the wiser. Perfect!”

Of course, it was not as simple as that, and Laurie’s team faced a host of difficulties, having to rethink the entire itinerary, helicopter in entertainers, and organise a finale event from scratch in the Italian town of Ravello, all the while trying to work at sea with minimal wi-fi.

“Though the pressure was at its highest, the team was able to pull everything together really well – an experience we’ll never forget, and one that reminds us that nothing is impossible.” And fortunately the client was happy to pay the final bill, which came in at a cool £3m.

At the peak in 2015–16, JustSeventy had 12 employees. There were the high points, including running the biggest bar mitzvah in the country. And yet, Laurie says, they were too often “running around like headless chickens, but not really making the money”; the need to maintain the increased overheads induced them to accept some poor-quality, unprofitable jobs.

Laurie and his business partner, Stas, reacted by bringing in consultants to help them, taking on a “proper non-exec”, slimming down the payroll, using freelances more often, and generally becoming more selective about the work they took on.

JustSeventy has built its reputation on “working at a fast pace and on attention to detail”, says Laurie. “In my office, there is nowhere to hide.” In everything, the focus is on delivering the best possible experience for clients, who, however rich they may be, are often well out of their comfort zone when commissioning an event from JustSeventy: “They are coming to you at their weakest, about to spend £50,000–£200,000 on a party, and they want it to be perfect.”

Laurie has retained an entrepreneurial approach and has had both hits and misses. One less successful venture was a new company established to hire out sound and lighting equipment`. He and his partners stretched themselves financially, spending £400,000 on state-of-the-art kit. When they realised it was not going to be the roaring success they had hoped, they were able to extricate themselves by selling the business.

On the other hand, the £40,000 JustSeventy has invested in developing a piece of industry-specific software, including CRM, is proving to have been money well spent. “We have attracted interest from other companies, and we are about to start licensing it to competitors.”

The pandemic has, however, inevitably been a testing time for a luxury events company. “We have only survived because of the furlough scheme and the bounceback loan from the Government.” Bookings are finally starting to appear, but it is still only a trickle.

Looking back, overall, Laurie is immensely proud of what has been achieved with JustSeventy. He observed that in his generation, those who have gone on to commercial success have often been those who, like him, were not the academic high-fliers at QE. “I was definitely in the bottom half of the year in everything, always struggling a little for air! Some of the boys that have really achieved are the ones who left halfway through the Sixth Form.”

Nevertheless, he says he has many reasons to be grateful to the School. “QE taught me some basics of ethics and morals and how to conduct yourself.” He pays tribute especially to his Business Studies teachers, Jason Dormieux and Matthew Sherman (“an American fond of skateboarding”). “They were the two guys who got me interested in business and gave me an understanding of it.”

He threw himself into QE life, playing rugby for the School and, in an early pointer to his later career, taking on running the lighting and sound for numerous School concerts and drama productions. “I was just quite involved. I did enjoy it. I stayed for the Sixth Form and I went back for the ten-year reunion. It was a good place.”

Laurie, who enjoys horse-riding, travelling and music in his spare time, keeps in touch with a number of other OEs, including his neighbour Neil Phillips and his financial adviser, Daniel Coburn, from the year above him. “There is a good network. QE Boys has got gravitas and massive kudos even today.”

Still in his thirties, lawyer Mantraraj Budhdev is today not only global Head of Compliance for one of the world’s biggest logistics companies, but also its Head of Legal, responsible for the Americas, Europe and Russia.

Throughout his life, he has worked ferociously hard and overcome disappointments, bad bosses and discrimination on his way to achieving his current success with Dubai-based DP World.

This month, as he celebrates the tenth anniversary of qualifying as a solicitor, Mantraraj took the opportunity to reflect: “The message I would convey is that a lot is down to luck, being in the right place at the right time. But more importantly, it’s about seeing opportunities as they come up and taking them and making the most of your career. That is easier said than done, and who you work for is very important.”

Yet alongside luck and capitalising on opportunities, Mantraraj (OE 1997–2004) has also very deliberately taken steps to ensure he does not drift, asking himself some hard questions every two years, fully prepared to adjust as necessary, whether that means a change of employer or even a change of career.

Mantraraj grew up in Radlett, where his family still lives. In Year 6, he had applied, among others, to The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School. Habs didn’t offer him a place, but something about QE had felt right to Mantraraj from the outset. “I think QE was a huge turning point in my life. I have very, very fond memories of it and I am proud to say I am state-educated.

“QE is not an easy place – or at least at that time it wasn’t – because you are among huge numbers of people. I saw people fall through the cracks, and back then it was easy to fall through. You could make the most of it, but if you didn’t want to help yourself, no one else was going to do it for you,” he says. He contrasts his experience with that of his sister who went to an independent girls’ school, where smaller class sizes made possible a rather different approach.

He traces his desire to be a lawyer back to his first years at QE and to the American TV show, Perry Mason, about a larger-than-life criminal defence attorney. “I watched it religiously and absolutely loved it.”

It was not only his career choice that was established at QE: a fearsome work ethic emerged, too. “I was never one of the popular kids, the cool kids: I was a grafter; I know I work hard.”

Unsure what type of lawyer he wanted to be, he took steps to find out. “I ended up doing work experience at quite a broad range of firms, from the High Street solicitor doing conveyancing and the like to Citizens’ Advice Bureau-type work and law firms in the City.”

As a senior pupil, he undertook a week’s summer holiday work experience with Canary Wharf colossus, Clifford Chance, and with Travers Smith, a more boutique City law firm. It was at these that he found his métier: “I like the buzz of the corporate world.”

He applied unsuccessfully to Cambridge – “I am not ashamed to say I was an Oxbridge reject” – so went instead to the London School of Economics to read Law. And he says that while campus universities, and even Oxford and Cambridge, offer one sort of student life, he greatly enjoyed the very different experience he received at LSE. “I had a fantastic time. I would not change it; it prepares you for life in the city.”

Yet while his studies were progressing well, Mantraraj realised that his contemporaries seemed to be advancing with their careers more than he was, being offered places on firms’ vacation schemes and training contracts. “I was getting nowhere.”

It was then that he instituted one of the unsparing career reviews which have been a recurring theme of his life, asking himself if law was still the right career for him. “Even the best-laid plans need to be critiqued – including those you have cherished from the age of 13…you have to think again and make sure you are on the right track. Every two years, I check in on myself: am I where I want to be and going where I want to go?” On this occasion, he decided to wait a little longer.

At the very last moment, Linklaters asked to interview him. The message reached him when he was on holiday with his family and, his confidence by this point at a low ebb, he almost didn’t attend. In the event, however, he went along and “hit it off with the senior partner.

“That completely changed the trajectory of my career.” He was offered a training contract and was soon enjoying the buzz he had once felt with Clifford Chance, albeit not at Canary Wharf but in the rather less stimulating Barbican, where Linklaters is based.

After two years there, he duly qualified as a solicitor on March 9th 2011. Offered the choice of joining the firm’s derivatives practice – “too niche” – or the corporate team, he opted for the “very exciting” work of the latter.

But, he adds quickly: “It’s far from glamorous – not at all like Suits on TV! The reality is very long hours. It’s not easy by any stretch.” He calculates that for one two-month spell, on average, he slept fewer than three hours a night.

He spent time on secondment with Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland, and then was asked to go to Dubai in early 2013 as a secondee to the Dubai World investment company of the city’s government.

Two more years went by and he was back in London. Now four years qualified, he pressed for a discussion with his boss about whether he was going to “make partner”. He had identified in advance three possible scenarios for himself: trying to make partner with Linklaters; moving to in-house practice, or leaving law altogether. “I got a rather woolly response: one in ten in my intake would make partner in six years.”

Dissatisfied with this, over a coffee, he spoke to a colleague who had left Linklaters and was now at the American-British law firm, Hogan Lovells, as a partner. They were, he said, looking to hire two people with the possibility – “although no promises” – of making partner in three years.

Mantraraj duly made the move to Hogan Lovells. “For some reason, I was seen as a bit of a win for them. At Linklaters, I had a generalist role, which set me in good stead.” He was able to help his new firm secure the big fees that came with public M&A.

One day at Hogan Lovells, a senior partner took him aside and explained that they were trying to cultivate “a really important relationship”, namely with Goldman Sachs. With some reservations, he took on a secondment there in September 2016, which lasted for six months. At the bank, he had “two bosses, one good, one bad. Who you work for makes or breaks your experience. Your boss has so much influence over how your career develops.”

In early 2017, he was back at Hogan Lovells, where the corporate team was then struggling to some extent, having to rely on referrals from the firm’s huge US business. He realised there was a bottleneck above him, with senior people not being promoted, which in turn was harming his prospects for making partner.

At another two-year point in his career, he was ready for a change. It came in the most unexpected way: “DP World’s General Counsel, who was based in Dubai, happened to be in Paris on business and was having lunch with a Linklaters partner. He told this contact that DP World was looking for a replacement because their Head of Legal for Europe and Russia was leaving.

“This Linklaters person happened to be in London about a week later and was sitting in the partners’ dining room.” A strict rule applied there that diners had to take the next available chair, rather than waiting for a table to become available so they could eat with their close colleagues and friends. “Purely by chance, this chap from Paris was sat next to my first boss from 2009 and they got talking. She called me the very same day and said: ‘I just heard something that would be perfect for you.’”

He sent her his CV and, somewhat to his surprise, she sent it straight on to DP World. Mantraraj thought he was too junior to be successful, but after going through no fewer than five rounds of interviews, in the summer of 2017, he joined DP World.

“This is how things often transpire and it demonstrates how your network is important. Sometimes these things come through random routes. I don’t believe in nepotism at all, but I do believe in opportunities, and you have to create something from them for yourself when they come along.”

He thought he might stay at DP World for three or four years and then move on to keep up his career momentum: “In in-house practice, people don’t really leave: it’s not a conveyor belt like a law firm,” he explains. But almost four years in, he remains firmly committed to the company. “I ended up progressing here in a way that I hadn’t expected to be – and very quickly.”

In 2019, he was asked to create and run a new global compliance function, while still retaining his existing role. DP World is a huge business, with 55,000 employees worldwide, so the new job was an enormous responsibility. Then, from February this year, he was given the additional task of being Head of Legal for the Americas, while still fulfilling this original role for Europe and Russia.

The nature of what he does is now changing. A year ago, he had no team; now he has five people directly reporting to him and a further 16 indirectly. “I need to slowly let them do a lot more of the day-to-day work and I can be more strategic. So, it’s a transition, but it’s gradual.”

In seeking to lead the team well, he has drawn on his own negative experiences with “horrible” bosses in the past. But he readily acknowledges that he has had “incredible” ones, too – mentors with whom he has continued to maintain close ties. Not least among these is his current boss who, he says, has been an enormous inspiration and support in championing him throughout the organisation, but also his former boss at Linklaters who was instrumental in his securing his job at DP World. Now a very senior partner at Linklaters, she is herself “being instructed” by DP World: “It boils down to relationship,” he says.

Mantraraj, who is based in London, has been reflecting not only on his career, but also on the extraordinary global events of the past year – coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter protests.

“Lockdown has been a blessing in disguise, because I have not been able to do as much travelling as I normally do.”

He appreciates the deeper consideration of important issues that BLM has provoked, but adds: “Change is slow and it’s incremental and it’s not going to happen overnight.” He recalls one experience during his time with his previous firm that illustrates this.

An August baby, Mantraraj was used to being the youngest in his classes at QE. Because of his fast rise, he has often found himself in a similar position in his career. On one occasion, he was about to start a meeting with a Scottish client and his (Mantraraj’s) junior colleague, a young, white man. The client, assuming he was in fact the more senior employee, had been chatting for three or four minutes and then turned to Mantraraj and said: “Could you get me a coffee, please?”

Mantraraj says: “Because I was young, I must be the junior guy, he thought, and the white, posh boy must be the senior.”

Although surprised, Mantraraj did as he was asked. “I didn’t mind, and he was the client after all.” But when it was Mantraraj who subsequently started to lead the meeting, the client realised his mistake: “He was absolutely mortified and red-faced.

“What we need is to be prepared for what the world is going to throw at us,” Mantraraj says, adding that QE, precisely because it was “not the easiest place to be in”, had helped him in just that way. “There is a level of grit available there that brings determination – if you choose to have it.”

He remains in contact with a group of fellow OEs, meeting up for weddings and keeping in touch through WhatsApp groups. Secondary school is, he points out, a unique time in most people’s lives – a seven-year period when you are together with a group of people, the make-up of which changes little. “That is not replicated, even at uni. I think it sets you up for the 40-year career ahead of you.”

Mantraraj is not married. “Sometimes balance is very hard to strike. I start my day at my desk at 7am and it will often be back-to-back calls until 7pm, and then doing other things after dinner. I am ambitious and driven, and I have been very lucky in the progress of my career. I work very hard and that comes at a cost. Sometimes I sacrifice things that I think other people would not sacrifice.”

He cites one recent occasion when he had been looking forward to meeting his QE contemporary, Anand Gangadia, a fellow lawyer, for dinner at 6.30pm. “About five minutes before 6.30, I got an email that said: ‘I need this done tonight’. The dinner therefore became a brief walk before Mantraraj had to return to the office. “Because Anand was a lawyer, he was fine about it – we remain close! It’s difficult because sometimes you need to sacrifice, so you need to go into this career with your eyes open. Nothing is as glamorous as people think,” he says, adding that he would encourage aspiring lawyers currently at QE to make sure they get exposure to the reality of the lawyer’s life.

In any spare time, Mantraraj enjoys cooking and seeing friends.

Benjamin Cohen highlighted the significant role that serendipity has played in the successful and very varied career he has enjoyed since he left QE 23 years ago.

In a video conversation with the School’s Student Leadership Team and Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Ambassadors arranged during LGBT+ History Month, Ben (OE 1993–1998) told the story of his high-profile life from the age 15 to 38.

He took in his days as a dotcom millionaire, his emergence as a national newspaper columnist and TV correspondent, through to his current role as CEO of PinkNews – an online newspaper reaching tens of millions around the world which describes itself as “the brand for the global LGBT+ community and the next generation”.

He began by explaining that his time at QE was dogged by illness from when he was 12, around the time of his bar mitzvah. “I got glandular fever…I ended up not ever really recovering. I actually have MS now: it just took a long time to be diagnosed.”

It was because of his illness that he left QE immediately after his GCSEs and went to the Jewish Free School (now JFS) for his A-level studies. “When I was at JFS, I started my first business, right at the time of the internet first being a thing.”

This business was JewishNet.co.uk – “Britain’s first social network before the term was invented” – which offered an agony aunt, dating service, kosher recipes and even a cyber-rabbi. “I think serendipity is really important. I probably would not have started that if I had stayed at QE,” Ben told his audience of current QE pupils, before adding that he was not suggesting they should follow suit and leave!

They were heady days: “I found myself above Prince William in the Sunday Times Rich List – supposedly worth a lot of money.”

He then sold JewishNet and started another business, CyberBritain – “a dot.com darling for a couple of years” – which he ran during his gap year and then while at university. Among other things, it launched a UK-specific search engine powered by its own technology and attempted to establish a service similar to Spotify.

During much of his involvement with CyberBritain, Benjamin was also an undergraduate at King’s College London, where he read Religion, Philosophy and Ethics.

If serependity was behind him going to JFS and starting his first business, it now played a part in another episode in his professional life. “Something really random happened: my then-business owned a lot of assets – domain names – and one of the domain names was itunes.co.uk. We just happened to own it.”

Apple duly sued and this attracted the attraction of the national newspapers. “I was asked by the guy who was reporting on the story for The Times if I wanted to go to their Christmas party and I said, ‘Oh, why not?’”

At the party, he met The Times’ business editor, who asked him to write a column. “Weirdly, at the age of 21, I was writing a weekly column about e-business and technology…for The Times – mostly because the grown-ups didn’t really understand how the internet worked!”

When he then asked to write for the newspaper about LGB issues – as they were then termed – he was turned down, because someone else already had that role. “It was something I wanted to write, so I decided to write it anyway and put it up on the internet: I put it on a website I called PinkNews.co.uk – and everything kind of flowed from there.”

About a year later, while PinkNews was still small, he was asked by Channel 4 if he wanted to become its technology correspondent. An audition with the channel’s Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy went well and Ben duly got the job. “I was 23 – the youngest-ever correspondent on a network news programme.”

For six years, he fulfilled that role alongside his work for PinkNews, which took a leading role in the battles over same-sex marriage – “equal marriage”. With Ben leading this campaign, he eventually felt he should concentrate on it full-time and so he left Channel 4. (From 2010 until 2017, he did, however, do work as a presenter for the BBC, including writing and presenting a critically acclaimed documentary, I was a teenage dot.com millionaire. He is also a longstanding UK trustee and non-executive director of Humanity & Inclusion, a global disability development charity.)

PinkNews has, he says, “grown and grown and grown”. And that growth had actually accelerated during the pandemic. “This time last year, we had 20 people that worked at PinkNews; now it’s over 40….Every month, about 50 million people consume our content,” he said. As well as attracting views through its website, PinkNews gains heavy exposure as the exclusive LGBT content provider on Snapchat, where it has seven channels, on Twitter, where it is the exclusive LGBT video partner, and on other social media channels.

“It has grown into quite a big business. I don’t really have to do any of the writing or anything like that any more because I have a whole team that does that,” he said.

Ben’s video session was recorded so that it can be used by form tutors to stimulate discussion among all year groups as an eQE online resource within QE’s personal development and wellbeing programme.

After his talk, there was a Q&A session when boys asked questions on topics including religion & LGBT rights, barriers still facing LGBT people and national changes in sex education and religious education.

To read more about the Q&A session, read our news report on the visit here.

In 1962, Mike Vanderkelen left behind the warm waters of his native Australia to spend a year in Britain’s chillier climes as a QE pupil.

It was a time of great change, both at the School and in wider British society. Timothy Edwards had succeeded veteran Headmaster E H Jenkins only the year before, and during Mike’s stay in Barnet, he experienced both the last great London smog and the dawning of the Swinging Sixties. Here, Mike records his memorable experience.

“One evening midway through 1961, my father had arrived home from his office in Melbourne with a question that would throw wide open the door to my teenage years. As my sister and I hovered around before the family sat down to the evening meal, Father asked did we want to spend a year living in England?

I don’t think I immediately understood what it might mean to live in another country – let alone go to school there – even though we were regular travellers between Melbourne and the island state of Tasmania to see my mother’s family. [Mike sent the postcard with the view of the School shown here to his grandmother in Tasmania.]

Previous generations of my family had been inveterate global travellers, a process that began after my Belgian great-grandfather had come out to Australia for the Great Exhibition of 1880.

But for my father, who had started his own diamond wholesaling business after the Second World War, to pack up the entire family and budget for the travelling and for a much-reduced family income must have taken some confidence and planning. His was a bold decision.

‘I would like to meet the gem suppliers I have been dealing with in Hatton Garden and see London’s diamond trade first-hand,’ he explained.

Moves across the world are now commonplace for many people, including QE alumni wanting to further their experience and their careers. In 1962, my father must have felt confident that the visit – albeit only for a year – would help grow his business.

Making the journey before international air travel had become commonplace, we disembarked at Tilbury after a five-week sea journey from Melbourne. And within days, we had received a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s inviting my enrolment at the School.

A tall and balding Timothy Edwards, who I thought then was the figure of an archetypal headmaster, accepted my enrolment for 1962. I sat silently in his offices with my parents as he briefed them on the School and its history. [Mike is pictured, top, wearing his QE blazer under an apple tree in what had been an orchard at the Manor Road house where his family lived.]

As a recent arrival in the teenager ranks, my time in England would be one of change. Its first manifestation was when I started to become conscious of the fashion statements of the time. I soon convinced a reluctant mother that a pair of jeans and a duffle coat should be part of my wardrobe.

Heading rapidly towards my 14th birthday and newly attired, I soon stepped proudly into the streets of Barnet.

At Monday morning’s classroom roll call, a balding, sports-jacketed and humorous Mr [Rex] Wingfield singled me out for special attention.

“Vanderkelen,” he said in his distinctly Home Counties accent,” I seen you down de ‘igh Street on the weeken’. Did your mum pour you into those jeans or was they painted on?” he asked, to the mirth of class.

Whether or not I responded did not matter. I had been noticed.

However, with one ‘senior’ teacher, Geography master Sam Cocks, I was noticed for the wrong reasons. I thought it a fair assumption that I should do well in a test on Australian geography – but to my horror, instead of 20 out of 20, Sam Cocks told the class I had one incorrect answer.

‘Where did I go wrong,’ I asked him? ‘Well, boy,’ he bellowed, ‘you did not correctly answer the question which asked where in Australia uranium was mined.’

My answer had been Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory, then a centre of uranium mining. But I was quickly told “no boy, that is not the answer in the book.”

If I learned a lesson, it was not one taken from the 1948 Geography textbook laid out on my desk.

If my classroom efforts at QE were mediocre, so too were my efforts at highland dancing in company with young ladies from Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School. Fortunately, these activities were overshadowed by some prowess in the then-open air School swimming pool and on the cricket field. With a fellow ‘colonial’, Chris Aldons from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), we showed our hosts what warm colonial water did for one’s swimming skills. But we kept hush about any thoughts we may have had about our Ashes-like prowess.

Living in High Barnet we were closer to a more rural England than the metropolis to the south. A short distance from our flat were the lanes and hedgerows that led to the QE rugby fields and, beyond them, a horse-riding school. Equally close was Jack’s Lake in Hadley Wood. The proximity of fields for horse-riding and a lake for fishing were to foster two pastimes I would enjoy on my return to Australia.

Given my ongoing enjoyment of music and an interest in social history, I have always thought that I was in the right place at the right time in 1962. After all, I got advance notice of the musical tsunami that was about to sweep the western world with the arrival of The Beatles, The Stones, The Hollies, The Animals and a myriad of others.  But during my year in Barnet, my ears and eyes were also opened to an earlier era of ‘popular’ music.

It was no doubt at my parents’ recommendation that I walked up to Wood Street, Barnet, and asked for the autograph of someone whose recording career would outlast many of those who made their names in the 1960s and beyond: Dame Vera Lynn was still making the music charts well into her 90s.

As a sheepish 14-year-old kid in a black duffle coat, my photo appeared in the local paper asking for Vera’s autograph. This was one famous lady who was more than a singer. In many ways she had been idolised in Britain for her contribution to war time morale of both service personnel and the public.

And about the same time as I was adding Ms Lynn’s autograph to my book, I was also attending the QE Christmas concert.

Just before our year in the UK was to end, the greater London area suffered its last great smog before clean air legislation and the reduction in the use of coal fires had their full effect.

A wintry outbreak brought snow to the country in mid-December. In the days before the snow began to fall and the roads to ice up, I recall seeing a yellow-ish smog seep in under the front door of our flat in Manor Road.

Opening the door, I could hear the London Transport bus as its diesel engine laboured up the hill outside the house. Peering through the smog as the noise got louder, all I could see was the faint glow of the light on the upper deck as the bus passed by on its way to Barnet town centre.

Parts of southern England had heavy snow on Boxing Day. Barnet and surrounding district was in the grip of the freeze. It was indeed big news just four days before we were to embark at Tilbury for the journey home.

So almost 60 years on, I am now able to answer the question about what it would be like to live overseas and what the QE School experience did for me.

Was QE an élite institution, as several private schools in Australia aspired to be, modelling themselves on well-known English public schools? No, on reflection and despite its long history, QE appeared to be democratic and up to date, remembering, however, that this was a time when there was a real distance between pupil and teacher. It was a distance that I tried to bridge just seven years later when I spent a year teaching at a secondary school in Melbourne.

Vague whispers in the QE corridors that I had come from The Colonies were less concerning than arriving into a class half way through the School year. I was soon to find my classmates were ahead of me in several subjects.

Since school is as much about socialising as it is about academic achievement, I began to fit in. I then continued exchanging letters (remember them?) with former classmates until the late 1960s. Our opinions about the latest releases across several musical genres were an important regular topic.

Apart from this mutual passion for music detailed in every letter, my most regular correspondent Geoff made references to the cricketing fortunes of our respective nations, wrote that the School pool would eventually be covered, that there was an Australian was on the QE staff teaching Latin and the UK was contemplating entering the Common Market.

But as tertiary studies, careers, relationships, sporting and cultural interests on either side of the world diluted our memories of QE, the exchange of letters ended.

Before we embarked for England an unnamed friend or family member – I never found out who –had recommended that my sister and I be sent to boarding schools in Australia for the year while my parents made the trip.

My father, an insightful man, said: ‘No, the experience, including school, will broaden their education.’

And, you know, I think he was right.”

• After returning to Australia Mike obtained an arts degree from Melbourne University and a commission in the Australian Artillery Reserve. In 1971 he secured a position as a journalist on the small team which launched the first business newspaper in Australia to serve the computer and information industries. This foundation paved the way for him to launch a B2B consultancy providing advice and services to global technology companies, including names such as Hewlett Packard and SAP and numerous Australasian software and hardware providers over more than 40 years. During his career he lived and worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland, before returning to his home state of Victoria. Today he lives in its second biggest city, Geelong, and thinks the concept of ‘retirement’ is an onerous one, so remains busy helping build and restore wooden boats in a local community group, cultivating a large vegetable garden, enjoying food and wine (from the Geelong region’s many fine vineyards) and music. He also likes to get away to Tasmania’s central highland lakes to fly-fish for trout.

After gaining a Master’s in Engineering and qualifying as a Chartered Management Accountant, Zeeshan Khalid has forged a career in international consultancy – with a distinctly forward-looking slant.

Zeeshan (OE 1996–1998) is a Partner with a boutique consulting firm, Trestle Group, and is the only member of its seven-strong management team currently based in London.

Along with several of his Trestle Group colleagues, he is involved with Fourth-IR (‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’), a firm established in 2016, which harnesses new technologies including AI to help clients transform their businesses. A recent example is its partnership with a large dental-imaging software provider, where AI is used to provide augmented diagnosis, precision treatment and a better overall patient experience.

“Reflecting on my career, I would advise my fellow Elizabethans not to just follow a traditional career path, but to look at the diversity of your learning, as this is what will help differentiate yourself and open more doors,” he said.

“Life presents many opportunities; sometimes one is unable to realise that a challenge or a setback may in fact turn into an opportunity. Always make use of the opportunities given to you and leave the rest to God.”

After leaving QE, Zeeshan went to Imperial College, where he gained a Master’s degree in Information Systems Engineering.

He then spent seven years with UBS, working across finance, risk and IT departments for the Swiss financial giant, before working for RBS Global Banking & Markets and then Credit Suisse. In total, he notched up more than 16 years’ experience at top-tier investment banks, working in both London and Zurich.

In 2007–2009, he undertook his training with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and then in 2011, he established Atlas Accounting, a niche accountancy business for contractors and consultants.

Over the years he has held a variety of senior roles, covering risk management, regulatory change, capital optimisation, risk analytics, finance transformation, programme management and enterprise-wide global IT delivery.

His work with Trestle Group involves him driving business growth and building teams for consulting projects on key accounts with leading global investment banks. Active projects include transformation programmes relating to Brexit and industry-wide Basel regulations, such as the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB).

At Fourth-IR, he is the UK Country Head. The firm offers clients a range of Virtual Team members, which are AI-driven products designed to be easily integrated into clients’ business operations. Fourth-IR works across multiple industries, including health, wealth, risk and legal, collaborating with product specialists, such as the dental-imaging software business.

Zeeshan has fond memories of his time at QE, in particular, of the then-Head of Sixth Form, Dr John Marincowitz (who became Headmaster in 1999), and his Mathematics teacher, Mrs Elizabeth Borland.

“Even though I was a new joiner to QE, I was able to establish new relationships with many of those who entered the Sixth Form from the lower years. I still vividly remember all the younger-year pupils carrying brief cases to School and the Elizabethan luncheons & debates.”

Outside work commitments, Zeeshan has been a long-standing primary school governor. Keen on the outdoors, he supports his local scouting association as treasurer.

“2020 has been a strange year, but an important one in re-setting goals and priorities,” he said. “It has made me realise the importance of focusing on friends and family, how to better manage the tricky balance between work and life (I follow the motto: ‘we work to live, not live to work’), and lastly not to take free movement & international travel for granted.

“For those wishing to get in touch, please contact me via LinkedIn; I am happy to help with any career advice or questions current pupils or alumni of QE may have,” he added.

After a spring and summer spent largely in lockdown, I am pleased to report that this Autumn Term has felt much more normal.

The majority of School life has taken place, albeit often in adapted form. Not only have our classrooms once again reverberated softly to the sounds of teaching and learning, but there has also been a welcome return to those in-person extra-curricular activities which could be run within our year-group bubbles. Alongside this, cross-bubble activities have taken place online, including our much-valued peer-mentoring system.

I do not underestimate the magnitude of the changes many have had to contend with. To name just two examples among many, our University Mock Interview Evening and our Year 11 Careers Convention at the School both had to be cancelled. I, therefore, greatly appreciated the willingness of alumni such as Zac Howlett-Davies (2006–2013) and Karan Dewnani (2006–2013) to support senior boys by giving online interviews and speaking at our virtual careers event respectively. Overall, however, I can say that we have been fortunate in terms of the number of incidences of Covid-19 within the School. It has certainly been difficult at times, but I am thankful that we have not faced really significant disruption.

I was naturally delighted to read the highly laudatory report on Queen Elizabeth’s School published recently by the Good Schools Guide. The guide’s Kate Hilpern began her research during lockdown and then visited us in October. Her final report commented on how we had “flexed quickly and well” to the challenge of Covid-19 and had “learned from it, too” in areas extending beyond the classroom, including pastoral care.

That process has continued throughout the Autumn Term. The intelligent use of technology has enabled much more day-to-day normality. For those needing to isolate at home it has also enabled them to participate in their lessons.

We have seen some bold initiatives within the scope of the current restrictions. Our Year 9 Drama Club members rose magnificently to the challenge of staging an abridged version of Hamlet for this year’s Shakespeare Schools Festival. Music, too, has adjusted well to the current dispensation, deploying web broadcasting and live-streaming to ensure that the term’s concerts reached as wide an audience as possible.

The Good Schools Guide mentioned our “intellectual approach to Art”, noting the breadth of the forms and materials used, such as animation, installation, sculpture, and painting. While sports fixtures with other schools have not been possible, the PE department have been ensuring boys stay match-fit, organising intra-year group games and tournaments in rugby and water polo, for example.

Our new, pupil-led initiative, Perspective, continues to have an impact. We were pleased to welcome Jamie Sherman (OE 2002–2009) and Arjun Goswami (OE 2001–2008) on International Men’s Day, when they spoke about their experiences as members of the LGBTQ+ community in an event that combined an actual meeting with senior prefects with live-streaming into Year 9–13 tutor rooms. During Black History Month, Ifeanyi Chinweze (OE 2008-2015), recorded films for older and younger boys. recounting discriminatory comments against him as a teenager and telling the junior pupils: “It’s important to understand that racism is not limited to hate crimes or acts of violence.” Our forthcoming curriculum review will incorporate themes of combatting racial bias.

In spite of all the new pandemic-related restrictions, the term got off to a very cheerful start as we continued to celebrate the GCSE and A-level grades awarded to our boys during August. All the things we were hoping for in the summer were realised. At GCSE, a shining performance at the very top, with 61% of all grades being at level 9, helped propel us towards what were ostensibly our best-ever results. It was a similar story at A-level, where our leavers achieved 99.6% A*–B grades, as well as a 9.3% increase to 54.6% in the number of A-levels awarded an A* grade; both figures represent a School record. Given the cancellation of public examinations in 2020, comparing these awarded grades with previous years’ results is difficult. But they are, by any measure, remarkable statistics, and I fully appreciate what an extraordinary amount of time and effort from our whole Elizabethan community stands behind them. They are a vindication of our emphasis on free-thinking scholarship. As the Good Schools Guide put it in their summing-up: “[QE is] a place where boys can expect to get carried away with the collective will to learn both in and outside the classroom, the result of which is one of the most inspiring learning environments we’ve ever come across.”

The end of term sees the retirement of Deputy Head Emi Aghdiran. Emi joined QE in 1998 and has made an outstanding contribution over many years.  She was the School’s first Business Manager and also our first female Assistant Head, before her promotion to Deputy. Dynamic and visionary, yet with attention to detail, she has been a significant factor in the School’s present success. On a personal note, I have found her hugely supportive and a pleasure to work with. Happily, she is by no means quitting the Elizabethan community entirely: she will remain a trustee of the School and of the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s. I wish her a happy retirement.

Work on our keenly awaited Music School continues apace. The foundation works have largely been completed, and the erecting of the steel frame is scheduled to start this week. We remain on track for completion in time for the autumn of 2021.

I also eagerly anticipate the publication of our exciting new School Development Plan, covering the period 2021–2025, which was approved by the Governors last month. We look forward to launching it.

May I conclude by saying how impressed I have been at the resilience and good humour shown by so many in our Elizabethan family in the face of the unprecedented crisis which 2020 has brought us. For that, I thank you.

I extend my best wishes to all alumni for a peaceful Christmas holiday and for health and happiness in the New Year.

Neil Enright
Headmaster

After seven years in a senior role for the global advertising agency behind Nike’s ‘Just do it’ tagline, US-based Nilesh Ashra is now blazing a trail with his own innovation consultancy. 

Named in Ad Age’s 40 under 40 list in 2016, he has been profiled in the print edition of Fast Company, the influential American business magazine. He is a high-profile speaker who has appeared at events including SXSW (the annual conglomeration of jointly organised film, interactive media and music festivals and conferences in Texas), Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and numerous other conferences. And he has won several industry accolades, a winner of Webby, Cannes, Fast Company and D&AD (Design & Art Direction) awards.  

Nilesh (OE 1995–2002) launched his consultancy, Pragmatic Futurism, in January last year. “My consulting work involves helping companies face the future of technology, work, and business,” he says. “We give our clients new ideas, new strategies; we create prototypes, and redesign their internal processes – all to help them face the future in a more optimistic way.” 

His interest in technology was apparent early – he started coding at the age of 11 – and after QE, he took a degree in Artificial Intelligence at UMIST (now part of the University of Manchester).  

On graduating, Nilesh says he was “interested in working in a ‘non-traditional’ technology space. That led me to a digital creative studio called Poke, in London.” 

In his four-and-a-half years with Poke, there was, he says, “barely a corner of modern, open-source-stack web development that I didn’t have the opportunity to work on. 

“From there, I was headhunted by the iconic Wieden+Kennedy.” Not only had W+K famously produced Just do it for Nike, they also created all of Nike’s TV commercials.  

He began his seven years with W+K, based in Portland, Oregon, as Creative Technology Lead and was later promoted to Director of Creative Technology. In creative industry circles, Nilesh is best known as the founder of W+K Lodge – the agency’s technology-focused division. One example of the Lodge’s work was the 2017 launch of Nike’s new retail experience that combined video-game-style motion capture and projection mapping to reduce the time needed to customise shoe graphics from eight weeks to less than two hours. This was short enough for it to be done on demand and in-store.  

“My professional obsession has been the profound and positive impact that emerging technology can have on culture and on businesses alike. After many years in the spotlight at W+K, I am now committed to my young family, and to humbly helping my clients thrive in their careers.” 

Nilesh is married and has one daughter aged six months and another who is four. “I have found myself very settled in Portland. It is mostly a liberal, relaxed, and positive community of creative people. 

“I’m an avid surfer, and have surfed all over the world,” he adds. 

Frankie Vu (OE) has secured a role as a presenter of the iconic children’s television show, HOW, while also enjoying a new job with Facebook, working in virtual reality.

ITV have revived the educational programme, with Frankie (Francis) among the team of four presenters. HOW originally ran from 1966 to 1981 and was then re-launched in 1990 as How 2.

“I have very fond memories of the children’s television I grew up with in the 90s and 00s, and a handful of those shows were memorable enough that they still find their way into nostalgic conversations with my peers,” said Frankie (OE 2000–2008). “How 2 was one of those shows, and when I received the news that I would be part of the new presenting line-up, it took weeks to really process the heritage that I would be contributing to.

“Before the audition process, I was unaware that How had been a successful series from the 1960s through to the 80s, and that How 2 had run for a further 16 years from 1990 to 2006. So to be a part of such an iconic format, and to be reviving a show with so much history, is a real honour.”

Produced by Terrific Television, the new series is being shown on CITV and simulcast on ITV; it is also available on ITV Hub. The team also includes veteran HOW presenter Fred Dinenage MBE, who has been a TV presenter for 56 years and was a presenter on both the original series and How 2.

Frankie, a freelance presenter who has worked for broadcasters including the Disney Channel and CBBC, has also been working for Facebook since the start of this year.

“I work in virtual reality (VR) for Facebook ‘by day’. I’ve juggled this with presenting by using annual leave days to film, as and when necessary.

“After spending the best part of ten years messing around in front of cameras, I decided to get a ‘proper’ job, where I spend my days in the virtual world, desperately avoiding the perils and responsibilities of real life. Jokes aside, VR is a rapidly growing part of the tech industry, and over the past few years, I’ve witnessed huge development in the capabilities of the hardware, as well as the current and potential uses of VR.”

Beyond its most obvious application in gaming, VR is now also being used for fitness, surgical training, sports rehabilitation, corporate meetings and tourism, amongst other industries, Frankie points out. “My own role involves overseeing the training and development of Product Experience Specialists, who are tasked with delivering memorable first-time VR experiences, both in-person and now remotely.

“Managing my schedule has been challenging at times, but the gratitude I feel for being able to do what I love massively outweighs any negativity.”

On leaving QE, Frankie studied English Language & Communication at King’s College London. After attending a talk on careers in the media in his final year, he was invited to screen-test for Disney, and secured his first TV contract at the end of the summer.

A sports enthusiast – he won the UK football freestyle championship while still at QE in 2006 – he was a host for the fencing and taekwondo events at the London Olympics and for the wheelchair fencing at the 2012 Paralympic Games, as well as for other live sporting events, including rugby, football and NFL.

“If I could glean any lessons from my own journey, and from this year in general, I would say that we can never know what lies ahead, so it doesn’t serve any purpose to worry too much about the distant future.

“My advice would be to focus on what you love doing, work hard – and don’t give up. Many of us will spend 50 years of our lives in the world of work, so it’s worth trying to figure out what really motivates you – and if that changes somewhere down the line, that’s fine too. The job I’m doing at Facebook didn’t exist a few years ago, and when I was at QE, I had no idea I’d be presenting TV shows – so focus on the things you can control and everything else will fall into place.”

Frankie adds: “I’m still in regular (socially distanced) contact with lots of friends from QE, and I live within walking distance of two my closest friends from Underne house, Robert Michel and Anil Douglas.”

• Frankie can be reached at:
  Instagram: @frankiepresents
  Twitter: @theFrankieVu

For any QE sixth-formers frustrated and perplexed because they haven’t yet got a career path all mapped out, Kushal Savla has a few words of encouragement.

“My advice is: just follow your passion in terms of choosing your uni course, and you’ll figure the rest out later.

“I think especially at QE you almost expect yourself to know what you want to do with your career before you even finish your A-Levels. But it took me two years after graduating to figure out what I want to do – and I couldn’t be happier with my decision!”

Today Kushal (OE 2005–2012) is a London-based Senior Sales Operations Associate with Diligent Corporation, a US multinational that provides a secure software platform used by the boards of companies and other organisations for collaborating and sharing information. “What does that fancy job title mean? I’m a data analyst who works with sales and commercial teams. I build data models, analyse our sales and marketing data, and build reports and dashboards for our leadership teams.”

After leaving QE, Kushal studied Economics with German at the University of Nottingham, where he gained a Distinction for his spoken German. He was a student on the European Union’s Erasmus scheme and spent his Erasmus year working at Bosch in Stuttgart, Germany. “It sounds like a cliché, but at the time it really was the best year of my life. I was fully immersed in a whole new culture, I made new friends who I am still in contact with, and, of course, the Erasmus grant meant I was able to enjoy the entire year travelling around Germany and Europe.”

Even after graduating, he still had no idea what career path he wanted to follow. “All I knew was that keeping up and maintaining my German was really important to me. After searching and searching, the main roles on offer were in sales, so I thought I’d try it out to see if I liked it.”

This job, which he took up in September 2016, was with his current employer, Diligent. “I really enjoyed using my German every day on the phone and I was also promoted to Team Leader. But in my heart, I knew that in the long term it wasn’t for me, and I wanted to do something more data and numbers-oriented.”

Diligent later took over a German competitor in Munich. “I almost landed a position as a data analyst there, but that fell through. Then I looked back at my company, started talking to the right people – and after a few months got that perfect position I was after.

“I feel very fortunate and lucky to be in the position I am. Things have fallen into place now and I am learning a lot on the job. There is also lots of opportunity to travel to the US, which is something I really appreciate. (Of course, this was all pre-Covid.)”

He still uses German in his job. Like his fellow Nottingham alumnus, Tony Norman (also featured in this issue of Alumni News) Kushal, has been in touch this term with QE’s Head of Languages, Nora Schlatte. And he points out that none of this – getting a job he loves, with all the perks and opportunities for travel that it provides – would have happened had he not studied German. “Learning language is still dear to me: I used it as an entry point into my career and it has guided so much of that career to date!”

• Kushal is pictured: top, in New York; above right, with friends in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin, and, above left, at the Munich Oktoberfest.

In retrospect, Jamie Wolfson’s move to a different company and a new sector could hardly have come at a more difficult time.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging worldwide, he found himself having to get to grips with his new job entirely online, liaising from Hong Kong across international time zones with colleagues he had never met.

“I joined in March in the midst of Covid, working from home – and Hong Kong apartments are very small; ours is 650 sq ft – and we had a two-year-old baby, too. The first three or four months were challenging, to say the least.

“I had to be quite resilient during that period, as most people did. The last three or four months have been more enjoyable. We are back in the office.”

Jamie (OE 1999–2006) had moved from Ernst & Young to global insurance provider Chubb, with a role as IFRS17 Project Lead for Chubb Life, a life insurer with operations in 23 countries. IFRS17 is, he explains, an international financial reporting standard that needs to be implemented by 2023, predominantly by larger insurers, representing quite a major change for them. “I am working mainly with the global Chief Financial Officer, and also the Chief Information Officer.”

“Before I took this role, my background was more digital transformation, across the insurance value chain working with the c-suite [executive-level managers within a company, such as the CEO, CFO etc].

“I had been at EY for my whole career. Having been a graduate entering one of the Big Four, when it came to my ninth year, I felt like I was in a bit of a bubble. I just thought I needed a fresh challenge – I was in my comfort zone. I also wanted to build up some more insurance-specific experience, and had previously worked with Chubb as a client.

“You have always got to challenge yourself, because then you will keep learning, and there are already things I have learned here. In this day and age, no one can afford to stop trying to push themselves and ‘upskill’ themselves because the environment keeps changing so quickly. It’s important to push yourself out of your comfort zone.”

He adds that with his senior-level contacts at EY, returning there in the future remains a possibility, if he wishes.

Jamie met his wife, Maria, when they were both on the EY graduate scheme in August 2011. “We worked together for three-and-a-half years in London and then in Hong Kong. We moved in January 2015, and the time has flown by. I cannot really understand where the last six years have gone.

“We are very happy here. We don’t have plans to leave anytime soon,” he says, adding that after seven years, they will have the right to permanent residence, meaning they could live and work in Hong Kong without needing a work visa.

He plays 11-a-side football with the Hong Kong Football Club, which involves Tuesday night training and games on Sundays, and contributes to a lively social life. Jamie is trying to get back into tennis and also plays golf, although access to the latter in Hong Kong is difficult.

He has, of course, reflected on the implications of the democracy protests in Hong Kong. These were at their peak for a few months last year.

“Although I was never caught up in it, there were a lot of protests and occasions when the police fired tear gas; it was a strange period to say the least. How the western media portrayed it made it appear worse than it was though – picking up videos of extreme cases. For a lot of people here, I don’t think our lives have been impacted too much. On the odd occasion, we had to work from home.

“One rally last year got over 1m people [but] since May or June this year, with the new national security law, the protests have completely gone, completely subsided. It’s really quelled any dissidence to the government, to be honest, rightly or wrongly.”

There is also the commercial aspect of relations with mainland China to be considered. “In the life insurance industry, we are talking about how we do more business with China. Chubb has a joint venture there and recently took a larger stake. People are not under any illusion: China will become a key headline to profitability, so people are embracing that fact.”

But Jamie says that he does, of course, talk about “basic rights” with his friends and says that if he saw his “day-to-day life changing for the worse”, he would then consider if he had a future in Hong Kong.

Jamie maintains strong friendships with people from his year group, including Anand Dattani, Nick Wallis, Sam Murray, Sam Granger, Dominic St George, Kumar Hindocha and Neil Yogananther. His first cousin, Mark Wolfson, is also an Elizabethan who lives in Hong Kong. “My closest friends are still my mates from the School. They all came to my wedding.

“I have really happy memories of School and I look back at it very fondly.” He especially enjoyed the Sixth Form, relishing the opportunities to spend his days studying subjects he had chosen and the fact that “the teachers didn’t treat us like kids anymore – because we weren’t”.

Among the happy memories are Geography field trips to Swanage in Dorset and “the 18-hour coach trip” to the town of Mende in Languedoc, France.

Jamie, who went on to read Geography at Nottingham, follows Headmaster Neil Enright on LinkedIn, who, he says, taught him Geography for two or three years. “It’s made me quite happy to see how he has risen in the School, but also it’s pleasing to see how well the School has done even since I left: it fills me with a lot of pride.”

Circumstances permitting, he hopes his young son, Isaac, will in a few years’ time follow in his footsteps and become an Elizabethan himself.

And does Jamie have any advice for younger Elizabethans entering their careers? “When I started at EY, I was convinced I wanted to stay and become a Partner and have some sort of global leadership role.

“I am still very ambitious, but I think my priorities, what makes me happy, have changed. They are now more focused on doing something I enjoy and am passionate about and that allows me to spend time with the family and doing sport. Money and titles – for me, that’s not what is important.

He adds: “If you can find a passion, it’s less like work, and you put in more time and more effort, which will likely be more successful. Looking back myself, I think the key is about finding that passion – and you may have do a few different things first before you find it.”