Richard Henry Tizard
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Richard Henry Tizard (25 June 1917 - 5 September 2005) was a distinguished engineer and founding Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge
Dick Tizard lived in the eye of the storm that was Britain's military and social history in the twentieth century. He was a living link between Churchill's 'Boffin's War' and Churchill College, Cambridge -- founded in the era of Harold Wilson's 'white hot technological revolution'. Tizard pioneered University outreach to schools, admission of women and reform in academic governance.
He was described by a former Vice-Chancellor as Cambridge's most significant Senior Tutor of the post-War years. Tizard was profoundly influential in shaping the national memorial college to Winston Churchill. His deliberate policy of widening admissions contributed to Churchill's rapid ascendancy in the league of Cambridge colleges. He believed that it was possible to expand access to higher education and raise standards at the same time.
Tizard was born on 25 June 1917 into a family already distinguished by service to science and the Navy. His grandfather Captain Thomas Henry Tizard , C.B., R.N., F.R.S. was navigator of the H.M.S. Challenger expedition and one of the founders of oceanography. His godfather, Professor Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, served as Churchill's Scientific Advisor, friend and confidante. His father, Sir Henry Tizard chaired the committee that led to the crucial deployment of radar. The Tizard Mission to the US in the summer of 1940 engaged the reluctant Americans to manufacture radar by sharing British magnetron technology. It serves as a model for international technical co-operation to this day in organisations such as NATO.
Tizard was educated at Rugby School, Bristol University and Oriel College, Oxford where he read Mathematics and Engineering. He graduated at the outbreak of the Second World War and served as a Scientific Officer in the Royal Aircraft Establishment between 1939-42; from 1942-46 as an experimental officer in the Admiralty Research Laboratory. He worked on aerial defence research, where he was one of the team that designed and developed a gyroscopic gun-sight for use on anti-aircraft guns. He was also involved in a number of other air-defence schemes, including the use of kites and aerial mines to bring down enemy fighters.
After the war he served as a student apprentice at the British Thomson-Houston Company before joining the National Physical Laboratory in 1947. He was seconded to work in 1950 at Vickers-Armstrong with Dr Barnes Wallis of bouncing-bomb fame (the Dambusters was Tizard’s favourite film). On his return to the NPL he set up its new Control Mechanisms and Electronics division. He joined LSE as a research fellow in 1956.
Tizard made major contributions to the work of the engineering professional associations. He was a member of the Council of the Society of Instrument Technology and chaired its new Data Processing Section from 1957-59. Between 1951-59 he served as a member of the Committee of the Measurements Section of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He was a founder member and honorary fellow [1] of the British_Computer_Society.
In 1961 he was chosen by Sir John Cockroft to be a Fellow of the new science based college established at Cambridge University as a secular institution, funded by national subscription, in the name of Sir Winston Churchill. As Director of Studies in Engineering, Tizard devoted his time to college admissions and teaching, to pastoral work, and to academic governance. Contrary to today's intense specialisation, he believed that an engineering supervisor should be able to teach the whole of Part I of the Engineering Tripos. As an engineer without a lab he was a precursor of a new kind of engineering.
In 1966 when he was appointed Senior Tutor, he could report that 'in as a short a period as five years the College has achieved the University average in most subjects.' By 1969 he could show that Churchill had reached the top end of the colleges' league with 69 firsts against an average of 42. This achievement had been won by systematically widening the pool for admissions to schools that had not previously considered Cambridge a destination for their alumni. Churchill's first 600 students came from no fewer than 300 schools.
The Sixties were a period of turbulence in academic governance, and Cambridge students were no less revolting than their peers at LSE and elsewhere. Tizard came from a family of high achievers with a productive stubborn streak. He used his political skills to marshall his grammar, state and public school intake behind a programme of historic renewal and reform in the University. In 1969 he led his colleagues to accept students into membership of the College Council and to admit women -- the first Cambridge men's college to do so. In 1970 Churchill's JCR led the NUS in taking the Cambridge Town Clerk to the High Court to overturn a 19th century precedent that denied students the right to vote in their University Towns. This new interpretation of electoral law was made possible by the Labour Government's Sixth Reform Act. [2]
By 1975 the College had grown to the point where admissions needed a separate person in charge and Tizard took this job until 1979. In 1984 he reached retiring age and was elected to a pensioner fellowship. He continued to live in college until a few years ago, when ill health forced him to move to Cambridge Nursing Home.
At Churchill College, Tizard’s industrial experience helped build and maintain bridges between academic and practical engineering. He insisted that every undergraduate engineer take a year out in industry before coming up, and he maintained close links with his alumni. Tizard had worked at the cutting edge of early computer science; the discipline that evolved from code breaking, ballistic missile control, weapons simulation and data processing. Churchill College now has a large cohort of science and engineering alumni. Non-resident members play formative roles in civilian and military data processing, in the new Cambridge software economy, and in national cultural and economic life.[3]
Outside College Tizard's greatest passion was sailing. He competed in Oxford v Cambridge sailing matches while at Oxford. At Cambridge in the Sixties and Seventies he was successively Senior Treasurer, Commodore, then President of Cambridge University Cruising Club.
The young Tizard features in the letters of Arthur Ransome, an original Swallow or Amazon. The older Tizard was mentor to Fellows and students alike. He encouraged non-resident members of College to continue his work of outreach to schools, from which they, the College and the University had benefited.
Tizard [4] [5] was dogged by illness later on in life. He bore it with the same dignity and determination with which he led his life. He will be greatly missed and gratefully remembered by his family and generations of students.
