Leonard Lawley obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/25/leonard-lawley-obituary

Version 0 of 1.

My father, Leonard Lawley, who has died aged 93, was a leader in the first waves of polytechnics that drove the modernisation and expansion of higher education in the 1970s.

Len was the son of Albert Lawley, a factory foreman, and his wife, Annie, a former milliner’s shop assistant, and was brought up in a modest home in the Black Country town of Cradley Heath. He won a free scholarship to Stourbridge grammar school. This set the pattern for a life in which he took advantage of new opportunities and spent most of his working life in academia helping others to do the same.

Leaving school at 16 to work in an insurance office, he was old enough to volunteer for the RAF by 1941. Work on radio communications and the then secret radar equipment was far more to his liking than insurance. The RAF recognised his talents and gave him a job as an instructor. Next, they sent him on a two-year degree course at University College Wales, Swansea, in physics and electrical communications, after which he resumed service as an officer.

By 1946, after the end of the second world war, he had gone on to complete his honours degree at Swansea, before gaining a PhD at Newcastle (then a division of the University of Durham). There, he patented a device to detect dangerous methane gas in coalmines.

His teaching career took him first to Regent Street Polytechnic, London, then to Kingston Technical College, where he moved up to the positions of vice-principal and principal. Academic standards and prestige rose steadily under his leadership. Higher-level work moved to the new College of Technology, which eventually became Kingston Polytechnic. From 1969 until his retirement in 1982, he was its director.

By today’s standards, he faced extraordinary interference and attempts to limit the institution’s progression. The local authority’s elected members placed education well down their list of priorities; some believed that the growth of higher education would inhibit the local economy. Abrupt fluctuations in government funding were further obstacles.

He often welcomed other polytechnic directors to the family home. They would talk animatedly about the new provision and opportunities they were building together, often in proud defiance of what they saw as the traditional snobbery of the older universities.

Len was also an accomplished do-it-yourselfer, happily rewiring his house or fitting out an elderly Bedford Dormobile as a camping van with luxury leather seats acquired from the local scrapyard.

By the time he retired, Kingston’s “poly” was thriving, and it formed the foundation of today’s Kingston University. In recognition of his contribution, he was granted the title of professor, Kingston’s first.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, three children, Katherine, Susan and me, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.