Staff and teaching

The tutor team was the largest ever, with a superb lineup of new and old staff.

Olivia Strudwick joined us as my assistant and performed the role with consummate reliability, panache, and total unflappability. Pete Donnelly and Laura Warren once again brilliantly performed the assistant director roles (academic and student welfare respectively), dealing with any and all issues arising with individual students to keep me free to focus on the overall running of Camp.

Please visit the website under ‘our courses’ for details on what we offer. Once again, we had a vast array of groups: complete beginners who used either the Nick Oulton or John Taylor coursebooks, covered all the essential grammar of current GCSE specifications, and sat an actual past language paper at the end; GCSE students who mainly focused on readers and other selections of the finest extant Roman literature reading more widely than they would have time for in school; and A-Level students reading rather more demanding and ‘left field’ texts (this year including Seneca’s Thyestes and Apocolocyntosis, Suetonius’ Nero and Petronius’ Satyricon) that they are highly unlikely to have met before, to provide themselves with that edge for high-end university applications.

I remain delighted that Camp keeps supporting people about to embark upon a PGCE or who are indeed already working in a school without much Latin teaching experience, whether through a bespoke group for teachers or an adult class of complete beginners. I am very grateful to Classics for All for the funding they provide to enable teachers at or about to join state schools to attend.

We are also now providing the opportunity for people who have just completed the beginners’ course to immediately capitalise on what they have acquired and work with us towards a proper Latin GCSE. At highly competitive rates, we are offering a once-weekly online session with an experienced Camp beginners’ tutor from September throughout the school year revising all the key GCSE grammar covered at Camp and working through the set texts, with the realistic view to having exam-ready candidates for May.

The grammar clinics were expanded back in 2023 to the six extensive series of sessions which are each on offer on a near-daily basis:

• • Drop-in clinics for beginners to consolidate their learning from the past few lessons.

• • GCSE-level clinics for less experienced students who have not yet embarked on their A Levels or the equivalent.

• • Advanced-level clinics for those who have.

• • ‘Beyond Advanced’ clinic to stretch the most advanced students with some of the trickier, more niche grammatical concepts.

• • Seminars led by tutors with topics of particular interest to them; for example, this year we had sessions on food in literature, verse composition, the borders of an empire sine fine, and an introduction to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

• • ‘Teach meet’ sessions – though these were primarily intended for the tutors to meet and informally discuss and share good practice, there was also the opportunity for the student-teachers to draw on their knowledge and expertise.

This all represents a huge commitment of time and preparation and would not have been possible if were I not blessed with such a hardworking high-quality team of tutors.

Lectures, trips, and events

Our aim with the lectures is to provide a range of both ‘mainstream’ talks on texts the current students might be studying at school and talks of wider and more general interest. Anthony Bowen once again delivered his ‘Sound of Latin’ and Costas Panayotakis returned to us with ‘Bread and Circuses – Spectacles and Imperial Image’. Alison Cooley provided a very useful and well-timed ‘Encounter with Inscriptions’ with special focus on the inscriptions in the Yorkshire Museum the evening before we went to look at them for ourselves! Llew Morgan gave a fascinating and thought-provoking left-field offering with ‘A Latin Epic Written in 1890 and How a Classicist Sets About Making Sense of It’. New to Camp this summer, Dr. Andrew Sillett and Prof. Judith Mossman both gave excellent presentations on ‘Pro Roscio, Murder at the Bathhouse’ and ‘Plutarch on the Romans’ respectively (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Our own JSST chair, Judith Mossman, exciting us on Plutarch’s accounting of the Romans.

We also for the first (and certainly not the last) time had Legio VI, a Roman living history and re-enactment group based in York named after the legion which was posted in the area from mid first Century AD. We split into four smaller groups and they talked to each about Roman military drill and tactics, weapons and armour, daily life in a Roman camp, and some aspects of civilian life, helping people experience what life was like in Roman Britain. Each session culminated in the students being able to come up and handle the various replica material they had brought (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Student trying on some of Legio VI’s equipment.

Harrogate is close enough to Hadrian’s Wall to enable a day trip on the middle Sunday and more than 100 Campers signed up. I remain very grateful to Pete for leading this trip with a team of seven committed tutors. The group began with the 2-hour walk from Steel Rigg to Housesteads, the Roman auxiliary fort; there they were met by our local guides who showed them round before taking the group to the fort at Vindolanda as well as the Roman Army Museum (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

A tough old hike up to the top of Hadrian’s wall, but well worth it.

On the second Wednesday, the entirety of Latin Camp went to York (Eboracum to the Romans). As well as free time to enjoy that beautiful city, we had pre-booked visits to a combination of Roman and non-Roman venues. Much of the legionary fortress is unviewable, buried under modern York, but we were able to view a military bathhouse and our very own Pete led each of the eight groups around some of the outside parts of York to learn about how the modern city corresponds to the ancient Roman site which had itself evolved over roughly 400 years.

The ground floor of the Yorkshire Museum consists almost entirely of Roman exhibits. Most interesting among them are probably the Ivory Bangle Lady (skeleton of a very high-status woman from Eboracum c. 4th century AD found with considerable jewellery and other valuables), and there is also a bust of Constantine the Great, declared Emperor in Eboracum itself in 306AD. We were very fortunate to have been able to arrange guided tours for each group with the museum staff. In addition, we visited the Jorvik Centre, containing lifelike mannequins and life-size dioramas depicting Viking life in the city through which the viewer is guided through in small carriages (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

A tutor and student discussing the various finds in the Yorkshire Museum.

Other events included a quiz night early into Camp, giving the students another opportunity to break the ice and meet people outside of their teaching groups. We ran various ‘best picture’ competitions and there were lots of superb selfies in Harrogate and shots of the Roman sites on both trips. I was also delighted to welcome back the Hellenic Bookservice who did excellent business as usual!

Two new drama initiatives have both worked very well this year. First, we had an internal declamatio competition run by tutor Dan who selected a passage for each of three categories – beginners, intermediate and advanced – and provided coaching sessions over the fortnight before a panel of judges selected the winners. Congratulations to Si Cockling (beginners), Divi Mittal (intermediate) and Christian Sanders (advanced.) Also run by Dan was a performance of a short play in Latin, damnatio memoriae (a Roman take on cancel culture!) – written by Florence Golding, a former Camper still at school; this was performed in front of our entire community on the final night before the main staff play and party (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

The proud winners of the 2026 declamationes!

And of course Latin Camp would not be Latin Camp without the staff play and party on the last night. After the Damnatio Memoriae plays, students were ‘treated’ to the staff’s version of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (adapting A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) before launching into our classical costume party. Winners this year included Aeneas, Ascanius, and Anchises (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Excited students gathering before the start of the last night party.

Acknowledgement and thanks

This year, I awarded £29,240 in bursaries for 39 free or subsidised places; it is very important to us that we make the summer school as accessible as possible, and the sponsorship we are given allows us to provide places to those who would not otherwise be able to come. I would like to thank the Classical Association, the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, the Craven Committee (University of Oxford), the Jowett Copyright Trustees, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Classics for All.

The 47th JACT Latin Summer School will run from Sunday 18th July to Saturday 31st July 2027, again at Harrogate Ladies College, now renamed Duchy College. The website www.latincamp.co.uk continues to be the key source of information and contains a very simple online application form. If you have any general questions at all after reading this, please do get in touch with me on director.latincamp@gmail.com. Once more, my warmest thanks to all the staff who have served Camp so well this year and in many cases for several years before. It really would not matter how well or badly I ran the show were the quality of staff who give up holiday time not so consistently high (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

The 2026 staff team.