In 1974 I was invited to become Vice Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. I had been through a variety of largely administrative “Offices” in my 11 years at Southampton while remaining Head of the Department, and although the Department had provided one of the most satisfying and exciting challenges of my working life, it was time for it and me to move on.

We were already a world ranking Department in several areas though, for all of our expansion, still remained, numerically, relatively small on a world scale. Some sixteen members of the Department during the period became Professors (a significant promotion in those times) either in Southampton or elsewhere which, while saying much for the quality of our staff at that time, made a significant contribution to the development of University electronics nationally. Included in that number, and thus in a sense “closing the loop”, was Harvey Rutt, a brilliant student in my period who, after wide experience elsewhere, rejoined the Department to press further the boundaries of glass fibre technology and to become Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2007.

The department is now enormous by comparison with my time, and has for some while been rated comfortably within the top ten in the world. It is a matter of great pride and happiness to me that, at a period of revolutionary worldwide change in the development and importance of electronics and computers, I was privileged to play some part in its growth in the University of Southampton.