End of an Era

Every week, the Bulletin features a vertiginous variety of articles published on the Portsmouth Point blog by PGS pupils. And this week is no different. We also hope you enjoy the latest issue of Portsmouth Point magazine, coming home with pupils today, which explores science, history, politics, medicine, war, literature, music, film, technology, philosophy and baseball.

The magazine theme is 'Era'. And for the editor, James Burkinshaw, it represents the end of an era, as he steps down from a role he describes as “one of the great privileges of my professional career, working alongside the hundreds of intellectually curious and creative pupils who have served on the Portsmouth Point editorial team over the past 12 years with a shared commitment to freedom of thought and open debate. 750 magazine articles, 5,300 blog articles and 1.5 million page views later, I hand over to the new editor, Dan Frampton, who I know will bring Portsmouth Point into an exciting new era, including a new site for the blog starting in September.”

Below, PGS Archivist John Sadden interviews James Burkinshaw about his 12 years in the role of Portsmouth Point editor:

When you took on the editorship of the magazine from Julian Elphick-Smith, what new ideas did you bring? I introduced the idea of having a theme for every issue of the magazine, each one chosen by the pupils on our editorial team. I think this thematic approach has given the pupils collective ownership of each issue and allowed for a more cohesive experience for the reader. It has also offered a frame through which to view our era. Many are indicative of pupils’ sense of living in transformative times (Change, Destinations, Progress, Revolution, Exploration, Chaos). In a decade of great cultural and technological change, there seems to be a fascination with the relationship between past, present and future (Lost and Found, Inspiration, Interwoven, Time, Re- and Era) and an interest in values and beliefs that transcend time and place (Icon, Belief, Dreams and Reality, Truth, Heroes and Villains, Human Rights). There has also been regular reflection on how we perceive and represent a world of such complexity and diversity (Perspective, Fight Club, Mirror, Perception, Alien, Colour). 

How do you order the magazine articles? I try to sequence them so that there is a clear segue from one article to the next, allowing them to enter into dialogue with one another. Hopefully, this encourages the reader to look for points of intersection and connection between the articles, lending more coherence and depth to their reading experience. I think that is part of the value of reading a printed magazine in contrast to the more impressionistic and sometimes disorienting experience of scrolling/clicking online. Philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that the more an account is compressed (for example, in a Tweet or 2-minute news bulletin), the more it seems that what is being discussed deserves no more space than it has been allocated. A key aim of Portsmouth Point magazine is to allow readers the space and time complex issues deserve.   

Which is your favourite themed edition and why? It’s difficult to say, because they have all been so enjoyable to edit and have all included writing of such quality.  ‘Icon’ was the first issue in which I collaborated with the fantastic designer Clara Feltham (in Autumn 2012); it was very rewarding working with her at the studio to help develop a completely new look for the magazine. I have been very lucky that Clara’s successor, Andy Sanders, has proven to be another gifted and dedicated designer. He designed the ‘Interwoven’ issue, which is a theme I love: the idea of the cultural world as a web or network (just like the natural world), with endless interplay between eras, environments, ideas, perspectives and texts. That sense of intertextuality, of articles in dialogue with each other, is what I have tried to achieve in each issue of the magazine.   

The magazine has had some "iconic" covers. Which is your favourite? There have been so many striking covers, almost all of them designed by pupils. One of my favourites is the ‘Revolution’ cover, which was a lot of fun to do, with the pupils re-enacting and parodying Delacroix’s iconic painting, ‘Liberty Leading the People’. For the ‘Inspiration’ cover, our dedicated photographer had to undertake 120 30-second exposures to achieve a stunning image that appears to show all of the stars in the night sky rotating around a church spire. This issue is also notable for featuring some striking satirical cartoons by PGS pupils, as did the ‘Alien’ issue, which boasts a memorable cover photo that portrays someone levitating above a lake. I have been very lucky to have worked closely with our Head of Photography, Oliver Stone, over the past decade, a gifted photographer himself, responsible for several superb cover images, and someone who has inspired so many pupils to produce creative and technically accomplished photographs over the years, which have added so much to the magazine (and blog) in terms of style and content. Oliver was responsible for another of my favourite covers, for the ‘Interwoven’ issue, in which two images taken in the Quad 113 years apart (1909 and 2022) were merged to reflect the relationship between past and present in a memorable and moving way.   

You were also responsible for creating the blog. How does it differ from the magazine in terms of content and style? I felt that we needed more than a biannual magazine. I wanted pupils to have a daily forum so that they could discuss what was happening in the world as it happened. So, I launched the blog in February 2012; I remain indebted to Daniel Rollins, a Year 11 pupil at the time, who designed it so brilliantly and promoted it so enthusiastically. Our first blog article was an evaluation of the philosophy of the Ancient Greek scientist, Thales, taking us back two and a half millennia. Our second article was a review of Emeli Sande’s debut album, Our Version of Events, which had only been released the day before. So, from the very beginning, the blog embraced the historic and the contemporary, the scientific and the artistic. 

I will admit to being stunned at how quickly the blog took off. We rocketed from 4 articles in February (our first month) to 45 in March. There was a genuine buzz about it, as pupils enthusiastically seized the opportunity to explore and discuss issues as they were happening. The March 2012 articles included a live-blog of George Osborne’s Austerity budget, coverage of the racist killing of Trayvon Martin in the USA, articles about war crimes in Syria and Afghanistan and the parliamentary ‘cash for questions’ scandal in the UK, so there was a huge level of political engagement. At the same time, we had wonderful articles on maths equations as a form of art, reviews of poetry, novels, music and film and a profile of the ‘hacktivism’ movement. I remember that, such was the initial enthusiasm during that first year that pupils continued writing (and I continued publishing) throughout the summer holidays, on everything from the London Olympics to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

Over the years, have you become aware of any changes in the sort of subjects chosen by pupils to write about? The last 12 years have been particularly dramatic ones, so I am pleased that, day after day, month after month, year after year, our pupils have been able to use Portsmouth Point blog as a vantage point from which to record it all: Black Lives Matter, Brexit, Syria, the Higgs-Boson ‘God Particle’, the growing geo-political significance of China, the Climate Crisis, Afghanistan, the Me Too movement, Artificial Intelligence, LGBTQ, the rise of authoritarianism (from Trump to Modi), COVID, Ukraine, social media, CRISPR and Gaza, just to cite some of the transformative events that have taken place. Of course, during these times of environmental, political, social, cultural, economic, scientific and technological upheaval, our editors have continued to write about so many other things besides: sharing recipes, reviews, poems, short stories and photographs; exploring history, literature, art, philosophy, drama, religion, psychology, fashion, food, music, tech, film and TV. From 2012 to 2016, the number of articles averaged an impressive 450 per year, and in 2016 we received our 500,000th page view. From 2017-2019, numbers of articles steadied to an average of 350 per year. Then COVID hit. 

Suddenly, there was no doubt to anyone that we were living through history. One of my most rewarding experiences during the first Lockdown, John, was working with you, in your capacity as School Archivist, on a special commemorative magazine, ‘We Are PGS’, recording the response of the school community to the pandemic, with contributions from people across the globe, from Japan to the United States. It was wonderful to have articles by pupils, staff, parents, grandparents and alumni, each with a different take: artistic, environmental, medical, historic, personal, political, philosophical and social. There was such a sense of togetherness, in spite of and because of the isolation and distancing. 

During the pandemic, Portsmouth Point blog published an unprecedented number of articles and reached new heights in terms of readership. Pupils wrote 83 in May 2020 alone. By the end of 2020, we had published 545 articles in one year, easily beating our previous annual record of 485 (in 2013). And page views soared: we hit our millionth view in January 2021. There was a real energy to the blog in that period. It provided an invaluable forum through which members of our community could share their experiences and their reflections during a time that encouraged all of us to re-evaluate our priorities and our values. The blog formed a very productive partnership with Lit Soc, run by Bryony Hart, platforming weekly recorded lectures on cultural issues that attracted extraordinary numbers of pupils. I was also pleased that we were able to publish, as always, a summer magazine (the theme was ‘Mirror’, appropriately enough during such a reflective period) and that we were even able to launch it at our usual Summer Garden Party: most participants were remote, joining from their own gardens with the traditional strawberries, cream and Schloer, that sun-soaked afternoon, but a few Year 12s were in school, so they had a socially distanced celebration in the Neil Blewett Memorial Garden.    

One of the regular features on the blog during that first Lockdown was the photography shared by PGS Marshal Tony Hicks, who (courtesy of his drone) gave us those of us stuck at home panoramic aerial images of PGS and its environs. I particularly remember a photograph of the Solent looking a tropical blue-green, one of the consequences of the decline in pollution during the pandemic. I should note, of course, that Tony’s spectacular photography has been a mainstay of the blog since 2012 - beautiful images of flowers and wildlife, photographs celebrating Portsmouth’s history and traditions, particularly relating to the Navy, and so many artistic pictures of the school itself, in sunshine and snow, in the early dawn and the late evening. Tony’s photographs by themselves provide an evocative record of the past decade or more. 

Among other colleagues, I am of course grateful to Julian Elphick-Smith, not only for launching the magazine 15 years ago but for giving it such a resonant title. Portsmouth Point is an artful allusion to a part of the city just a few hundred yards from PGS, where, in the early eighteenth century, at the time the school was founded, coffee house culture thrived: places where the dissemination of news and exchange of ideas helped shape our modern media culture. Among the many staff contributors to the magazine over the years, the most prolific have undoubtedly been Mark Richardson, who wrote with wisdom and wit on music and literature in a distinctive voice that invariably left you convinced that Mark was sitting right there talking enthusiastically to you, and Tom McCarthy, who wrote on art, literature and history with such scholarship and elegance, each article as intricately crafted as a piece of eighteenth-century clockwork, every phrase as exquisite as a mediaeval illumination. You yourself, John, have also been a long-standing contributor to Portsmouth Point, ranging from an appreciation of the Clash (‘Anarchist to Archivist’) to a commemoration of those who took part in the D Day landings to an explanation of why Extinction Rebellion gives you hope for the future. I have always really loved your writing style, its blend of the erudite, elegiac and ironic.     

One PGS Head referred to Portsmouth Point as “the Jewel in the Crown”. Is there an article that you are particularly proud of having published? I have been grateful for the strong support for the publication by David Wickes, Anne Cotton and James Priory. I do think that Portsmouth Point represents something very precious, something that only increases in value. I would not want to single out a specific article; there have been so many that I have felt it a privilege to publish. I have just been proud to provide, through blog and magazine, two platforms that have enabled pupils to discuss complex and sometimes contested issues with intellectual curiosity and honesty. It has been reassuring that there continues to be an appetite for writing and reading what is now called ‘long-form writing’. As Marcel Proust noted a century ago, in an age of similar technological upheaval, good writing is not a luxury: “Style has nothing to do with embellishment, it’s a quality of vision”.

Were there any articles that you have not been able to publish? Of over 5,300 articles that have been sent to me for publication on the blog, and 750 for publication in the magazine, there has only been one that I have felt unable to publish in any form. On occasion, I need to discuss an article with a writer before I feel able to go ahead with publication, but this always takes the form of dialogue, with the aim that the writer will find their own way to address the issue without compromising their article. One thing that I am always mindful of is that, as a school publication, we are part of a community and that respect and consideration towards each other as individuals is an important dimension of free speech. One of the more disturbing aspects of social media is the way in which the medium itself seems designed to encourage a binary, tribal, antagonistic approach to issues that has the potential to be dehumanising and dangerous. 

The worst kind of censorship is self-censorship. Discuss. Understandably, people worry that what they write online is open to (mis)interpretation by others, and sometimes this can lead people to avoid topics that might be viewed as controversial. Recently, governments, even in some Western democracies have introduced restrictions on free speech, such as the right to protest (from environmental protests in the UK to Gaza-driven protesters on US campuses). So, it is all-the-more admirable that so many PGS pupils remain strongly engaged with political and social issues. I have always been struck by (and colleagues have remarked upon) the sheer volume of articles written by our pupils on a weekly basis, over and above their academic studies and other commitments. Every single article is a voluntary, self-willed act, with no reward or incentive other than the fact of publication itself. Each new editorial team has brought fresh energy and enthusiasm to Portsmouth Point every year, reflected in so many of the promotional videos editors have put together to recruit new members: always inventive, usually satirical, often anarchic, reflective of their sense of the blog as a fearless and free-spirited student publication.

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