Museum Trustees

Chairman

Lance Batchelor

Lance Batchelor is the Chairman of several UK-based technology and services businesses. Prior to this he was CEO of a number of well-known companies including: Tesco Mobile, Domino’s Pizza plc and Saga Cruises. Earlier in his career he served in senior marketing roles for P&G in Cincinnati, and was then head of marketing for Amazon.com in Seattle. He holds a Harvard MBA.

Lance is the lead external director on the Royal Navy’s board. He served as a submariner in the Cold War and now holds the honorary rank of Captain RN.

Lance previously spent eight years as a trustee of the National Gallery, where he was also the Chairman of the National Gallery Company. He is a keen student of history, having recently completed an undergraduate certificate history course at Cambridge University. He is an Elder Brother of Trinity House, an RYA Ocean Yachtmaster, and a keen sailor.

Professor Clare Anderson

Clare Anderson is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the history of empires, including the history of punishment and forced labour mobility. She has special interests in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean regions, and is the author of numerous articles and six books, including Subaltern Lives and Convicts: A Global History.

Professor Anderson has served on the British Academy’s South Asia panel and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grants Assessment Panel C, including as Vice-Chair. She has been awarded research grants totalling over £3m, including from the European Research Council, ESRC, AHRC, and British Academy, and has held doctoral partnership awards to work with PhD students in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum, Howard League for Penal Reform, and Salvation Army International Heritage Centre.

Dr Fiona Butcher

Dr Fiona Butcher is the General Counsel and Company Secretary of Trinity College London, an international awarding organisation and educational charity. Before moving in-house, she worked in the fields of EU and competition law, regulation and compliance at a magic circle firm and at three regulators, including as the Legal Director of Ofwat. She holds law degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Dr Butcher has a keen interest in art history and holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialised in Modern British Art and wrote her doctorate on British landscape painting in the early Cold War period. In addition, she has worked in the Interpretation Department at Tate Britain and contributed to various art publications.

Dr Helen Czerski

Helen Czerski is an Associate Professor at University College London, and also a broadcaster and writer. Her research topic is the physics of breaking waves and bubbles in the open ocean, and how these bubbles influence the transfer of gases between the atmosphere and the ocean. She has spent months working on research ships in the Antarctic, the Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Arctic, and is an experienced field scientist.

Since 2011 Helen has presented a wide range of science documentaries for the BBC on the physics of everyday life, atmospheric and ocean science. Her books and science columns reach an international audience.  Helen is passionate about the blue of our blue planet, and as a writer, speaker and performer strives to share a broader perspective on what the ocean itself is, and how this watery engine matters for our planet.  She received the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for her work on communicating physics to a wider audience. Helen is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association and was one of the 2020 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers.

Sir Stephen Deuchar

Stephen Deuchar’s career in UK arts and museums began at the National Maritime Museum in 1985 when he was appointed Curator of Paintings after completing a PhD in the History of Art at the University of London. Later roles in his 13 subsequent years at Greenwich included his organisation of the major Armada (1988) and Titanic (1994) exhibitions and directorship of the Neptune Court Project, prior to his becoming founding Director of the Tate Gallery of British Art (later Tate Britain) from 1998 to 2010, shaping its new role on the national and international stage.

From 2010-20 he was Director of the Art Fund, the national charity for art, doubling its membership through the introduction of the National Art Pass and leading a significant expansion of its grants programme, especially in support of curatorial innovation across the UK museums sector. In parallel, the Art Fund ran a number of successful public appeals to help secure important works of art for the nation including the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo Saxon treasure for the West Midlands, the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I for Greenwich, and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage for Creative Folkestone. He was appointed CBE in 2010 for services to the arts, and was knighted in 2021. He was made an Honorary Commodore of the NMM in 2016.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell

Julian Dowdeswell is a glaciologist, working on the form and flow of glaciers and ice caps and their response to climate change, and the links between former ice sheets and the marine geological record, using a variety of satellite, airborne and shipborne geophysical tools. In a career of over 30 years, he has taught in the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bristol and Cambridge. Since 2002, he has been Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, including its Polar Museum, and Professor of Physical Geography in Cambridge University, and is Brian Buckley Fellow in Polar Science at Jesus College. He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by Cambridge University in 2016.

Julian graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and studied for a Master’s Degree at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in the University of Colorado and for a Ph.D. in the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. He has worked, on the ice and from aircraft, in Antarctica and many parts of the Arctic, including Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland and the Russian and Canadian Arctic archipelagos. He has also undertaken many periods of work on icebreaking research vessels in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, in the fjords and on the continental shelves of Svalbard and Greenland, and around Antarctica. He has also represented the UK on the councils of both the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and is a past chair of the UK National Committee on Antarctic Research.

Murdoch MacLennan

Murdoch MacLennan has held a series of senior leadership roles within the British and European newspaper sector, representing the industry on several international media bodies, including as President of IFRA, the global technical association for newspapers, Vice-President of the World Association of Newspapers and twice Chair of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

Murdoch chairs PA Media Group, Mediahuis Ireland (part of Belgium’s Mediahuis NV Group) and the Scottish Professional Football League. He also sits on the Board of the Competition Markets Authority and chairs their UK’s Office for the Internal Market Panel.

He was CEO of the Telegraph Media Group from 2004-2017 and thereafter served as Deputy Chairman and subsequently as member of the board until 2019. An honorary professor at The University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, he is Vice-President and Appeals Chairman of the Newspaper Press Fund, President of the NewstrAid Benevolent Fund and sits on the board of the SPFL Charitable Trust.

Alastair Marsh

Alastair Marsh stepped down as Group Chief Executive Officer of Lloyd’s Register Group on 31 December 2020 after 13 years, having been both Group CFO and Group CEO during this time.  

Lloyd’s Register supports over 60,000 clients to minimise risk and optimise the performance of their assets and processes across a range of sectors centred upon critical infrastructure including oil and gas, nuclear, low-carbon, chemicals, manufacturing and food. Safety and risk are at the heart of the Group, which began as Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, a marine classification company, and continues to be one of the four key global providers of this service.

Alastair is a qualified Chartered Accountant and prior to joining LR, worked for Price Waterhouse before holding a number of senior financial management positions within the high-tech manufacturing, chemicals, software and ICT sectors.

He is a member of the Global Maritime Forum Advisory Council, the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, and is a Younger Brother of Trinity House.

William Nye

William Nye is the Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council and the General Synod of the Church of England. From 2011 to 2015 he was Principal Private Secretary to TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall. Previously, he was a civil servant in various roles in HM Treasury, the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, specialising in national security.

Professor Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson is Chair of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College. He is Co-Director of the Oxford Global History Centre. He was previously the Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council where he worked closely with many of the UK’s leading museums, galleries, libraries and archives, securing significant new funding to promote the use of digital technology to create a unified national collection. He was awarded a CBE in 2021 for services to research.

Andrew is Vice Chairman of RMG Trustees.