Fellows 2007

Dr Timothy Brain

Thursday 26 July 2007
Fellows 2007

Dr. Timothy Brain QPM, BA, PhD, FRSA
Former student Dr Timothy Brain QPM, BA, PhD, FRSA, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire Constabulary was presented by Pro Vice-Chancellor, Professor Aled Jones, on Wednesday 11 July.

"The University is delighted to award a University Fellowship to Dr Timothy Brain, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire.

Dr Brain is no stranger to Aberystwyth, having attended his own graduation ceremony here on completion of a degree in History in June 1975. He was the top student in his honours class, taking both the second and third year undergraduate prizes, and was awarded a high quality first class degree. He then went on to complete a doctoral thesis here on Bishop Richard Watson, a colourful and controversial cleric of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century (and Bishop of Llandaff from 1782 to 1816).  The thesis is a valuable contribution to the reappraisal of the latitudinarian tradition and Tim's first publication, while he was still a postgraduate student, on Watson and Toleration, drew widespread praise for establishing Watson's place in the Lockeian tradition.

He would, no doubt, have made an excellent academic, able at all aspects of the work, teaching, administration and research.  He would have risen to the top, because he was always interested in ideas, in people and in leadership, but his very special blend of qualities, as both a thinker and a doer, found a home in the Police Force. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, Tim has been closely involved in the latest thinking about policing and criminality.  His ideas are always informed by rational and pragmatic thinking, but also by a concern, that we at least like to think comes from his training here as a historian, that in meeting future challenges, the lessons of the past are not ignored. 

He entered the police force in 1978 under the Graduate Entry Scheme, and sfter training at the Police Staff College at Bramshill,  he began as a constable in Bristol in the Avon and Somerset Force (still writing up his thesis while on the beat), rising to the rank of Chief Inspector in 1990 before being appointed a Superintendant at Basingstoke in the Hampshire Force. In  1993 he attended the Senior Command Course at Bramshill and subsequently was appointed Assistant Chief Constable of the West Midlands Force in 1994. While there he became a member of the revived Lunar Society of Birmingham, which had been the most distinguished gathering of scientists, industrialists and men of letters of its kind in England in the age of the Enlightenment, and Richard Watson, the prelate whom, as I’ve noted, Tim studied for his doctoral thesis, was closely in touch with all the latest trends in enlightenment thought and practice which it exemplified. 

In 1998 he was appointed Deputy Chief of Gloucestershire and subsequently Chief Constable in 2001.  In 2002 he was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal and in the following year the United States Air Force (Europe) Medal of Distinction.

Since 1994 he has been a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers [ACPO], and its spokesperson on prostitution and related vice matters. He drafted the first national guidelines on child prostitution and sexual abuse and has led national operations against people trafficking for sexual exploitation.  He has developed an international reputation on such matters and has advised as far afield as Colombia, where he has advised the Colombian police on child prostitution .
He is a chair of the ACPO’S’s Finance Committee, and was responsible for creating the Association’s strategy in 2004.  Tim is also Chair of the Chief Police Officers’ Staff Association.  He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) in 2004.

Since 2005 he has been Visiting Professor in Criminology and Police Studies at London Southbank University.

As you see, he is a man of immense enthusiasm and energy: he is also Chairman of the British Police Rugby and has travelled with the team to Canada and South Africa. 

He is a keen musician. As a student he was a member of Aberystwyth Philomusica.  He no longer plays the viola but remains an enthusiastic singer and has a deep knowledge of the British choral tradition. His wide ranging expertise was demonstrated last year when he was interviewed by Michael Berkeley on his Sunday morning programme, Private Passions. Tim is Chairman of the British Police Symphony Orchestra, and travels around the country with them. Next year they will be touring abroad.

As if he is not busy enough he is writing a history of policing in England and Wales from 1974-2006 for OUP due to be completed next year (April 2008). He is one of Britain’s key police officers, and he has remained throughout a historian.

The University is proud of your achievements, Tim, and we are honoured to award you a Fellowship."

Lynne Brindley
Ms Lynne Brindley MA, FCILIP, FRSA, Chief Executive of The British Library and Chairman of UK Digital Preservation Coalition was presented by Mr Andrew Green, the National Librarian of Wales, on Thursday 12 July.

"Lynne Brindley is the outstanding librarian of our time.

If the word ‘librarian’ no longer calls to your mind a solitary introvert hunched in silence over dusty leather-bound volumes then Lynne Brindley has done more than anyone else to dispel that image.  She foresaw - and hastened - the electronic revolution that we are living through today, a revolution that has seen libraries expand to embrace a digital knowledge universe of virtually limitless size and reach.

Lynne is a native of Cornwall, and maintains her links with that Celtic land.  She was educated as a musician but almost her entire career has been spent in higher education and national libraries.  These included the British Library and the libraries of Aston University, the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds, where she rose to become Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Lynne’s influence lay behind all the major UK initiatives that paved the way for today’s digital libraries: the virtual colonisation by librarians of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Electronic Libraries Programme, the Research Support Libraries Programme and the genesis of the Research Information Network.  The university libraries of today, with their wired up systems and downloaded knowledge, would look very different without the outcomes of these programmes and the vision that underlay them.

Over the years Lynne has combined an unusually clear sense of vision with the skill and single-mindedness to get things done, especially through the talented people she has recruited.

In 2000 Lynne became the Chief Executive of the British Library: the first woman to hold that post.  (She’s also, incidentally, the first woman in six centuries to have been elected to the Court of the Goldsmiths’ Company.)  In the British Library she’s had the chance to translate her vision into an impressive reality.  During her time there, the law of legal deposit has been modernised, a new Conservation Centre has been opened, and impressive digitisation and exhibition programmes have been organised.  Access to the Library’s reading rooms has been liberalised.  Last year a well-known television historian with a clever turn of phrase but a muddled mind accused Lynne of ‘steadily dismantling a world-class cultural institution under the wholly disingenuous banner of access and inclusion’, and of injecting into the reading rooms ‘a hum of mobile phone ringtones, chit-chat and pubescent histrionics’.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  One of Lynne’s greatest achievements is to show that it’s entirely possible to uphold scholarly excellence and research standards while at the same time democratising access to the world’s knowledge.  The National Library of Wales has a motto, ‘braint pob gwybodaeth’ – all knowledge is a privilege.  It’s not one I like to quote often: we should treat knowledge, as Lynne does, not a privilege but a right made available to all who wish to benefit from it.

Today the British Library is recognised as a world leader in the curation and transmission of recorded knowledge, and Lynne Brindley as one of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners in her field. 

Mae’n bleser ac yn yn wir fraint imi ei chyflwyno yn Gymrawd er Anrhydedd Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth. 

It’s a real privilege – but also an undiluted pleasure - for me to present Lynne Brindley as an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales Aberystwyth."

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