Throughout my tenure S W (a.k.a. Wally) Punnett was the lynch-pin of the Department’s teaching work, organising our courses immaculately while contributing as a superb teacher himself. He showed little appetite for research in my time, though earlier things had been different – yet, like other perfectionists I have known, he could never bring the work for his thesis to a point where he felt it worthy of submission.

We all benefited from his standards and wisdom, but would have equally wished him a more tangible academic recognition of his excellence.

The Department had always treated its teaching seriously, and at that time it offered two undergraduate courses with slightly different emphases, one in “Electronic Engineering” in the Engineering Faculty and the other in “Electronics” in the Science Faculty. They were unique in the country at the time of their inception – though as world awareness grew that electronics was becoming a major force in life, other universities followed suit – often coming to us for advice in the process. We attracted a very high calibre of students, and virtually all student applicants of promise were interviewed by members of staff of the department, before acceptance, to ensure that they had the necessary mental and reasoning capacity to cope with their chosen courses. By the middle of my period our reputation had grown to the point that one applicant, the son of an F.R.S., with 4 A’s at A-level (quite an achievement in those days), came to interview me with a view to confirming that the department was more appropriate to his needs and standards than Cambridge. I “passed” my interview and he went on to become one of three particularly brilliant “firsts” in his year.

All of our courses included an important “Project” component, although we were not alone in seeing this as a good way to encourage and develop original creativity in students. We published a number of papers in the field of project-assessment, which we believed led to fairer and more reliable ways of assessing merit, whilst helping examiners to perform more objectively and uniformly in the process. We were also among the pioneers of “continuous assessment” – a new concept at that time which, though it had its virtues, did not always lead us to the conclusion that it either improved standards or encouraged students to work more effectively, on their own initiative, in the fields which we covered.

We continued to run the existing one year Diploma/MSc course in Electronics for some twenty or so students, many of whom were chosen from among the junior officer ranks of the RAF. These latter always performed well – after all their careers depended on their success! The course also proved attractive to more mature overseas students, many of whom were also Servicemen and were also sponsored to come – although of course there were no high fees for overseas students in that period.

During my period as Head of Department the number of departmental staff nearly quadrupled and the research effort increased apace, bringing the need for a competent full-time administrator to be added to our strength. In 1970 we were fortunate to persuade Commander Ron Broom to occupy this role. He himself was a first rate electronic engineer, respected by all, with a sense of order and detail that lifted many a burden from the shoulders of the other staff, all of whom accepted his wisdom and authority.