MacTutor
Joseph Burchnall
Times obituary
Mr. W. S. Angus writes:
You formally recorded the death of Professor J. L. Burchnall on April 29, 1975. Those familiar with the government of the University of Durham in the thirties, forties, and fifties will think that his work deserves fuller notice.
It is not uncommon for professors of mathematics to be active in academic administration, but Burchnall's aptitude for it was marked. His mathematical gifts had been established in a distinguished career as an undergraduate at Oxford, 1911–14. Service as an officer in the Royal Artillery, 1915–19, gave him practical administrative experience. When he went to Durham in 1919 as Lecturer (later Reader) in Mathematics, his capacity for academic business was soon recognized as outstanding among the teaching staff of the Durham Colleges—a staff small in numbers but enjoying an egalitarian participation in the government of the Durham Colleges without parallel among universities in this country outside Oxford and Cambridge.
From 1926 to 1938, Burchnall served as secretary to the council of the Durham Colleges, a part-time post held with his readership in mathematics. He was therefore concerned in the planning and execution of policy during a period when the Durham Colleges had begun to realize that progressive changes were necessary, and when they could not avoid being concerned in the troubles which came to a head in the University of Durham College of Medicine in Newcastle in 1932, quickly involved the whole university, and led to the Royal Commission of 1934 and the new form of the federal university under the statutes of 1937.
It was due to Burchnall and a very few others that the Durham Colleges, emerging from this period, retained so much of their essential characteristics while deriving increased resources and strength from being constitutionally more closely integrated into a progressively minded whole. After 1945, thanks to national policy, the Durham Colleges came into a degree of financial prosperity which previously they had sorely needed but never attained.
Burchnall relinquished the secretaryship to a full-time successor in 1938 and became Professor of Mathematics in 1938. Thenceforward, he was one of the chief statesmen in the rapidly developing federal University of Durham. He served on the Court and the Senate of the University, as well as on the Council and the Academic Board of the Durham Colleges and on a vast series of commit-tees. His acuteness and his practical sense could be relied upon to bring discussion to a useful conclusion; as often as not, decisions were precipitated by a terse and pithy sentence from him. He saw a little further than most of his colleagues.
His characteristic caution was leavened by perseverance and faith. His humour grew less sardonic and his essential kind lines more manifest as his years advanced, and so much that he had worked for came into reality.
When he retired in 1958, the Durham colleges were vigorous, effective, and capable of standing on their own, so that the main argument for the continuation of the federal university in 1937 no longer applied, and the establishment of the separate universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne in 1965 was coming into sight. No one had contributed more than Burchnall to the strength which made this independence possible for Durham.
Mr. W. S. Angus writes:
You formally recorded the death of Professor J. L. Burchnall on April 29, 1975. Those familiar with the government of the University of Durham in the thirties, forties, and fifties will think that his work deserves fuller notice.
It is not uncommon for professors of mathematics to be active in academic administration, but Burchnall's aptitude for it was marked. His mathematical gifts had been established in a distinguished career as an undergraduate at Oxford, 1911–14. Service as an officer in the Royal Artillery, 1915–19, gave him practical administrative experience. When he went to Durham in 1919 as Lecturer (later Reader) in Mathematics, his capacity for academic business was soon recognized as outstanding among the teaching staff of the Durham Colleges—a staff small in numbers but enjoying an egalitarian participation in the government of the Durham Colleges without parallel among universities in this country outside Oxford and Cambridge.
From 1926 to 1938, Burchnall served as secretary to the council of the Durham Colleges, a part-time post held with his readership in mathematics. He was therefore concerned in the planning and execution of policy during a period when the Durham Colleges had begun to realize that progressive changes were necessary, and when they could not avoid being concerned in the troubles which came to a head in the University of Durham College of Medicine in Newcastle in 1932, quickly involved the whole university, and led to the Royal Commission of 1934 and the new form of the federal university under the statutes of 1937.
It was due to Burchnall and a very few others that the Durham Colleges, emerging from this period, retained so much of their essential characteristics while deriving increased resources and strength from being constitutionally more closely integrated into a progressively minded whole. After 1945, thanks to national policy, the Durham Colleges came into a degree of financial prosperity which previously they had sorely needed but never attained.
Burchnall relinquished the secretaryship to a full-time successor in 1938 and became Professor of Mathematics in 1938. Thenceforward, he was one of the chief statesmen in the rapidly developing federal University of Durham. He served on the Court and the Senate of the University, as well as on the Council and the Academic Board of the Durham Colleges and on a vast series of commit-tees. His acuteness and his practical sense could be relied upon to bring discussion to a useful conclusion; as often as not, decisions were precipitated by a terse and pithy sentence from him. He saw a little further than most of his colleagues.
His characteristic caution was leavened by perseverance and faith. His humour grew less sardonic and his essential kind lines more manifest as his years advanced, and so much that he had worked for came into reality.
When he retired in 1958, the Durham colleges were vigorous, effective, and capable of standing on their own, so that the main argument for the continuation of the federal university in 1937 no longer applied, and the establishment of the separate universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne in 1965 was coming into sight. No one had contributed more than Burchnall to the strength which made this independence possible for Durham.
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