Viewing archives for Alumni Newsletter

Andrew Kettenis’ work as a digital experience consultant can be both diverse and sometimes high-profile: recent projects have included working on the UK’s vaccine roll-out and providing support for an AI-powered automatic ship, the Mayflower.

And the ship’s purpose – gathering data about the oceans for scientists looking at climate change, pollution and marine conservation – points to an area of focus for Andrew, namely sustainability.

After four years with IBM, he is currently transitioning to a new job as a UX (User Experience) designer with a leading London agency – “exactly what I enjoy doing”.

And yet Andrew (OE 2003–2010) acknowledges that his professional life today is very different from the career he expected when he was at School. “When I look back at my subjects for A-level, the two I focused on myself were Maths and Economics, but when I look at what I use, it’s Design. I use the principles I learned in it every single day, yet it felt at the time like a bit of a rogue one!” (Andrew also pays tribute to the support of Ian Clift, his Design Technology teacher.)

After leaving School in 2010, he went to study at Birmingham. “At university, I did International Relations, with Economics ‘on the side’.  In normal QE fashion, I was intending to focus more on the Economics and how that might relate to finance, but I actually enjoyed the politics side more, especially the sociology.

“My whole career view changed quite a bit, taking on a more human-centric focus, particularly with regard to sociology and how technology relates to that.”

Reflecting on all this, Andrew has his own advice for current QE pupils: “Follow the things you love, and lean into the things you love and that you find special or unique about yourself.” Unless boys are set on a very specifically vocational degree, they should choose a university subject simply because they find it interesting, he says.

After completing an MA at Birmingham in International Law, Philosophy and Politics in 2014, Andrew worked for a few months as a technical specialist for Apple. He then headed off to Osaka in Japan, where he spent 16 months as an English language teacher.

“I loved it. It was one of the hardest, but also by far the best, two years of my life,” he says, adding that he was speaking Japanese at conversational level within six months and learned many transferable skills. At QE, he had been a keen member of the robotics club. That experience now came into its own: “I brought a lot of that to my classes, using technology as a medium. I took a very tech-centric approach to my lessons.”

It is an approach which he has followed in his subsequent career. “Technology is an effective tool for social change and is pretty central to any social or entrepreneurial mechanism.”

He worked briefly for specialist IT training consultancy Optimum Technology Transfer – “a really good job” – and then went to IBM in 2017.

“IBM is where I found essentially what I will be doing for the foreseeable future – product and service design.”

Among the projects he has enjoyed most recently has been his work on the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project. “What the Mayflower essentially is, is an AI-powered automatic ship that has been developed by ProMare, a marine research and exploration company, in partnership with IBM. It incredibly important for our sustainable future to understand how our planet is changing. It’s really cool!”

Andrew’s side of the work has been to help design the people-facing digital products that will be used by scientists and by the wider public.

The ship has already been launched and is due to go on its first mission in a few weeks, sailing from Plymouth in the UK to Plymouth in Massachusetts – hence its name, recalling another pioneering venture, that of the Pilgrim Fathers, who established the first permanent settler colony in New England after arriving at Plymouth Rock aboard their own Mayflower in 1620.

He has also been involved in some of the UK vaccination work, re-designing the experience from a service user’s perspective, so that it works better and reduces waste, looking not at apps or the website, but at the general experience being offered.

“UX design is about what the end-to-end journey looks like,” says Andrew, who adds that his aspiration is to cultivate his skills “for a wider societal impact”.

He has developed a specialism in the sustainability of supply chains and products. He has, for example, just finished working with an automotive company to help them with their thinking about the future – “the big stuff, envisioning exactly how they will provide energy and mobility to people – how energy and electric vehicles tie into our future”.

Andrew, who is based in London, helps a number of mindfulness charities on a pro bono basis. He has worked with Dose of Nature, a charity promoting the benefits of engaging with the natural world which “does some really good work in mental health”.

He is encouraged by the ethical approach of many of his fellow OEs: “They are an upstanding bunch of human beings – just really good people, whatever path they have gone down, which I think is super-encouraging.”

A music-lover and media enthusiast, Andrew also enjoys gaming in his spare time. To find out more about Andrew’s projects and interests, visit his website.

 

Anhad Arora’s continuing studies at Oxford combine his love of Music with his passion for German.

After leaving QE with straight A*s in Music, German, French and English Literature A-levels, Anhad (OE 2009–2016) read Music at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First.

He moved on to a Master’s thesis looking at elements of orientalism in Robert Schumann’s Myrthen song cycle, op.25 (‘Myrthen’ means ‘myrtle’, the flowering evergreen shrub native to the Middle East). “My Master’s in Musicology was completed with Distinction just down the road at St Cross College, where I was funded by the Humanities Division of Oxford University,” he says.

After recently delivering a paper in German to the Henrich Heine Gesellschaft on Schumann’s interpretation of the orientalist flower in the work, Anhad won the Düsseldorf literary and artistic society’s prize for best lecture. Parts of his thesis are set to be published in the 2021 issue of the Heine-Jahrbuch, the society’s annual publication.

And Anhad is now delving deeply into German literature for his interdisciplinary doctorate (DPhil) project, which similarly investigates orientalism in nineteenth-century German song.

He has made good use of his time since the beginning of lockdown, with professor of Medieval German at Oxford Henrike Lähnemann giving him a crash course in German Romantic literature. This is helping him grapple with works including Goethe’s West–östlicher Divan, which Schumann and “all the big-hitting Lied composers” drew upon. These studies are supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Clarendon Fund, underwritten by Merton College.

With Prof Lähnemann, he runs a blog, called Lieder Spiel, and a YouTube channel “for fun”.

Anhad says he has “enjoyed balancing a busy performing career on early keyboards with academic research” and “hopes to continue researching and performing in equal measure”.

“As an undergraduate, I was one of two répétiteur scholars for New Chamber Opera, a professional opera company based in Oxford. With their support, I put on two fully staged operas (Haydn’s Lo Speziale and Handel’s Xerxes) and assisted on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. We took Lo Speziale to the British Embassy in Paris in November 2019 for a one-off concert performance, which was good fun.”

“During my undergraduate years I was also the director of the university’s premier Early Music ensemble, the Bate Players, and was (and still am) the principal keyboard player of the Oxford Bach Soloists, who are performing all of the Bach’s cantatas in chronological order.

“I didn’t do much apart from music – and drinking! But I was drafted in somehow to act in French-language play, Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale, the success of which is better left to speculation.”

He stays in touch with a number of friends from School. “Particular shout-outs to Thomas Archbold, who is pursuing a PhD at King’s College London in Computer Science, and Youssef Zitoun, who is flourishing as a corporate analyst in London.

“I’m also in contact with members of the Barbershop group: Simon Purdy is enjoying a varied, freelance career as a violinist and Kavi Pau as a hybrid consultant-musician. Kavi has recently started The Third Culture Collective, a collaborative music group.” Anhad says he is looking forward to seeing how Kavi’s work develops.

Anhad enjoys cooking – “when I can be bothered” – and reading satirical newspapers. “I’ve always had a soft spot for irreverence – ask any of my former teachers at QE!”

 

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.