Notes
Ged Martin (see References) offers this brief biography: ‘James Shaw, an Etonian from a Yorkshire coal-owning family, entered Magdalene as far back as 1886. A veteran of the south African War, he was 48 when he was killed in 1916. Robert Harvey, who had come up to Magdalene in 1891, founded an elite private school in Victoria, British Columbia in 1901. In his early forties when war broke out, he might have honourably left the fighting to younger men. 'I cannot tell you how sorry I am to go away without seeing you all again,' he wrote in an open letter to his pupils on 21 August 1914, explaining that 'my reason for offering to go to the front was not to win honour for myself, but because I felt it was the only honourable thing to do whether I was sent to the war or not.' He was captured during the second battle of Ypres in April 1915, and died soon after of wounds in a German prison camp.'