In 1965 a new chair was created, in Control Engineering, to which Jim Nightingale was appointed. Jim was a good natured gifted colleague of many talents, who, though not renowned for getting to meetings on time, always worked with an enthusiasm which truly inspired his research students – indeed his work in the field of medical electronics was ground breaking in its day.

His greatest achievement was the first design of a forearm/hand prosthesis, which, working off residual nerve potentials in the patient, was capable of picking up an egg without dropping or cracking it. He worked on other aspects of medical electronics too, including a highly original Compton-scattering imaging device. His team included Tariq Durrani who was later to move to a Chair in Strathclyde and also subsequently to be appointed to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Alan Newell also achieved some notable firsts in the para-medical area, in the field of “captioning for the deaf”, and had the distinction of being invited to install a special aid for a prominent member of the House of Commons. On his first attempt to gain entry to “The House” Alan failed, as the officials refused to believe he was not a salesman, and higher authority had to be sought to convince them that they should let him in! Alan subsequently left us to fill a Chair in the University of Dundee.

We were fortunate enough, also, to have Doug Lewin on the staff for some years, who did some seminal work on associative processors whilst with us, as well as contributing to our computer teaching in a major way. He was a truly original thinker and soon moved on, first to a Chair at Brunel and then to be Head of Computer Science in Sheffield, where his untimely death saddened us all.

Others who succeeded to Chairs elsewhere included Bruce Batchelor, who left the pattern recognition group for UWIST, and Adrian Bailey who, after a two year secondment to ESTEC in Belgium where he worked on positioning thrusters for satellites, succeeded Professor Bill Bright as leader of the Electrostatics Group in the Electrical Engineering Department. That group included among its achievements a solution to the problem of why, unaccountably and apparently spontaneously, super-tankers blew up and grain silos exploded.

These were only a few aspects of the work of what was a lively and committed department, which had a strong team spirit and thrived on innovation.