Professor Blake meets beneficiaries of family engineering legacy

Professor David Blake (centre), with past and present students. Front row (l-r): Nick Simpson, Daniel Cornish, James Churchman, Jacob Vials, Siyuan Lu, Shirui Zhu, Junfeng Deng, Hayley Mitchell; back row (l-r): James Gwinnutt, Adi Gurtu, Alex McNeill, Adam King, Nicholas Hinitt, Robin Wickenden, John Harris, Amir Safavi Richard Walker

9 May 2008

David Blake, Professor of Bone and Joint Medicine at the University of Bath, recently visited the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering to meet past and present recipients of the Professor Leslie Reginald Blake Memorial Fund.

The legacy, awarded to the department in 2004 by the Blake family in memory of Professor Leslie Reginald Blake, is used to support six (or more) undergraduate bursaries annually. These are awarded to new students studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering for their first year of study.

Professor Blake, accompanied by his wife Sheila, enjoyed a buffet lunch with 16 past and present recipients of the award in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the Merchant Venturers Building, before viewing a new corridor display within the department in recognition of his father’s historical links with Bristol.

A short history
Leslie Reginald Blake was born in Easton, Bristol on 11 April 1923 and, after finishing secondary school in 1939, was employed by the famous Wills Tobacco Factory as an electrician’s mate. An exceptionally bright young man, Blake was awarded a scholarship to study Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol and enrolled in the autumn of 1941.

As an undergraduate during the final years of the Second World War, Blake undertook air-raid watches from the top of Wills Memorial Tower.

Blake graduated from the University of Bristol in 1945, winning the coveted Albert Fry Prize, awarded to the best final-year Honours student within the Faculty of Engineering. His final-year thesis, entitled ‘Static phase conversion’ and a copy of his PhD thesis, ‘Pulse magnetisation’, awarded by Birmingham University in 1948, now reside in Queen’s Library archives. In 1967 Blake was also awarded a DSc from the University of Bristol in recognition of his published papers.