Fourth Cambridge student found dead in one term after 'suicide jump' at Beachy Head

The body of a Cambridge student has been found at a notorious suicide spot – the fourth undergraduate from the university to die in a month.

The body of Tess Maddock, 21, was recovered from the sea beneath cliffs at Beachy Head, East Sussex, where she is feared to have committed suicide.

Students have been offered counselling after the string of tragedies, which the university said yesterday were not connected.

'Brilliant': Tess Maddock was expected to gain a first-class degree at Cambridge

Miss Maddock, a keen hockey player, was described as a ‘brilliant’ student. She had been expected to win a first class degree in theology from Jesus College when she graduated next year.

But she was unable to return to the university to start the final year of her degree in September, and tutors said she was absent because of ill health.

She was seen falling from the 500ft cliffs at Beachy Head on October 30. Her funeral was held in Bristol on Monday.

A month earlier medical student Mingwei Tan, 20, died in a horrific accident when she was knocked down by a bus and dragged underneath it for up to a mile.

Miss Tan, president of the university’s karate club, was struck by a double decker night bus as she left the Royal Free Hospital in North London on September 30.

Four days later university rower George Starling, 19, was found dead in his student flat in Cambridge. He was a close friend of Miss Tan, from Singapore, who had been his ‘college mother’, or mentor, at Peterhouse College.

Promising theology student Tess Maddock fell from Beachy Head in what is believed to have been a suicide.

The second-year engineering student was still mourning the death of his mother five months earlier. His father, Lieutenant Colonel John Starling, said he believed Miss Tan’s death had ‘tipped him over the edge’.

Then on October 11, Bulgarian-born law student Pavel Kantchev, 22, was found dead in his room at Girton College.



Police are not ­treating the deaths as suspicious, although inquests will be held.



A Cambridge University spokesman said: ‘These are entirely unconnected, individual cases. Each one is a tragedy.’

The notorious East Sussex suicide spot of Beachy Head

Dr Stephen Siklos, senior tutor at Jesus College – Prince Edward’s former college – led the tributes to Miss Maddock.

He said: ‘Tess was a brilliant theology student who had gained a starred first in her first-year exams.

‘She also played hockey for the college and for the university women’s second team. Sadly, she had been unable to return to college this term due to ill health.



'Tess had many friends and will be much missed. The thoughts of everyone here are with Tess’s family at this time.’

Her parents, retired rugby coach Harry Maddock, 70, and his wife Catherine, 56, were said to be ‘devastated’ by her death.

Miss Maddock’s brother Ewan, 23, graduated from Oxford last year.



They had both attended Bristol Grammar School and Miss Maddock played hockey for Avon County’s under-17s team.

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