EMH EarlyModernHistory

Being a Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher then and now I was a postgraduate researcher and aspiring early career researcher in the 1960s. The context in which I lived and worked was radically different. After the Robbins Report was published in the autumn of 1963, there was a rapid expansion of new universities and the creation of a significant number of history departments across the country. A cohort of young postgraduates and early career researchers took up posts in these departments. Unfortunately, the sterling crisis of 1967 brought this process of expansion to an abrupt end. It became much more difficult for postgraduates like me in the middle of their research to get one of the few posts being advertised while the new incumbents naturally enough stayed put. Looking back, there were all sorts of issues that I was not aware of at the time. As an undergraduate, I had been relatively well off: as a postgraduate on c.£500 a year, I was pretty hard up, especially in compar