Brian Sefton, the distinguished artist who was on the staff at the Art College, recalls Charlie’s determination to found a glass degree course. He took colleagues to look not only at the Pyrex Works – Sunderland’s famous home of laboratory and kitchen glassware – but to the glassmakers Hedley Woods, where they used virtually unchanged medieval techniques for producing plate glass.

It became apparent that Charlie had an embracing knowledge of the material science behind glassmaking. He discovered that there was a shortage of textbooks covering the areas in which he was now so emphatically keen to work. So, over the next few years, he wrote them. The Dictionary of Glass; Glassblowing; and Ceramics and Glass became standard works, now to be found on the shelves of any individual or institution anywhere in the world concerned with the creative or practical aspects of the work.

He had worked out techniques that even the glass industry didn’t recognise or understand, says Brian, and in addition to lobbying and planning successfully for the establishment of the degree course, Charlie was a hugely admired teacher. He treated students with respect and concern for their welfare; and he was resourceful to a fault. If the college couldn’t afford new equipment, he’d arrive at work with his car laden with discarded components he’d cadged from British Gas or whoever.

Charlie was, says Brian, a gentleman in the best and widest sense of that word and was a huge asset to the institution. There never would have been a course – or the National Glass Centre in Sunderland – had it not been for him. And the man who had hardly any formal qualifications, let alone a degree, was eventually awarded an honorary fellowship by the University that the old Sunderland technical and art colleges had become in the 1980s.