27Prime Minister Clement Attlee receives an honorary degree on the stage of Prichard-Jones Hall in 1949.
28Wesbury Mount in Menai Bridge, purchased as a home for the Marine Biological Station in the 1950s.
29For many students, Prichard-Jones Hall was the venue for College ‘hops’ (and examinations!).
30The eminent electrical engineer, Sir Willis Jackson (third from left) at the opening of the Electronic Engineering building in Dean Street in 1959, with Principal Charles Evans (second from right).
31The Students’ Representative Council, 1956/57. The President was R. Gerallt Jones, the writer and poet.
32The original Dining Hall, now divided into teaching rooms.
33Charles Evans, Principal, 1958–84 – a pencil drawing by John Merton in 1972.
34Lord Hailsham (right) during the opening of the new Physics Building in 1962.
35Brecht’s ‘The Tutor’ performed by the English Dramatic Society in 1965.
36W. Charles Evans (with pipe) holds forth to postgraduate students and researchers in Biochemistry – one, Douglas Ribbons (second from right), later occupied the Chair of Biochemistry and Soil Science.
37Students’ Union Executive, 1963–64, in the Council Chamber.
38Dennis Crisp, one of the world’s most influential marine scientists, in the 1960s.
39J. Gwynn Williams, Professor of Welsh History, and Vice-Principal from 1974 until 1979.
40William Mathias (left) Professor of Music, with Gordon Lamb, visiting Head of Department from the University of Texas in 1976 (by kind permission of Rhiannon Mathias).
41Bedwyr Lewis Jones, Professor of Welsh from 1973 until 1992.
42Students of Neuadd John Morris-Jones and Welsh medium teaching staff.
43Principal Sir Charles Evans (left), Lord Kenyon, President (centre)and Eric Hughes, Registrar, at a meeting of the Court in the late 1970s.
44Student protesters gather, watched by police officers, in January 1979.
45The College rugby team, 1979/80.
46Eric Sunderland, Principal, 1984–95.
47The centenary: Eric Sunderland (Principal) and Sir William Mars-Jones (President), lead the centenary procession from the Penrhyn Arms portico in October 1984.
48New en suite student residences were opened on the Ffriddoedd site in 1993.
49Hen Goleg, the original Coleg Normal building, became part of the University in 1996 and now houses the University’s Business School.
50The poet R. S. Thomas, who declined an Honorary Professorship in the 1980s in protest at government policy, accepted one in the 1990s.
51Roy Evans, Vice-Chancellor, 1995–2004.
52Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos unveils his portrait on his retirement as President in December 2000.
53Merfyn Jones, Vice-Chancellor since 2004.
54Student volunteering: an arts and crafts session at Treborth Botanical Gardens for local children.
55The University Chamber Choir, rehearsing with Dame Kiri te Kanawa in 2003.
56Author Philip Pullman, an Honorary Fellow and Honorary Professor in the University, lecturing in the Main Arts Lecture Theatre in 2006.
57Lord Elis-Thomas (President) and the Prince of Wales at the ceremony in June 2007 in Prichard-Jones Hall to mark the centenary of the laying of the foundation stone of the Main University Building.
58Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with the Vice-Chancellor Merfyn Jones, chats to a student at the opening of the ‘Environment Centre Wales’ in February 2008.
| AUT | Association of University Teachers |
| BUA | Bangor University Archives |
| DNB | Dictionary of National Biography |
| FRS | Fellow of the Royal Society |
| HEFCW | Higher Education Funding Council for Wales |
| MHT | Mountain Heritage Trust |
| NEWI | North East Wales Institute of Higher Education (renamed Glyndŵr University in 2009) |
| RAE | Research Assessment Exercise |
| UCCA | Universities Central Council on Admissions |
| UCNW | University College of North Wales |
| UCNW | J. Gwynn Williams, The University College of North Wales: Foundations, 1884–1927 (Cardiff, 1985) |
| UCW | E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1872–1972 (Cardiff, 1972) |
| UGC | University Grants Committee |
| UMCB | Undeb Myfyrwyr Colegau Bangor (Union of Students of Bangor Colleges) |
| WDA | Welsh Development Agency |
Prifysgol Bangor University has been at the intellectual centre of my life. At 17, in a spirit of inverted snobbery which has been a trait since, I refused to take my old grammar school headmaster’s advice to apply to Jesus College, Oxford. Instead I worked to win a William James Lewis Scholarship to the University College of North Wales – as it was called then – in Bangor. In a move typical of the ‘family University’ which we still are even at 11,000 students, I was following in my father’s footsteps.
He had been a star of Professor Ifor Williams’s pioneering Welsh-language translations of Ibsen’s modern dramas in the 1920s, as well as a tough and quick rugby half-back, a devotee of inter-varsity smokers, and a member of the Student Representative Council, before deserting the boards for the pulpit and becoming a divinity student with the Presbyterians. In much, but not all of that, I followed him.
It was in the Students’ Union, on the stage of P-J (Neuadd Prichard-Jones) at would-be-revolutionary general meetings around 1968, or in the smoked-filled rooms of old Tanrallt, at inter-University debates, or heckling visiting politicians, that I learnt my politics. It was in Neuadd Reichel as a three-year pampered scholarship student that I learnt to be sociable, to drink sherry in the common room and robust wines with formal meals of fine Welsh meat. Ours was the first generation of male students to be allowed to entertain women in our own rooms within regulations on a sultry Sunday afternoon, between serious games of croquet on manicured Reichel lawns.
Moving from graduate to postgraduate in the hugely erudite School of Welsh, I was later to teach drama bilingually in the School of English, and to complete a Ph.D. in literary history and theory just before the regulations caught up with me. By then we were called University of Wales, Bangor, a form of naming which did nothing for us, I thought. A joyful moment tinged with sadness was when I succeeded my father’s close friend and my boyhood hero Lord Cledwyn, wearing those amazing robes at graduation ceremonies in that same Neuadd P-J, where I had graduated, as President.
There are regrets too, not only the personal ones of loss of friends and colleagues over the years, but those of institutional failures. A particular period of estrangement for me was when Bangor became an arena of struggle for bilingual language rights to which the then authorities failed to respond in a positive way. I regret that I did not really try to improve my relationship with Principal Sir Charles Evans until it was too late. But that Wales now feels like another country!
My pleasure to have been a graduate, a postgraduate, a member of staff and finally President of my own University is second