A portrait of the past

Bill Joynson by Professor David Wood

A portrait of the past

When Bill Joynson joined the Psychology Department in 1948 the only other member of staff was the professor, Walter Sprott. Bill taught psychology to generations of undergraduate students, retiring in 1987 after 39 years of distinguished service.

In 2016, Emeritus Professor David Wood painted a portrait in oils of Bill, based on a photograph of him taken by Peter Barnes in 2009.  The framed portrait was presented to Professor Peter Mitchell, representing the Department, at the event in October to celebrate the launch of Childhood into Adolescence: growing up in the 1970s.

Childhood into Adolescence

In 2014, Professors John and Elizabeth Newson were honoured on the list of the university’s ‘100 Heroes’.  Members of the department from the 1950s to the 1990s, they enjoyed a high public profile, largely on account of their research into patterns of child rearing in a sample of  Nottingham families.  Mothers were interviewed when their children were 1, 4, 7, 11 and 16. The findings from the first three age-stages were published in four books between 1963 and 1977, three of which reached a wide audience as Pelican paperbacks.

A book about the 11-year-old children was written in the early 1980s but, for unknown reasons, was never published.  Until now!  The manuscript was found in 2016, after John and Elizabeth’s deaths, when their daughter Carey was sorting through their papers.  Peter Barnes and Susan Gregory, former members of the Child Development Research Unit, have edited the text and written a context-setting introduction, and Professor Charlie Lewis (University of Lancaster) has contributed a final chapter reviewing the Nottingham project as a whole.

Childhood into Adolescence: growing up in the 1970s is published by Routledge.  You can read more about it at www.routledge.com/9781138565968 The book was launched at an event in the department on Saturday 20 October attended by 60 people, including former students on the Newsons’ Masters course on Child Development, former associates of the CDRU and members of the Newson family.

Text provided by Prof. Peter Barnes.