Swansea University

Campus and Community in a Post-War World, 1945–2020

Sam Blaxland

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786836069
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786836083
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Swansea University: Campus and Community in a Post-War World, 1945–2020 marks Swansea University's centenary. It is a study of post- Second World War academic and social change in Britain and its universities, as well as an exploration of shifts in youth culture and the way in which higher education institutions have interacted with people and organisations in their regions. It covers a range of important themes and topics, including architectural developments, international scholars, the changing behaviours of students, protest and politics, and the multi-layered relationships that are formed between academics, young people and the wider communities of which they are a part. Unlike most institutional histories, it takes a 'bottom-up' approach and focuses on the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of people like students and non-academic staff who are normally sidelined in such accounts. As it does so, it utilises a large collection of oral history testimonies collected specifically for this book; and, throughout, it explores how formative, paradoxical and unexpected university life can be.

CHAPTER ONE

‘COMMUNITIES OF LEARNING’: INTELLECTUAL AND ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION, 1945–1956

ALTHOUGH THEY DID NOT KNOW each other at the time, two children called Tudor Jones and Margaret Caswell, who would later become husband and wife, both watched from their respective houses in the Uplands district of Swansea in February 1941 as their town suffered three nights of sustained aerial bombardment. Margaret, whose father was an engineering lecturer at the University College of Swansea and a Second World War air raid precaution warden, remembered that ‘we used to look out … at the town and you could see flames … going like anything’.¹ The man she would later marry ‘had bombs all ‘round our house’.² Half of Swansea’s town centre was destroyed as the result of the dropping of 30,000 shells. Over 11,000 houses were damaged and many more were completely demolished. At least 227 people were killed.³ Going to the war-torn town as a young boy, Peter Robins, who would later study at the college, could only recall ‘acres of devastation’.⁴ The severity of the damage was so great that Swansea bore the scars long after the war had ended. Mary Morgan, who came to Swansea’s college as a student in 1947, remembered the town being full of ‘mounds of stones and bricks’ from bomb damage.⁵ Another student, David Painting, remembered that ‘there were Blitzed buildings everywhere. The market had no roof, that sort of thing … [it] took a long time to clean up’.⁶

Figure 9. The remains of Caer Street, south side looking west, 1941.

Photo: South Wales Evening Post. Courtesy of West Glamorgan Archive Service (P/PR/95/4/55).

Figure 10. The interior of Swansea Market, 1941.

Photo: SWEP. Courtesy of West Glamorgan Archive Service (P/PR/95/4/27).

Figure 11. Sketty Road, south side, near junction with Bernard Street, 1941. This was near the University College of Swansea.

Photo: SWEP. Courtesy of West Glamorgan Archive Service (P/PR/95/4/39).:

Figure 12. College Street and High Street Junction, looking west, 1941.

Photo: SWEP. Courtesy of West Glamorgan Archive Service (P/PR/95/4/16).

That immediate clean-up effort, and the wider task of post-war reconstruction, took many years and came in various forms. It was something in which the University College of Swansea played a significant role. This chapter will argue that the college was pivotal not only in the economic and industrial reconstruction of the town and region of which it was a part, but it also played a part in shaping the nature of post-war Britain’s recovery and the future of higher education. Even before the war had ended, the college produced a report that emphasised the need for it to help re-build the British economy. This tied in with a broader nation-wide drive to weave higher education more tightly into British public life.⁷ After 1945, there was increased cooperation between Swansea’s college and local industry, especially steel, nickel and tin-plate companies. This came in the form of specific research and the training of graduates to act as staff for industrial firms like the Steel Company of Wales (SCOW). In return, these firms supported the college financially and politically by providing both sympathetic voices on its governing bodies as well as very significant financial donations. Unsurprisingly, there was a heavily gendered aspect to the recruitment and training of an industrial workforce, with the vast majority of those studying applied science or engineering subjects at the college being male. The college in this period was a very male space, evidenced by the fact that 88 per cent of its students in 1946/7, for example, were men. Of the 155 undergraduates studying applied science, which was a strong feature of the curriculum in Swansea, only one was a woman.⁸

This notion of ‘reconstruction’ extended beyond the traditional economic and industrial realms and into the intellectual by moulding the ideas and thoughts of its graduates, who would go on, in some cases, to occupy important and powerful positions. It contributed to a change in the way people thought about public policy, governance and, ultimately, about the very necessity of war. At Swansea, a new and more ‘liberal’ approach to higher education that emphasised broad study grounded in multiple subject areas and disciplines was inaugurated at the end of the 1940s, to pull students out of what it considered ‘rigid and narrow educational methods’ and to think more broadly and holistically, ‘narrow thinking’ having supposedly contributed to the horrors of Nazi Germany. By developing schemes like Fresher’s Essays and a series of first year ‘general lectures’, Swansea’s principal from 1947 to 1959, John Fulton, helped lay the intellectual foundations upon which the next generation of universities in places like Sussex, Essex and Warwick would operate.⁹

The spirit behind this broadening out of the curriculum and the widening of people’s minds extended beyond the college in Singleton Park. In order to connect both with local and international actors, the college followed a policy of increasing adult – or ‘extra-mural’ – education classes in the surrounding community and region with the hope and aim of creating a more broad-minded general population alongside its student cohort. Perhaps even more significantly, in the early 1950s, it introduced a new kind of scheme designed for international scholars. Swansea was chosen ahead of other institutions by the United Nations and the British Council to host and educate a series of ‘welfare fellows’ from around the world, who would study and learn about social work and administration. Again, the spirit lying behind this scheme was both to encourage and strengthen a sense of international harmony, but it was also an attempt by figures like Fulton to broaden the mindset of the town and region’s people by involving them in ‘cosmopolitan’ events and talks related to these fellows.¹⁰ All of this was part of his vision for universities to become new kinds of ‘communities of learning’.¹¹ As this chapter will also show, these attempts to fuse together the college and the town of which it was a part did not always meet with success. Throughout this period, the college was sometimes perceived, in the eyes of some townspeople, as distant, aloof and elitist, demonstrating that the tensions that often marked out communities and their universities in this period existed in Swansea, despite the college’s many good intentions.

UNIVERSITIES IN THE POST-WAR WORLD

Planning for the post-war era, involving debates about the kind of society Britain would be in the future, was discussed seriously by the government, and bodies like universities, before the Second World War had ended. The Beveridge Report of 1942, which outlined the need for a more interventionist government approach to health and welfare, and the Butler Education Act of 1944, which introduced the tri-partite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools, were two prominent examples of planning for a post-war country.¹² It is the immediate post-war period, however, that can reasonably be labelled an age of reform in Britain, as well as across swathes of Europe. Although this was an era of austerity, with the vast majority of the British population experiencing rationing and shortages in their daily lives, it was also one of dramatic political reform that witnessed a substantial (if not quite a fundamental¹³) change in the way the British state operated.¹⁴ With the victory of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee in 1945 came a national, Britain-wide programme of economic development, which was the fundamental driver of government policy.¹⁵ Its second priority was building ‘Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’, which meant that an existing welfare system was extended to ‘a welfare state for the whole nation’.¹⁶ The centre piece of the British government’s welfare programme was the founding of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948.

Tied up with these reforms were changes in policy towards education at all levels, many of which had begun to be made before or during the war. This included raising the school leaving age to fifteen, and then sixteen shortly afterwards, a remodelling of the system building on the Butler Act of 1944, and further provision of post-school education including part-time classes.¹⁷ Such thinking involved a re-orientation of the place and the role of the British university.¹⁸ They ‘came to be seen as a public service with a strong element of autonomy rather than a collection of independent institutions receiving state support’.¹⁹ Until the mid-1940s, universities were, by and large, elite institutions whose purpose was ‘to produce the leaders of society’.²⁰ Their relatively small sizes had resulted in many acting as closed-off and separate bodies within the towns and cities in which they were located. In accordance with the post-war re-think, however, the block grant that higher education institutions received from the central University Grants Committee (UGC) rose from £2 to £5 million from 1939 to 1945, demonstrating that the state wanted universities to play a greater public role.²¹

They also became more associated with national economic development, and professional or manpower needs for certain occupations. Partnership with industries was one key way of achieving this.²² In August 1943, the Parliamentary Scientific Committee had issued a report arguing that, in universities ‘research in many categories will have to be undertaken on a scale not hitherto contemplated in peace-time … This can only be ensured by the application of active and well-directed technological research firmly based on the foundation of scientific discovery.’²³ The report pulled no punches about the need for universities to receive more funds, and to train workers to conduct fundamental research.²⁴ The Percy Report of 1945 also called for a boost in technocratic education to spur on economic growth and recommended a quadrupling of the number of engineers turned out by universities.²⁵ Unsurprisingly, the promotion of science and technology in particular was seen by central planners to be of the greatest importance and these subject areas consequently received fresh impetus and a revitalised status amongst university subjects as a result.²⁶

With this in mind, the UGC passed a motion in 1944 that ‘in the interests of the nation, it is urgently necessary that the Universities should be able to resume their normal activity’.²⁷ Some university vice-chancellors and college principals treated these suggestions with caution. Sir Franklin Sibly, who had been Swansea’s first principal and was by 1944 the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, worried about the ‘practical politics’ of ‘starting straight away’ with such enthusiasm. Others favoured issuing questionnaires to canvass opinion on the matter. Understandably, principals from London voiced concern about the requisitioning of buildings that had been used in the war effort.²⁸ A much more determined and upbeat attitude was taken by the college at Swansea. In 1944, its council and senate, the two governing bodies that, respectively, were made up of lay members of the community a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Note on terms and place-names
• Note on oral history interviews
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: ‘Communities of learning’: Intellectual and economic reconstruction, 1945–1956
• CHAPTER TWO: ‘A quiet revolution’: Campus and community life, 1947–1964
• CHAPTER THREE: ‘How in hell can we cool them down?’ Politics and protest, 1964–1973
• CHAPTER FOUR: ‘DON’T BE SO COMPLACENT!’ Crisis and cutbacks, 1973–1988
• CHAPTER FIVE: ‘Change with the times’: Marketisation and commercialisation, 1988–2020
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices
• Notes