Bathsheba ffoulkes

Dame Bathsheba "Baz" ffoulkes, DBE, is the current Secretary and Steward of Aldergate University. She's also the oldest living pal of the great Adrian Ward, and is responsible for his return to Aldergate. To her the credit, to her the blame.

Early years
Baz was Born in Leeds, wasn’t she? Or Hull? Her parents are Welsh, but they live in London. At least they used to – back in the lean days she used to have them up quite often to take the BOWfAX crew to dinner. Nice people, father was a big something-or-other with British Rail. Mother sat on boards of things. No siblings.

Not much else is known about the ffoulkes family history, except that Baz once mentioned that her granddad died in WWI. It's easy to imagine a sepia-toned Baz, captain’s pips upon her cuffs, strolling briskly across no man’s land with her baton tucked crisply under her arm. Utterly unflappable, even when one ought to be flapping like mad.

Life at Aldergate
Baz was … sixteenish, perhaps, when she got her invitation to Old Carroll? Anyhow, she was seventeen when her path first crossed that of AW. Baz the Brilliant Busybody, hardest-working programmer in the School of Difference Engineering. For all her exceptional talents in comprehending and managing complex systems, her real superpower was an inhuman ability to keep plugging away at the most deadly dull tasks for days on end - with occasional breaks to microwave another Pot Noodle and flirt awkwardly with Neek.

Not so much an innovator, perhaps, as a dynamo powering the machinery of innovation. Out of all the Founders she probably generated the fewest of those cataclysmic brainwaves that illuminated the PULL sign on whatever door they’d spent the last hundred hours shoving against - but she was always the first to re-roll her sleeves and start tugging.

Post-BOWfAX
When the Hobson Mews fire blew up BOWfAX it sent the surviving Founders flying all across the globe. Only Baz stayed on at Aldergate. And stayed, and stayed. Published a few papers on procedural systems interfacing, then wrote an automated script that politely refused the ensuing hailstorm of obscenely lucrative offers of employment. Man doth not live by code alone, however, so eventually she took a part-time job in the Bursary. Administration agreed with her, and now she’s the engine that keeps the University chugging along.

Not quite sure when she officially received the title of Secretary and Steward of the University. She accepted her damehood in absentia - coming to New York to recruit the 51st Vice-Chancellor may have been the first time she'd left Aldergate since she arrived.