The College community is deeply saddened to announce the passing on Friday 14 March of our alumnus, friend and Benefactor Fellow, Dr Edward Powell.
Eddie, as he was almost universally known, matriculated at Churchill in 1967 to read Natural Sciences (chemistry). He then did his PhD (inorganic chemistry), also at Churchill. He got involved in rowing early on and coxed for most of the time he was a student, including during his PhD years, coxing the May boat in 71 and 72. He also trialed for the University boat and coached many generations of Churchill rowers, including those from the first intake of women in 1972.
After completing his PhD, Eddie trained in London with KPMG to be an accountant. In 1974, Canon Noel Duckworth married him and Ruth (whom he had met whilst studying – she was at Homerton) in the Chapel.
Moving out of the accountancy profession in 1978, he spent two years in Frankfurt, followed by eight years as finance director of a Marconi company subsidiary of Arnold Weinstock’s GEC, and then 10 years as group finance director of a light engineering group based in Havant. In 2000 he joined a small (6 people) start-up in Cambridge (Abcam), giving him and Ruth the opportunity to return to Cambridge. The two entrepreneurs who founded the company were brilliant and Abcam grew rapidly, such that Eddie had the intense experience of leading its floatation on the London AIM stock market.
Eddie retired in 2007 and continued to be involved in several start-up companies in Cambridge, as well as the Cambridge rowing community: upon returning to Cambridge he joined Rob Roy boat club, and he often coached the College boats. In 2012 he became Chief Financial Officer and Director of Cambridge Nutraceuticals Ltd. The company develops and markets supplements to prevent cardiovascular disease, and those promoting joint health.
Eddie and his wife Ruth jointly contributed to the 50@50 campaign with his daughter Christine (who was also a student at Churchill, matriculating in 1998) and named a room on the ground floor of Cowan Court.
In 2011 he established the Palestinian Studentship at Churchill, as well as donating large sums to the College’s general endowment. He also regularly supported Churchill College Boat Club financially, as well as by giving up his time to coach. Eddie always enjoyed meeting the recipients of the Palestinian Studentship funding and members of the current Boat Club, often forming long-lasting friendships with them.
He also enjoyed speaking to students during the College’s annual telethon, and generously provided funds that matched other alumni donations. He was also incredibly generous with his time, serving on both the audit and the finance committees of the College for over a decade. He very much appreciated being back in Cambridge, as he was able to cycle everywhere, which he often did, and he kept up sculling until after the pandemic. He was a regular at College events, including the Roskill lecture and Association events, and will be very much missed by all of us here who knew him.
He is survived by his widow Ruth, his two daughters Rachel and Christine, and his grandchildren.
He became a Benefactor fellow of the College in 2019.
Tribute to Dr Edward Powell A Curriculum of Presence By We’am Hamdan
I return to a moment from my childhood, a speech written for me by my teacher, meant to be read at a graduation ceremony in a nearby Christian village.
The military blockade had forced our schools to shut down so we gathered elsewhere, carrying the weight of disrupted education and uncertain futures.
I was twelve. I stood behind the wooden podium at the church (Jifna Parish – St. Joseph Church), reading words still carved in my memory.
“Between the destroyed home and the road covered in dust, every Palestinian must find a way to cling to life. Knowledge is our path, and understanding is our goal. We bear witness before the whole world that we are students of truth.”
I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of my life as a witness; the first time I spoke publicly about survival and learning in the same breath.
And I think of it now because, in some quiet way, Eddie helped me continue that same speech.
When I think of Eddie, I don’t first think of ideas, though he had many.
I think of presence: the calm, alert way he listened, as if he was always learning from the person in front of him.
I did not know him long enough to claim understanding, but I knew him enough to feel his sincerity.
He met people without pretence or performance.
A brief conversation with him could feel like a moment of clarity, not because he imposed certainty, but because he made space for honesty.
As a Palestinian at Churchill College, I’ve often felt the friction between history and hope. Eddie recognised that tension immediately. He never treated it as abstraction. He wanted to understand what it meant to live inside it.
He spoke about Palestine with care. Not as a distant conflict, but as a place of people and stories that mattered to him. His care was not sentiment. It was knowledge, the kind that comes from listening and staying engaged even when it’s uncomfortable.
He once told me about visiting Bethlehem University and meeting so many Palestinian women full of ambition and resolve. That moment stayed with him. And perhaps it explains the quiet force behind the Palestinian Studentship he created here at Churchill – the one that made it possible for me to study.
His generosity was not an abstract virtue. It was recognition, an act of belief in the endurance of knowledge and in the dignity of those who seek it.
I often think about what remains of a person after they’re gone.
For us Palestinians, death is not distant; it lives beside us.
We measure life not by its length but by what endures: gestures of care, fragments of memory that refuse to disappear. Eddie’s generosity was one of those gestures. It was an insistence on life, on continuity, on learning when the world forgets how to listen.
My own work has led me to places where knowledge itself is under siege. A few months ago, in Jerusalem, I watched a play called Artificial Heart. On stage, a man is reprogrammed again and again, and each time the system tries to erase him, memory returns as a tent, a wound, or a childhood song. The protagonist’s silence was dense with meaning. The play asked not whether a machine can think, but what kind of consciousness refuses deletion.
I thought then of Eddie: how he, too, resisted the erasure that indifference brings. His generosity was an act of remembering, of keeping alive the idea that knowledge can still do good in the world.
That night I also thought of another loss. The Palestinian theatre-maker Adel al-Tartir, known as Abu al-Ajab, the father of a dear friend of mine, who built wooden storytelling boxes he called Sandouq el-Ajab – “boxes of wonder.”
Each box held a fragment of memory, performed for the community, by the community. He believed storytelling could heal what violence tries to destroy.
Eddie and Abu al-Ajab never met, yet their lives speak to each other. One built boxes of wonder in theatre; the other built them in people. Both believed that life is not linear, and that it loops through the lives we touch, the stories we nurture, the kindness we leave behind.
Earlier this year I published my first academic work titled Empty Chairs, a piece of writing shaped by Edward Said’s call to bear witness; to insist on the human story where power prefers silence. And I realised that Eddie’s life belongs to that idea too. What I called a curriculum of testimony is not taught in classrooms; it is rather lived through example. It says that to teach is to care, to listen, to accompany someone in their becoming. Eddie did that. He turned generosity into pedagogy.
What remains of him now is not absence, but continuation: the students he believed in, the knowledge he made possible, the quiet insistence that education is still a moral act.
He understood that giving is not only a transaction of resources but a commitment to the world we want to build together.
He gave because he believed that knowledge could make us more human, and that access to it should never depend on circumstance.
His generosity was not charity; it was conscience.
To Ruth, to Rachel and Christine, and to everyone who loved him:
I can’t claim to have known him deeply, but I felt what he stood for – the integrity of kindness, the courage of attention, the quiet solidarity that asks for nothing except that we see each other clearly.
Eddie once gave me a chance. Everything I have done since – the research, the writing, the teaching – carries a trace of that gesture.
That, I think, is what it means to live on in others.
In the end, what remains of any of us are the stories told in our absence,
the ways we helped someone continue when they might have stopped.
That is Eddie’s story.
And today, by remembering him, we become part of his curriculum –
a curriculum of presence, generosity, and care.