ABSTRACT
The first time I met Ted Happold was at the University of Bath in autumn 1976, when he had just been made Professor of Building Engineering and I was a lecturer in the history of ideas. The University of Bath had started life in the previous decade as a College of Advanced Technology, and there was still a strong sense of ‘them and us’ in the relationship between the Schools of Humanities and Engineering. Humanities people were thought by engineers to have both feet planted firmly in the air, to be interpreters rather than performers; Engineering people were thought by historians and social scientists to have both feet planted too firmly on the ground, and to get their rather humourless kicks from reading slides rules on site. Ted, it was immediately apparent, was not a man who fitted either stereotype.
