The extensively rolling lawn at Dartington Hall in Devon, England, once a driving force for social change and community development and now a vibrant fusion of old and new, was an improbable but appropriate place for early ideas on what might now be called "disaster reduction". At the 1972 Summer School of Music and as a family of three, we had returned a few months earlier, by way of contrast, from Hong Kong. While we were there, in 1970, Bangladesh had suffered its largest cyclone ever and 500,000 people had died. Media images from helicopters, of people devastated by the tropical cyclone and desperate for help from helicopters, tragically exposed deficiencies of "disaster relief" as they then were. In Hong Kong, we had experienced serious tropical cyclones ourselves. Typhoon Rose, in 1971, sank a ship and its crew in the harbour, under which was being constructed the first Cross Harbour Tunnel between island and mainland Hong Kong and on which I was working. One of the colossal steel tunnel units was also sunk, in the wrong place, as it waited to be towed to its position.

Having discovered in London some early indications of shifts from "relief" to "prevention", we discussed at Dartington my need to more extensively survey the "disasters" scene (1). In Geneva, United Nations (UNDRO) contacts were kindly but it was the League of Red Cross Societies' Secretary-General who expressed his idea for what might be a demonstration project of "pre-disaster planning" to be based in the Bahama Islands.

Very soon after that visit, a university lecturer friend in our village spotted, in the Sunday paper we didn't take, a job announcement from the Project Planning Centre at the University of Bradford. Applicants were to have an interest in any of a number of subjects – the last of which was "natural disasters". Not having conceived of an academic role for myself, I applied and was invited to interview. "On a shortlist of one" I faced a University committee of probably thirty academics and was appointed subject to funding. A proposal to the Leverhulme Trust was successful so, now as a family of four, we went to Yorkshire.

The Disaster Research Unit was attached to the Project Planning Centre at Bradford. Michael Gane, its director, had undertaken an assessment of the impact of tropical cyclones in Fiji. The Bahamas project went with me, eventually to become a field study, with Phil O'Keefe additionally supported by the UK Overseas Development Administration, and Ken Westgate. I was on a steep learning curve. I never knew the reasons for Michael Gane's resignation from the University, or for the University's discontinuation of the Disaster Research Unit, of which I was co-founder and director. Nevertheless, it formed a secure stepping stone for each of us, for my continuation at the Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath (funded again by the Leverhulme Trust), and for subsequent and continuing applications and writings.

(1) U.K.'s Inland Revenue rejected the inclusion of my Geneva costs as incompatible with my self-employment at that time. At an appeal hearing a year later, I won my case.

Reflections on the Bradford Disaster Research Unit
By Ken Westgate (31 March 2008)

I have no doubt in my mind that my time at the Unit was among the most stimulating periods of my life and set me up for the direction that I subsequently took--and I have not wavered. I graduated from Bradford with a BSc in Geography and Economics in 1973. During the last year I wrote a geography dissertation. There were 26 students in the year so there were 26 subjects to choose from. Having a lazy streak I left it until almost the very last to choose my subject. By that time there were only two topics left. The only interesting subject to me was "The Human Geography of Earthquake Zones in Europe".

My interest developed from here and particularly it was an interest in the literature which I found was dominated by schools of sociology and psychology from the States, the human geography schools (Clark, Boulder, Toronto) and collections of literature around specific major disaster events which included, to my relief, the Skopje earthquake of 1963. We were lucky also in having a Yugoslav Studies Centre at Bradford. So by the time I graduated I had a fair knowledge of the field and a growing interest in it.

On the day I received my undergraduate degree in July 1973, I was approached by my lecturer in economic geography who was aware of my dissertation and he told me that Michael Gane was trying to set up a Disaster Research Unit at the Project Planning Centre for Developing Countries based on his experiences in the Pacific. I did not have a job to go to at the time and therefore I was keen to follow up the suggestion.

I went to see Michael and he agreed with my suggestion that I should become a research student with the new unit using my growing familiarity with the literature as a basis for a wide-ranging study on the human response to disaster. Of course, we needed funding so Michael agreed to make a submission for funding from the UK Social Science Research Council. This would be funds from the residue or "pool" that remained after all the subject specific funds had been allocated. We were successful and these funds covered the two-year period of my studies from 1973 to 1975 after which I was funded from the Unit, either from the contribution made by the University, or the Leverhulme money or from the UK Government's Overseas Development Administration (ODA) that was funding Phil.

Phil O'Keefe on the left and Ken Westgate on the right, in a slide labelled "Bahamas January 1975" (photo copyright and courtesy of James Lewis).

Bradford Disaster Research Unit Occasional Papers