for its sporting excellence. “This gave him
a great deal of confidence,” said Lancelot
Clark, “and he generally had wide interests.” He was head boy and had an interest
in drama, later producing a play for the
Edinburgh Festival.
It was a teacher at Millfield who
encouraged Clark to apply for the Morehead.
“I hadn’t been to the U.S. at all before
my interview at Chapel Hill, and I fell in
love with it,” said Clark, talking over
lunch in a gastropub near his London
office on Bermondsey Street, fittingly
located opposite the site of a former tannery. “I was a young man, it was April,
everything was in bloom, and there were
all these pretty Southern belles — it was
like I’d died and gone to heaven. I was
with some very bright people, and my
lasting memories are of sitting on the
porch on one of those balmy evenings
with my best friends — it couldn’t have
been more idyllic.”
At Chapel Hill, Clark continued to act
and play rugby. He even coached the
women’s rugby team, with Jeff Pike. But
more important to Clark was the Students
4 Students International organization he
and Pike founded. Pike, now an orthopedic surgeon, recalls: “I don’t think I’ve
ever worked more effectively with someone to get a project off the ground. Galahad’s a unique individual with a unique
upbringing and saw the world through
very different eyes than most students.”
David Moricca ’ 98, whom Clark
recruited to be part of Students 4 Students, remembers: “You immediately got a
sense from him that he thought about
changing the world. He didn’t believe in
limitations and had big dreams about
improving the world and society. There
are plenty of people who have that freedom but choose not to use it in the same
way.” Although the program moved for
political reasons from Zimbabwe, it is
thriving today in other African countries,
and Clark hopes it soon will return to
where it started.
Also at Chapel Hill, Clark discovered
his passion for China, one sparked by professors Judith Farquhar, a medical anthropologist now at the University of Chicago,
who taught him in Beijing in 1997; and
Sydney Rittenberg ’ 41, author of The
Man Who Stayed Behind, an account of his
