Academic Registrar at Birkbeck for 30 years, Brian Harwood retired in 2008 and was then elected as a Fellow. He notably recalled the challenge of fighting government funding cuts through the 1980s, a situation that recurred more than once during his tenure.

Brian said that what made him stay so long at Birkbeck was recognising the value of adult education on students: “They were admirable – they were mature, the great majority of Birkbeck’s students had jobs, they did not have time to waste and they were business-like and courteous.”

During his time, the student body increased threefold. He established Birkbeck’s disability service, a vital department supporting students with disabilities, both visible and invisible and ensuring they were able to study without hindrance. The disability service continues to provide ongoing student support today

A lifelong equalities campaigner and former President of Birkbeck, Baroness Betty Lockwood was born in West Yorkshire in 1924. Her early educational experiences prepared her well for the presidency of Birkbeck, which she held from 1983-1989.

After studying at Eastborough Girls School, she continued her studies at night school. Then, with the support of a Mary Macarthur scholarship for working women, she read economics and politics at Ruskin College, Oxford.

In 1978, she was made a life peer. Her parliamentary roles included Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission from 1975-83 and deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 1990-2007.

Sir Bernard Crick was the founding professor of Birkbeck’s Department (later School) of Politics and Sociology in 1971.

Crick’s three early books, The American Science of Politics (1958), In Defence of Politics (1962) and The Reform of Parliament (1964) established his reputation. His best known work was George Orwell: A Life, published in 1980. Crick established the annual Birkbeck Orwell Lecture and the Orwell Prize for political writing.

For Crick, politics was “ethics done in public”. His aphorism was another way of saying that he was an enthusiastic advocate of the unity of theory and practice. The entire raison d’être of academic politics was to forge an engaged citizenry.

Crick retired from Birkbeck in 1984, moving to Edinburgh where he was appointed Honorary Fellow of the University. His enthusiasm for active citizenship led him to the educational plans for citizenship studies in school curricula, appointed to this task in 1997 by his former Sheffield student David Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education. He also devised education programmes for immigrants in UK citizenship and tests for candidates seeking British naturalisation. He was knighted in 2002.

The celebrity painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, was a staunch advocate for the arts and famous for his enthusiasm for reviving British history painting on vast canvases in the first half of the nineteenth century.

He gifted his wooden palette to Birkbeck in gratitude for “opening their doors to him when every other institution had the moral cowardice to close them”, which is still on display in the Blue Corridor in Malet St.

Haydon became well known as a lecturer, teaching art at Birkbeck in 1835. His classes were popular, often attracting hundreds of people, including one in which he brought along a model to pose nude for the duration of his lecture on the subject of the nude in art. He campaigned vigorously for the wider appreciation of art, contending that governments had a responsibility to buy works of artistic merit and to allow the general public, as opposed to patrons and connoisseurs only, to view them.

Pimlott joined the Department of Politics and Sociology in 1981 and, during his two decades at Birkbeck, published distinguished biographies on Hugh Dalton, Harold Wilson, and the Queen. Pimlott’s aim was to communicate the importance of politics beyond the academy.

For Pimlott, writing was a “mechanism for revolution”. His sensitivities towards the political sensibilities of the wider British public were revealed in the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. When Number Ten telephoned him in panic, asking “what can we do? what is the mood?”, Pimlott is reported to have responded “’we could call her the People’s Princess’, which was … what he had called Princess Elizabeth in The Queen”.

When Tony Blair used those words in his address to the nation, they became the touchstone for a nation in mourning.

Barbara was professor of English literature at Birkbeck from 1970 to 1989, specialising in nineteenth century literature. In 1962, Hardy was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy for her monograph The Novels of George Eliot.

In 1988 she delivered the British Academy’s Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History. In 1997, she was awarded the Sagittarius Prize by the Society of Authors for her novel London Lovers.

Barbara was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1997, and a Senior Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2006.

B.S. Johnson is a legendary ‘underground’ figure: an ‘experimental’ novelist whose work is only now being recognised and celebrated for its ground breaking and provocative originality.

Johnson studied a pre degree level course in English, Latin and History at Birkbeck in 1955/6 whilst working at Standard Oil. His first novel was published in 1963, but it was later works, such as The Unfortunates (1969) that perhaps best show Johnson’s innovations with form: the book was published in a cardboard box, and readers could read it in more or less any order. Receiving early accolades from Samuel Beckett, Johnson went on to establish his reputation both nationally and internationally. He worked across diverse fields of cultural production: active in film making, TV, theatre and acting as poetry editor of Transatlantic Review. Johnson won the Eric Gregory Award in 1962 and the Somerset Maughan award in 1967. As he predicted, his fame came posthumously- Jonathan Coe’s biography (2004) certainly helped establish Johnson’s reputation. His worked has since been turned into films, has provided the focus for conferences and has also been celebrated musically, Luke Haines’ 2001 album being a good example of Johnson’s continuing cultural reach.

Scholars in English and law at Birkbeck have worked on, are working on- and publishing on Johnson’s work.

Born in Hammersmith, Johnson was from a humble background (his mum was a barmaid and his dad a stock keeper). He remained proud of his working class roots, and working class culture- and saw no contradiction between this and his interest in European and avant garde traditions. Birkbeck enable Johnson to get a degree (he actually graduated from Kings). As Coe’s biography shows, studying literature was central to Johnson’s career as a novelist and a poet. Johnson is evidence of the ‘Birkbeck effect’– a figure of international and ongoing cultural importance. He exemplifies the way in which Birkbeck encourages creativity, and provides a trajectory for those who have vision and talent to realise their trajectory.

Hiley is a British quantum physicist and professor emeritus of the University of London.

Hiley is known for his work with fellow scientist David Bohm, co-authoring the book The Undivided Universe with Bohm, which is considered the main reference for Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory.

In 1961 Hiley was appointed assistant lecturer at Birkbeck College, where Bohm had taken the chair of Theoretical Physics shortly before.  Hiley wanted to investigate how physics could be based on a notion of process, and he found that Bohm held similar ideas. Hiley worked with David Bohm for many years on fundamental problems of theoretical physics.

In 1995, Basil Hiley was appointed to the chair in physics at Birkbeck. He was awarded the 2012 Majorana Prize in the category The Best Person in Physics for the algebraic approach to quantum mechanics and furthermore in recognition of ″his paramount importance as natural philosopher, his critical and open minded attitude towards the role of science in contemporary culture”.

A luminary of the Arts who was regularly seen at Birkbeck’s theatre, Arthur Wing Pinero later became one of the most distinguished dramatists and stage directors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pinero first walked into the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution in Southampton Buildings in 1870. Although he signed up to four years of legal classes, his real reason for choosing Birkbeck was its magnificent theatre and unrivalled reputation for dramatic performances. Within only a couple of years, Pinero had won the College’s prize for dramatic technique.

Upon completing his legal training, Pinero accepted a job as actor in the Edinburgh Stock Company, first appearing at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh in 1874. Two years later, he returned to London with the Lyceum Company. He became a prolific dramatist, producing over fifty dramas, some of which had over 1,000 performances.

Today, Pinero’s plays don’t seem particularly subversive, but at the time they represented a seismic shift in theatrical theme and performance. Pinero’s “new women”, for example, were sexually liberated, politically astute, career-minded and edgy.

Annie Besant left a mark on Birkbeck in the late nineteenth century because the college discriminated against her on the grounds of her radical social politics. Besant had published The Gospel of Atheism in which she said that “ignorance … imagined the supernatural, and knowledge would bring all things within the reason of common sense”.

She was a leading advocate of birth control, a revolutionary idea for the time that made her a target for the authorities: she lost custody of her two children. The Birkbeck Committee, when it learned of who she was, failed to send her a “notice of the public distribution of certificates” and removed her name from their list of successful students. She protested vehemently and, with the backing of the Students’ Union, she won her case for having her name printed in the next syllabus “with an explanation as to its being an omission”.