Professor Willie Lamont joined Sussex in 1966 as a Lecturer in History and Education. He retired in 1999.
Well the first exhilarating thing for me really was I'd been in Aberdeen and I'd got out of the blue before I came to Sussex a communication from a Sybil Oldfield, who was a lecturer in English. And she'd picked up on the grapevine that there was a seventeenth century historian coming. So she said she had the idea of starting a course on English literature and the Civil War. And then we corresponded and we'd never met and this to me was astonishing. Astonishing that somebody should just approach me. I mean she knew I was going to come in the summer and was already planning and we discussed things, but we still hadn't met. And the thing I couldn't get my head around was that I'd been a student at the University of London where they change the syllabus about once every two hundred years or something. And here it was "Let's start a course", and of course the course would have to be approved, all that kind of thing. But there was this tremendous openness and I taught with her the course 'English Literature and the Civil War' and eventually we, a book came out of it in the Everyman series. Unfortunately this was just at the time when student demand for this particular course slackened. So Sybil and I never had the chance of teaching the course from the book that we wrote together. But other people said they enjoyed it. It was a little galling. But that was part of the excitement of Sussex.