I went earlier this evening to a memorial event for Rodney Fitch at Central St. Martin’s.   As often happens on such occasions, I learned much about him which I should have known, but didn’t:  that he had himself been at the Central School of Arts and Crafts;  had been a key person in the early history of the Conran empire as Managing Director of the Conran Design Group;  and what an important person he was in the retail revolution – the transformation of the high street through better shops.   I first met him in the early 1980s (I think when his company had just gone public) when he funded a studentship on the recently established V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design.   His interest and emphasis was on the training of students with a good knowledge of the history of industrial and product design and he was then, and remained, passionately interested in the professionalisation of design education, not least through the University of the Arts.