A tribute to Huw Jones by Charlotte Lythe

It seems somehow typical of Huw Jones that his formal retirement neatly marks the completion of a forty year service in Dundee.

When he came here, it was to the geography department in Queens college in the University of St Andrews, and his first years saw some of the tensions as the incipient University of Dundee was trying to assert its independence.

Huw is a product of the University of Wales, where Aberystwyth had established itself as the dominant force in producing academic geographers for UK universities, and the Welsh influence was already strong in the department before Huw joined it. His senior colleague, Stanley Jones, claimed that in his own valley he was known as "Jones the map". It would have been fair to dub Huw Jones "Jones the people" because population geography has been his abiding academic interest. He was thus well placed to play a major part in one of his department's early academic innovations.

In the early 1960s the MA degree programme was rigidly structured, and as it was made more flexible the geography department took the opportunity to increase its role by developing a new first year course in demography and biology. This was in turn the precursor of the degree programme in environmental science, which the department offered from the early 1990s to broaden its teaching and which involved pioneering cross faculty collaboration.

In common with many of his contemporaries, Huw initially devoted most of his attention to teaching undergraduate students, with the emphasis in his research, being to illuminate his teaching rather than to build up an extensive publications portfolio. He also found time to captain the staff cricket club, for which he was a guileful bowler. But when the presence of research publications became more significant for personal and departmental academic profiles, Huw was quick to respond.

The award in 1993 of a personal chair was generally recognised as a rather overdue recognition of the quantity and quality of his research output, including his well regarded monograph. In 1994 he led a project to establish the centre for applied population research which now brings together the work of four members of staff, two research assistants and six post graduates.

One of Huw's recent research interests has been Thailand and in consequence the department has hosted a steady stream of Thai research students. Huw is joint editor of the International Journal of Population Geography.

Huw's widest contribution to the University is his spell as dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences, which he completed in July 2002. His period as dean coincided with major changes in the administrative structure of the University, with a significant shift in power from heads of departments to deans.

Within the faculty, the transition seemed remarkably gentle because Huw was sensitive to departmental sensibilities. I am, however, fully aware of the debt the interdisciplinary schools in the faculty owe to his determination to support them. He worked patiently, and ultimately successfully, to win an improved unit of resource for the laboratory disciplines within the faculty and to achieve full funding for all the faculty's students.

Academically he led the faculty towards a fully modularised degree structure; whilst he was happy to leave the fiddly details to colleagues, he provided the clear general leadership that the faculty needed to persuade it to embrace the new structure and to think through its implications.

In his retirement, Huw has every intention of continuing his research. From his new eyrie high in the tower he will be well placed to observe his legacy to the University he has served so faithfully.

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