I arrived at Bideford grammar School in 1953, when my mother and her two children moved down from Bury in Lancashire. I had spent two years at Bury Grammar School and then joined year three at Bideford. I do remember having great difficulty understanding the Devonian accents and dialect at school – the same was probably true in reverse. I slowly realised that daps could not be eaten like baps.
We lived between Northam and Westward Ho! and I very much enjoyed my teenage years that were filled with friends, cycling, sea swimming and indeed also my time at school. BGS was a very small school after my two years at Bury Grammar School and it had a very friendly feel. I confess that sport was not to my liking. My main interest was in the sciences but the teaching that I most enjoyed was Geography with Mr Reed and History with Dennis Harle. Basher Bartlett, who taught physics, helped set up an ‘Electronics Group’ and that fired my interest in electronics that influenced my future career. Dick Bain was also in the Electronics Group.
I spent three years in the sixth form in order to improve my A-level grades and then in 1959, went to Queen Mary College at London University where I took a degree in Theoretical Physics. After my degree I went to work as a graduate trainee with Pye Ltd. in Cambridge, where I could experience plenty of electronics. One of the projects at Pye Ltd. was the development of the first UK cardiac pacemaker and watching this led me to look at a career in the medical use of my physics and electronics. I left Pye after a year and went to work as a Health Physicist at Berkeley Nuclear Power Station in Gloucestershire. I was there when it first ‘went critical’, in 1963, and it generated electricity for the next 27 years. 1963 even more important because it was also the year that I married Joan. We had three children and now have seven grandchildren and one great grandson. Roger Hoyle from our BGS year was my best man and we actually married two sisters.
From Berkeley I moved to Sheffield as a Health Physicist in the Department of Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering. It was a joint NHS and University post and the work involved routine services, teaching and research in the many uses of Physics and Electronics in Medicine. I completed my PhD in Neurophysiology in 1969. Sheffield proved to be a very happy place for me to work and the place was kind to me. I became Professor of Medical Physics in 1982 and the work gave me the opportunity to see a lot of the world.
Nearly all of my career was spent in Sheffield. However, for one year in 1977/78 I moved with the family to work for the UN in Hyderabad, India. I was there to set up training courses on the uses and maintenance of medical equipment, such as x-ray machines, defibrillators, ultrasound equipment and patient monitoring systems. It was a memorable year.
I retired as Professor Emeritus from Sheffield University in 2006 but I have continued with some research on cervical cancer. Joan and I live in a village called Holmesfield in Derbyshire. My mother continued to live in Northam and Westward Ho! until 1988, so we never lost the Devon connection and indeed we still visit North Devon every year. My memories of Bideford Grammar School have been kept alive more recently by the reunions of the 1956 O-level group, that Cyril Langman has organised in 2006, 2016 and 2021.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/medicine/people/iicd/brian-brown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_H._Brown
