Alongside its research work, the period saw the department very much in missionary mode, and over the eleven year period it published at least fourteen papers on “Electronic Engineering Education and the Universities” along with others on “University/Industry relations”. We also ran short courses for schoolteachers. As the world began to wake up to the reality of electronics and computers there was also a spate of National Committees looking at the future of the industry and how to prepare its future leaders.

The newly created “National Economics Development Council” established fourteen “Little Neddies” each serving a key industry, of which “Electronics” was an obvious and exceptionally active one. I was a member of this from its establishment in 1966 until 1975, during which time I was Chairman of its “Manpower Working Group” which published two key reports on “Manpower in the Electronics Industry” and “Electronics and the Schools”. I also chaired its “Manpower Statistics Working Group” and the “Manpower Steering Group” as well as, from 1973, the “Microelectronics Working Party”. This latter Group was tasked with trying to persuade the four major U.K. firms with active interests in the business to recognise the unpalatable likelihood that none of them, on their own, was big enough to compete on the world stage and that the only hope for success in the future was for them to agree to work together and produce a truly nationally significant capability. As has so often happened in the U.K., firms were not prepared to come together and, parochial interests predominating, were to pay the price eventually by disappearing from the world scene.

Simultaneously, I served on various Committees of the “Electronics Research Council” which served the Defence interests of the country. Among these was the “Microelectronics Working Party” which I chaired, a group whose task was to tour the Defence Establishments and to persuade them that they should be seeing their futures in terms of microelectronics. For whatever reasons they, too, showed little interest in what the future would clearly hold, being too concerned that the major problems that they were then seeing were “difficult enough with the present familiar technology”.

My involvement in these activities was time consuming and at times dispiriting, but it was without question recognition of the unique position that our department held at that time.