Swansea University by Sam Blaxland

Author:Sam Blaxland [Blaxland, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, Wales
ISBN: 9781786836069
Google: rmg9zQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2020-06-17T00:59:45+00:00

lots of allies as head teachers in schools in Wales who were very amenable to admission tutors … and were providing students. I, myself, at Tonyrefail [the Rhondda Valley school of which he eventually became the head teacher] sent endless students to the university. It was almost like a pay-back … but I didn’t think of it like that.

Although there are no figures to prove it, ‘I bet you more students went to Swansea as a result of this relationship than would have if it hadn’t occurred in the first place.’47 It was also possible to detect a greater degree of engagement with wider projects and people in other college departments, including beyond its local area. In particular, the Civil Engineering Department under Oleg Zienkiewicz, a person who was known ‘around the world’, contributed to the design of structures like motorway bridges, whilst the Physics Department also forged close links with the European Centre for Nuclear Research at Geneva.48 Scholars from Swansea were making a genuine impact on important practical projects overseas.

People outside, or not directly connected to, the college also had more opportunities and reasons than before to come to Singleton Park and connect with the college. A working group was established in 1976 to prepare ‘detailed proposals for an Arts Centre’ at the college.49 In 1981, it was announced that a series of grants and bursaries would be given out by the Arts Council to regional theatres and arts centres. As part of this, Swansea received £90,000 for a new ‘cultural complex’ at the college.50 Thus, building what would become the Taliesin Centre began at the end of 1983, and it officially opened in June 1984. Although those attending the opening walked past students protesting against proposed cuts in Arts Council grants, the ceremony was attended by a range of notables and dignitaries, including Swansea’s Lord Mayor, the Chair of the Arts Council and the opera singer Sir Geraint Evans, who unveiled the centre’s commemorative plaque.51 The first two weeks after the opening of the centre witnessed a programme of plays, jazz performances and a recital from the pianist Dave Brubeck.52 From its beginning, the public had more reason than ever before to come to the college to see and listen to the range of films, plays and other cultural events that the Taliesin Centre hosted. In 1986, so that it could show more films later in the evening, it applied for an extended bar licence, justifying this by arguing that it was something that would be popular amongst the public.53 The college’s publicity material continued to stress that the centre ‘although owned and run’ by the college, was ‘open to all’.54

Perhaps the most significant and far-reaching evidence that the college was re-positioning itself, responding to wider circumstances and becoming more outward looking came in its reaction to Chilean refugees coming to Britain to study in the mid-1970s. In total, 3,000 came.55 Many families, including José Cifuentes’s, came to Swansea. Driving this scheme was the WUS charity, which

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