It was a Wednesday afternoon in the early weeks of 1960 when I came out of the Underground at Acton Town station, walked up Gunnersbury Lane and saw Brunel College for the first time. I had come as a candidate for a post in Mechanical Engineering and was experiencing the mixture of hope and apprehension that is inevitable on such occasions. Whatever my feelings, I could not have guessed what lay in store for me that day nor the changes that were to take place at Brunel over the next few years.
In filling up the application form I had been careful to list those achievements that seemed to me appropriate for a job in technical education. I had worked in the aircraft industry in the days when Britain could boast a dozen or more aircraft manufacturers; I had several years experience of technical college teaching; and I had accumulated a handful of publications. Above all, I had stressed the teaching I had done for the external degree of London University - that acme of achievement in the technical college world at that time. So I was ill-prepared for the shock that awaited me!
After the usual preliminaries Dr Topping, the Principal, explained in the politest way, that my teaching career so far bore little relevance to his vision of the future Brunel. The College was to devote its efforts to the new sandwich courses it had started two or three years earlier; it would give up its programmes for higher national certificates and the examinations for the professional institutions; it would sever its links with the external London system even if this meant abandoning degree qualifications for its students; it would augment its present range of courses in science and engineering with work in the social sciences; and it would change from being a largely part-time college serving industry and the community in Middlesex to seek a national reputation. Looking back from 1995 this may all seem reasonable enough but it was heady stuff that Wednesday afternoon!
Somehow my faltering replies must have carried some conviction and I was offered the post - or I would not now be looking back on half a lifetime at Brunel! The Registrar, Mr Horner, took me to his office, paid me my travelling expenses from a cash box in his desk and pointed through his window saying "That is where the new engineering block will be built and where YOU will have your office". It did not work out quite like that and I spent the next year or so sharing a cupboard with Vince Lewis and that redoubtable Lancastrian, Joe Bentley, in a corner of the mechanics lab at the other end of Acton High Street!
Brunel College at Acton
By the standards of the time, Brunel was a substantial local authority college but it was tiny compared with today's University. The main building was the Science Block. Work had begun on this in 1951 on a former school site just off Acton High Street, although postwar shortages and economic difficulties delayed its opening until September 1957.
The building was the same size as our present Chemistry and Biology building, but it contained all the science departments - chemistry, which included metallurgy and biology, physics, mathematics, management and production engineering - together with the Principal's, Registrar's and Finance offices, the classrooms and two lecture theatres. When it was opened it had four floors but within a year or two a fifth was added to provide a refectory. In the tradition of technical colleges the caretaker had a house on the roof.
The college had one computer - an Elliott 803. It was a valve machine and sometimes packed up in hot weather. It filled a fair size office, it stored programs and data on punched tape ' it had no more power than some present day calculators and it had cost;£20,000!
Some of the former school buildings remained. The gymnasium was used for the College's main library and its other accommodation housed a catering school. The College had also acquired one or two adjoining houses that were due to be demolished to make room for a new engineering block. Meanwhile the Departments of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering were still located in the Acton Technical College building.
The College had no Social Science departments, no economics, law or government studies, no psychology, no education and design. We had no playing fields of our own, no indoor sports facilities, no bank or shop, not even a bookshop. The refectory had no bar and I recall an embarrassing incident with an external examiner who asked for a gin and tonic when he was taken to lunch!
The first residential accommodation became available in September 1960 when Middlesex opened a hostel in Brondesbury under the Wardenship of Dr. Alan Lacey. The occupants comprised 23 Brunel students (of whom three were women) and 18 women graduate students from the Maria Grey College (which became part of the West London Institute). How interesting to think that such an early link between the two former colleges should be renewed 25 years on.
The Higher Education scene in 1960
The sixties witnessed great economic and social changes that were to affect higher education in general and Brunel in particular. Britain had emerged from wartime austerities and by 1957 Harold Macmillan was able to make his "never had it so good" speech. There were thriving steel, coal and shipbuilding industries and a dozen or more British owned car firms. Manufacturing industry was seen as the key to our future prosperity and technical education had been given a boost with the Government's White Paper on the subject in 1956. Brunel benefitted greatly from the support of local industries and almost all the students on our first sandwich courses were sponsored by firms in Middlesex. When the College launched an earlier sandwich course in engineering based on the London BSc(Eng) degree, a local Acton company, the marine and aero engine manufacturer D Napier, sent half of the 20 students in the first year. It is a measure of how quickly fortunes can change that Napiers were taken over and its factory closed a few years later, having been in business since the beginning of the century.
In 1960 there were about 20 universities in Britain. (By 1967 the number had doubled and today it is almost a hundred). Fewer than ten percent of 18-year-olds entered fulltime higher education; this year the proportion is over 30 percent. Local authority grants were not universal and there were considerable variations between one county and another. In technical colleges the preponderance of part-time courses meant that nearly all students lived at home. The high proportion of engineering courses also meant that there were few women students. At Brunel there were nearly 2000 students altogether but threequarters of them were on part-time courses attending one day, or three evenings, a week and fewer than 400 were studying on the new sandwich courses.
It should also be remembered that the age of majority was 21 and most students were 'minors' in the legal sense. They did not have the vote and could not enter hire purchase, tenancy and other agreements. These restrictions reflected the social attitudes of the time and little attention was paid to students' views here or in other countries - the campus protests that started in America and France came later.
Such was the state of the College and the world of higher education when I joined Brunel in 1960.
The first signs of things to come
Towards the end of 1960 two decisions were made that were to change Brunel in almost every way. The designs for the new Engineering Block on the Acton site were complete and, in the October, Middlesex County Council approved a tender that would have enabled building work to begin. At the last minute it was decided to stop development on the College's 4-acre home in Acton and build a completely new campus on a site of over 100 acres in Uxbridge. At about the same time discussions began between Middlesex and the Ministry of Education that were to lead to Brunel's recognition as a College of Advanced Technology and eventually its designation as a University.
There were no immediate signs of change in that mechanics lab cupboard at the far end of Acton High Street, however, but some months later I received a summons to Dr Topping's office. "I want you to stop everything you are doing" he said, "and help me in the planning of the new campus". When I asked when he simply said I now' and handed me a stack of files containing all the correspondence about the proposed move to Uxbridge. But that is the beginning of a new story .......
Syd Urry
Brunel Link - Magazine of the Brunel Alumni Issue No 3 1995
Part 2: How Brunel went west
