Pippard as Cavendish Professor

Unlike Bragg, Rutherford and Mott, Brain Pippard was an ‘internal’ candidate for the Cavendish Chair. He had spent most of his academic career in the Cavendish Laboratory where he had carried out outstanding research in low-temperature physics (Sections 12.9.2 and 15.1.1). As recounted in Section 13.5, he had been deeply involved in planning the move of the department toWest Cambridge and in the detailed design of the new buildings. In addition, in 1965 he became the first president of the new graduate college, Clare Hall, where again he was fully involved in the planning and construction phases of the splendid new buildings designed by Ralph Erskine and formally opened in 1969. Mott regarded Pippard as his natural successor as Cavendish Professor and this duly came about in 1971 on Mott's retirement.

During the 11 years of Pippard's tenure of the Cavendish Chair, there were numerous changes in the way the Laboratory was managed in the light of changing circumstances. With the doubling in size of the research and teaching activity under Mott, the Head of Department could no longer assume the commanding role of a Rutherford, but rather acted as the chairman of a ‘company’, the main role being to keep the whole operation on the road. In addition, Pippard was temperamentally quite different from his predecessors. He was very much a hands-on experimental physicist who prided himself on not having held a Research Council grant and asserted that he had never done any experiment which could not be built in the Laboratory workshops. These attitudes were very much in the experimental physics tradition established by J.J. Thomson and Rutherford. Pippard often expressed provocative views, as is illustrated by his banquet speech at an IBM international conference on superconductivity in 1961. John Waldram and I wrote in his biographical memoir for the Royal Society: