The RCN Student Council comprises Representatives from each House, ‘Aspect Workers’ who sit on the Standing Committees, a UWC RCN Board Representative, a Communications Representative and the Chair.  The Student Council (SC) holds meetings every week-end, House Reps meet each week, and the Committees meet monthly, as does the SC with the Education Management team. Student Council is clearly a demanding EAC, requiring considerable commitment to student welfare across all aspects of life at RCN. This outgoing year group has worked with many development initiatives, successfully concluding, for instance, proposals to join the Norwegian Student Youth Council, to introduce a lock system in the Houses to enhance students’ security and expand and to develop the Extra Academic programme – in the process, becoming familiar with the challenges of negotiating diverse value-laden issues and recognising the different perspectives of the many College constituents (including student, staff, management, Board, National Committees and parents, and Council).

The outgoing SC has worked hard over the course of the year and taken time, over the past month, to train the incoming SC. A barbecue was held by the Education Management Team on Sunday 19th April to thank them for their important contribution to this academic year – and we wish them the best for their exams and beyond.

Ever since his days at Atlantic College, Marius Hauge (AC 1967-9) has been serving “spiffing refreshments” as he called them. Whether it be at the sea-front down by the Bristol Channel or in the Dining Hall at AC, Marius would create a happy atmosphere to any event, big or small. Marius as a grown man was a UWC enthusiast known for crossing the Skagerrak (a strait running between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) in a dinghy to benefit UWC, and then attempting to cross the North Sea in the same little wooden dinghy, for the same worthy cause. His mother would not have approved (I doubt if Camilla, his life-long companion ever approved), and Desmond Hoare, the Admiral and Founding Headmaster of Atlantic College perhaps was lucky no longer to be alive.

Marius was one of the five children of Jens Christian Hauge, the Head of the Norwegian Resistance (‘Mil Org’), after the war a Member of the Government and, as a lawyer – forever an eminence grise in Norwegian society. He died only a few years ago, and Marius had been translating some of his books. They both came much closer to each other at the end of their lives, but having divorced parents was, I am sure, not easy for Marius, and like many others at that time, perhaps found AC to be a good place to get away from it all. I am only guessing, but many others guessed that, and he was evidently very happy at Atlantic College.

Later in life Marius was always a bit of a Bohemian, training at the London School of Economics and with an office in the Norwegian Embassy in Belgrave Square as Fisheries Attaché, but an artist at heart. He had so many large paintings in his top floor Embassy room that rumours were that he was given an ultimatum to choose beween art and diplomacy. For many years after Marius worked as a sculptor in a cellar in Oslo, making heavy stuff from iron plates and stone.

Marius was a good friend, and to me especially important because of his enthusiasm and backing of the Nordic UWC project. He never failed in relentless belief and support. He was a true pioneer in this, taking part in the very first meetings at Norefjell back in the early 1970-ies, what one day in 1995 became the Red Cross Nordic United World College. In Camilla he had a wonderful life partner, and my thoughts go to her and to Marius` lasting memory.

Tom Gresvig
Honorary member of UWC RCN’s Council