John Hodgkinson, OBE, university administrator, was born on December 17, 1918. He died on January 4, 2004, aged 85.

John Hodgkinson was the university administrator par excellence. He joined the fledgeling University College of North Staffordshire when it had 600 students and supervised its development into the University of Keele with such success that university administrators from around the world came to ask how it was done.

Almost as its guardian, he saw principals and vice-chancellors come and go. He was central to all that Keele University did, and when he retired in 1982 it had 2,800 students.

After two years in industry, and five years as assistant registrar at the University of Birmingham, he was appointed Registrar of Keele in 1953. Keele had been founded in a time of severe postwar austerity. Its size was limited by the Government’s unwillingness to fund growth in its four-year degree courses.

In the 1970s student anger was vented against the Registrar and the Registry, which was broken into, occupied and set on fire — and even against his house. Yet he remained good-humoured and, had the radical students but realised it, he was more inclined to be sympathetic than to be hostile. Students and graduates were important to him, and he was the chairman and the mainstay of the Keele Society for many years.

He was adept at a quiet word here, a handwritten draft there, or a word over coffee in the senior common room. He also had a firm belief in the importance of academic freedom and the independence of universities. When the University Grants Committee sought “to develop techniques of comparative analysis of university costs”, he exposed the exercise in a letter to The Times in 1965 as both dangerous and useless.

He was appointed OBE in 1977.