58 See Introduction. In an essay written to complement Adshead’s Memoir in 1946, C. H. Reilly described how the idea of a Department of Town Planning ‘occurred to me walking down the Liverpool slum known as Brownlow Hill from the University to the University Club at the bottom. I turned in there and wrote a letter to that grand old man W. H. Lever, founder of the great firm of Lever Bros and afterwards the first Lord Leverhulme. I put the case to him and in less than a week he had not only promised the new Chair but a lectureship as well and a quarterly journal to be called later The Town Planning Review.
’The problem then, with no professional town planners yet in the country . . . was whom to recommend to the University for the new professorship. I had no doubt myself. It must be my old philosophical friend Stanley Adshead and being the only man on the Senate of Liverpool at that time with an allied Chair. . . . the appointment in practice if not in theory rested in my hands.’ [From typescript in possession of Mrs Bone.] Adshead’s title was ‘Associate Professor’ for the first two years.
In a companion piece to Reilly’s, Patrick Abercrombie wrote, ‘My association with Adshead at the Liverpool School of Civic Design was a happy one. For some time while lecturing in the School of Architecture under Reilly, I had been leaning mentally towards Townplanning and here was the opportunity at last to work under the newly appointed head of the newly created Department. And what a figure this was: he was big when he came, but he never ceased growing; the very opposite of the neatly equipped academic personality . . . Much of the work of those early years was done in the old Blue Coat Building, in whose numerous small rooms Adshead maintained a continuous exhibition of every conceivable aspect of town and country — old prints, photographs, maps of town planning schemes, legal diagrams and draught forms, designs for housing schemes and projects for Capital Cities (I remember well the show we had for Canberra). And everywhere books, reports, pamphlets, old and new, the latter largely supplied in exchange for Town Planning Review copies. Through it all stalked Adshead, often dreaming, generally absentminded, forgetful of what things were one moment but intense upon some practical problem the next. . . . Adshead was emphatically not, in the academic sense, a good lecturer; but what students who have anything in them are bothered by that, so long as they know their professor can do things, both in his own work and in their studies? He was capable of looking at a drawing, rubbing his chin gently smiling for five minutes and then without comment, or some remark under his breath colloquial but devastating washing or rubbing the whole thing out. I have seen a student actually in tears; but then came the illuminating constructive suggestion cutting through all the mass of toilsome detail, and before he had finished his rough sketches, the student was convinced and cheerfully set to work again to produce something solid and simple in the end.’ [From typescript in possession of Mrs Bone.]
