Much though I enjoyed my few years at Essex, I left for personal reasons: I got divorced and felt that I needed a new start in a new place. I was lucky enough to be appointed to the Chair of Linguistics at Bangor when I was 35. The attraction of the Chair was that it gave me a chance to rearrange other people's lives, rather than having other people rearrange mine. When I first arrived, I felt completely isolated (not helped by being in a building some way from the main campus). So, I spent most of my first summer at home with my parents in Cornwall, where I wrote my Transformational Syntax book (I didn't have any books with me or any access to a library at the time -- hence the limited number of references in the book).
The Linguistics Department at Bangor at that time was desperately short of students, and it was made clear to me that my main task was to improve student recruitment. So, I instigated a policy that every member of staff should teach two different kinds of courses -- research-oriented courses that reflected their own research interests, and student-oriented courses that reflected the students' interests. To set an example, I volunteered to teach a student-oriented course on Child Language Acquisition (which entailed quite a bit of background research since I knew very little about it at the time). The course attracted lots of students every year, and for their assignments I made each of them record a small sample of the spontaneous speech production of a child aged 20-40 months, transcribe it and analyse some aspect of the child's phonology, morphology or syntax. This way, I accumulated a substantial corpus of child acquisition data. After a few years, Child Language Acquisition became one of my main research interests. The Department began to attract more and more students at both graduate and undergraduate level: and the first-year Introduction to Linguistics course became the largest single course in the University.
I used to try and recruit students by wearing a bright yellow sweat-shirt with Linguistics is Fun written on it, and stuffing hundreds of cartoon leaflets in student pigeon holes in order to excite their interest. This was my Debbie Harry period (when Blondie was my favourite group): visitors to my office were taken aback to see that I had covered up the fissures in the plaster on the walls in my office with half a dozen life-sized posters of Debbie Harry. The fissures had appeared after a minor earthquake had shaken the building: I'd been washing up some wine glasses early one morning (after a student party the night before) when I noticed that all the glasses were shaking. My first reaction was 'I didn't drink that much last night, did I?' My next was 'They didn't tell me the building was haunted.' It was a while before the concept of earthquake impinged on my consciousness -- by which time, it was all over.
In the wake of improved student recruitment, we soon had a lively bunch of graduate and undergraduate Linguistics students at Bangor. I have fond memories of many student parties and of my friendship with my late colleague Michael Anthony: we used to scour the Indian restaurants in the locality looking for something hotter than chicken vindaloo; Michael was the life and soul of all parties -- his most memorable party piece being to entertain the audience by acting out all the parts in one of Shakespeare's plays. Of course, there was a serious side to life as well: gradually, I started to have students who'd graduated with first-class degrees staying on to do doctoral research in syntax and acquisition with me -- my PhD students during that era included Michelle Aldridge (now a Senior Lecturer at Bangor) and Adrian Battye (who went on to become a lecturer at York and started to make a reputation as a Romance linguist before his untimely death).
While at Bangor, I married by present wife Khadija, who I had met when she was an MA student. I first noticed her when she came to complain about the impossible workload she faced as an MA student (having never done any Linguistics before) in being required to take five courses on topics she'd never studied before (Phonology, Syntax, Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics and Teaching Methodology) in parallel with each other. She pointed out that it would make life much easier for students like her if we organised teaching in a block system, e.g. with three weeks devoted entirely to Phonology (followed by a reading and essay-writing week), then three devoted entirely to Syntax...and so on. On the basis of her suggestion, we did indeed introduce a block system of teaching, and it proved immensely popular with students (and staff -- you could condense your teaching into blocks, so leaving yourself more teaching-free time for research). Towards the end of my spell at Bangor I wrote my Transformational Grammar book.
Next, returning to Essex.