World War Lewis joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, serving in the Middle East. In addition to his official duties he helped to organise, and conducted, concerts for the troops. After the war, Lewis returned to the BBC in 1946. His brief was to plan and take charge of the music in the new Third Programme. The Times commented, "its famously high musical standards were substantially due to Lewis's combination of scholarly curiosity and painstaking efficiency". Birmingham and Musica Britannica In 1947, at the age of 32, Lewis joined the faculty of the University of Birmingham as Peyton and Barber Professor of Music, a post he held for 21 years. In The Musical Times his former student and later colleague Nigel Fortune noted that as well as "developing an academically fertile department", Lewis conducted "a wide range of music in professional concerts and with university forces", in demanding modern works such as Les noces and Cantata Profana. At Birmingham, Lewis continued his efforts to revive Baroque music. In live performance he set high standards for performances of choral and stage works. The Musical Times praised his pioneering recordings of little-known works such as Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine and Purcell's The Fairy-Queen and King Arthur, which the magazine considered set new standards. Lewis was an early proponent of the revival of Handel operas, which for 200 years had been generally regarded as unstageable. During his early years as professor at Birmingham, Lewis approached the Royal Musical Association with a proposal to launch a national edition of British music, making available scholarly editions of otherwise generally unpublished scores. He contended: The proposal was agreed, and resulted in the inception of Musica Britannica in 1951. Lewis was its general editor, assisted by Thurston Dart. In its first 20 years the undertaking produced more than 30 volumes. In 1954 Lewis was appointed chairman of the music advisory panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain, holding the post until 1965. While at Birmingham, Lewis married Lesley Lisle Smith (b. 1924) on 10 September 1959. There were no children. Royal Academy of Music In 1968 Lewis was appointed principal of the RAM on the retirement of Sir Thomas Armstrong. His biographer Michael Pope observes that the balance between academic and artistic work that characterised Lewis's life was now tilted away from pure scholarship: "for the next fourteen years he presided over many important developments