It's the Money that Makes No Difference: Thoughts from ‘Paid Retirement’

Biographical Note

I was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 1941 and spent the first eighteen years of my life in a village post office, just outside the town. After eight years at a local grammar school I went to the University of Manchester, graduating with a BA in Geography in 1962. I then obtained a scholarship to undertake research for an MA, which was awarded in 1964. Rita and I met on an undergraduate field course to Dublin and Killarney in 1961, and married in 1963. A year later we emigrated – on the £10 scheme – to Australia where I held a sequence of posts in the new Department of Geography at Monash University, completed a PhD on Melbourne's residential mosaic; our son and daughter were born during those three years. In 1967 we moved to the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, where we had a very enjoyable life raising our children in that (then) relaxed and equal society with its superb environment and I rose through the ranks to a Readership. I spent the first semester of the 1972–1973 academic year at the University of Toronto – an eye-opener to me in so many ways – and the first six months of 1973 at the London School of Economics – more eye-opening. Just before we returned to New Zealand I was interviewed for a chair at the University of Sheffield; it was offered to me a few weeks after we got back to Christchurch – I accepted, for a variety of reasons (academic and family) and we returned to the UK in August 1974. I spent eighteen years at Sheffield, heading the department for three and then serving as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor and chairing the university's main academic planning committee during a period of substantial cuts – and then one of rapid growth. In 1992 I was invited to apply for the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Essex – among the UK's top universities for social sciences, and occupied that post for three years after which I took early retirement and joined the University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences, to which I continue to commute from our home on the tranquil beauty of Salisbury's Cathedral Close. I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999, the same year in which I was awarded the Prix Vautrin Lud: in 2010 the Association of American Geographers gave me a Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2011 I was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to scholarship.