Mr Levine is a director of Severfield-Reeve the engineering group

Mr Levine is a director of Severfield-Reeve, the engineering group.Ask Central, the restaurant chain run by the Kaye family (of Golden Egg and Garfunkels fame) held at 200p after producing its second cash call in five months. The group has opened 20 restaurants since floating in September, 1995, and is due to launch another three It is raising pounds 5.3m on a one-for-five ration at 160p Last year's placing pulled in pounds 1.25m at 100p. The shares have been down to 58.5p.Freeport Leisure, running out-of-town shopping facilities, gained 11.5p to 136.5p. Some pointed to the MEPC\C&G Clark factory shops deal as offering a new basis for pricing Freeport; their calculation came to a remarkable 600p a share.Taking Stockr Watermark, a marketing specialist, jumped 6p to a 34p peak following profits of pounds 653,000 against a pounds 60,000 loss.

Stockbroker Durlacher calculates pounds 1m will be pulled in this year. But it is ignoring any possible contribution from a deal to manage the Miss World Contest, the old Eric Morley parade which is being held in the Seychelles in November and still has a big world-wide following. Miss World came in for heavy criticism in this country but John Caulcutt, Watermark's chairman, said: "It will be presented in a different and refreshing way compared with what went before." The shares were floated at 13p.Maid, the on-line information group, should make profits of pounds 10.1m this year and pounds 17.7m next Merrill Lynch says buy The shares are 234.5p.. Robert Aitken was a great Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University and a man of culture and kindness who contributed greatly to scholarship, to medicine and to academic life in this and other countries. He was born in 1901 at Wyndham, 25 miles from the southernmost tip of South Island, New Zealand. His father, a native of Glasgow, was a minister and was moved later to the remote East Coast region in the North Island. It was a hard country in those days with a scattered population and few roads; families usually had to ride across country to visit neighbours.

It was at the school in Gisborne that Aitken first met Margaret Kane (Madge) later, in 1929, to become his wife. He qualified in medicine in 1923 at Otago University College, Dunedin, and after junior posts was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. Two years later he joined the Medical Professorial Unit at the London Hospital, Whitechapel. There he finished his DPhil on respiration during exercise and published papers with Dr Clarke-Kennedy and Professor Ellis.In 1935 he became Reader in Medicine at the newly created British Postgraduate School at Hammersmith. He was one of an outstanding team recruited by the Director, Francis Fraser. Aitken contributed work on gastric ulcers, hypertension and liver disease.Four years later he was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine at Aberdeen.

He was 38 years old (young for such an appointment in those days). It was not an easy time; the demands of the war soon led to a shortage of medical staff, heavy teaching duties and too little time for research. But Aitken was indefatigable and gave tremendous support to the medical students.He was 47 when he was asked in 1948 to return to Dunedin as Vice-Chancellor of the newly created University of Otago - the only university in New Zealand with a medical school. He played an important part in the conversion of what had been a university college to a full university. Under his leadership there were major developments in the Science Faculty, Medicine and Physical Education (no doubt with the All Blacks in mind). It was at this time that Aitken began his interest in the Association of the Universities of the British Commonwealth, to which he was to contribute greatly.In 1953 he was invited to become the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University; to accept was a difficult decision because he and the family had been very happy in New Zealand.

I was a Lecturer at Birmingham and had just been awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship to work in New York. I was astonished when the new Vice-Chancellor, visited our home to ask me to represent the university at the Second Centenary Celebrations of Columbia University that were to take place that autumn. It was characteristic of Aitken that he came personally to see us, and that while I was away for a year he kept in touch with Margaret, my wife, arranged for my superannuation contributuions to be paid by the university and when I returned called me in to learn all about the work I had been doing with Andre Cournand, one of the pioneers of cardiac catheterisation. He might have been a Vice- Chancellor, but he was always a physician.In the next 15 years he was to oversee a doubling in the size of the university from 3,000 to 6,500 students, an increase in the annual budget from pounds 1.3m to pounds 7m and an enormous increase in capital expenditure.