In 1963 The Robbins Report recommended that universities should expand to be able to offer places to all students capable of benefiting from Higher Education. In 1970 the government commenced a policy of attrition of funding, the effects of which are still evident as I write.

The department was assisted in its early growth by the first of these factors, as shown by the following numbers of our academic staff in successive academic years.

9 in 1963-64
12 in 1964-65
16 in 1965-66
22 in 1966-67
25 in 1967-68
27 in 1968-69
28 in 1969-70
30 in 1970-71
33 in 1971-72
33 in 1972-73

For the universities generally the period 1963-74 offered both opportunity and initially-unperceived threat. Southampton University, with only some 1400 students in 1966, agonised between a desire on the part of some old stagers to stay small and cosy and a determination to expand by the more realistic majority, who saw genuine and exciting opportunities – not to mention the more general social benefits which would follow nationally.

When I was appointed to the Chair of Electronics in 1963 I was conscious of the reputation of my predecessor, Professor Eric Zepler, an engineer of great distinction, but at the same time not a thrustful man. My inheritance, therefore, had received little help from the university, which had singularly failed to capitalise on the uniqueness of the department he had founded. Thus I arrived to find a small but competent team which could in any circumstances be forgiven for not seeing the true extent of the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead, in a future in which their importance was to assume a new and startling relevance.

In 1963 we had only seven academic staff, with research activities divided broadly between “microwaves” and “microcircuits”. The microwave side was well established and formed the seed from which the department’s prominence in “opto-electronics” and lasers was to grow, while two of the three members of staff working on “microcircuits” would form the nucleus of the team that was to see the department as the national leader in silicon technology. These two areas certainly grew unbelievably in importance, but by the end of the period we had thirty three academic staff overall, enabling significant efforts in a number of other fields, which I shall touch on later.

Alec Gambling and I had both been candidates for the Chair and I was always immensely grateful for the way he behaved when the lot of headship fell to me. I valued his friendship and admired the way in which his single mindedness led to an international position in the opto-electronics field. We worked harmoniously together, and despite several offers from me for him to take over the Headship of the Department he always declined, preferring to develop his research interests which undeniably added greatly to the Department’s reputation overall.