In 1928, when I was launched on the world to seek a living and a career, the choices open to a young man with a public-school and university background were more restricted in some ways than those of today, wider in others. They were more restricted because industry and commerce (not finance, which lacked the social stigma of trade) played a much smaller part in them. On the other hand, for the majority who aimed to follow the traditional occupations of the upper middle classes—the learned professions, teaching at all levels, the public services—the opportunities were wider, for the British Empire was their parish. Many joined the Indian, Colonial or Sudan civil services, or such fringes of colonialism as the Chinese consular service, and other opportunities in the Empire overseas offered themselves for educators and other professionals. The heaviest impact of the end of empire upon the stratum of British society in which I was raised was the fracture of that web of Imperial service (including the Indian Army and other overseas armed forces) in which few professional-class families had no participant. My father started in the Indian Civil Service, one uncle of mine was a police officer in India, another a doctor in the Sudan, and an aunt the matron of a military hospital in the Far East.
A generation earlier, I daresay, my own assumed destiny would have been the Indian Civil Service, but in the 1920s the future of the British raj seemed uncertain, and high ambition unlikely to be fulfilled in India: in fact, my Oxford contemporaries, who, like Philip Mason, had joined the ICS had their Indian careers broken in 1947 when they were about 40, just when they were reaching the higher ranks of government in New Delhi or the Indian provinces, though most of them found good employment for their talents afterwards. So I sat for the then protracted and arduous civil service examination, and passed fourth in the Kingdom. The curiosity of the results however, indeed their effrontery—was the fact that in the compulsory English paper I did so badly that almost all the candidates lower on the mark list, and many higher, had names which indicated that English was not their mother tongue; I was so incensed that I resolved to contradict the examiners by making my career through writing.
Meanwhile, however, I had got cold feet about the civil service for another, less silly, reason. I shrank from the prospect, which suddenly came into focus, of going day after day into Whitehall for forty years, turning over official papers. I wanted a life with more freedom to write and speak. On the eve of the medical examination, which would have finalised my entry, I withdrew. It was a decision which I did not repent; for three years later I was indeed working in Whitehall, on the secretariat of the Economic Advisory Council, in a higher rank and at twice the salary that I would have achieved, as a normal entrant into the service.
Yet another sort of career did I reject in those summer months of 1928. The Warden of New College, HAL Fisher, an imposing figure who had been a Cabinet Minister in Asquith’s Administration, invited me to become the College’s economics tutor in succession to Lionel Robbins. The latter may indeed have recommended me; for I had been “farmed out” to him for tutorials in economic theory, Balliol then having no economics don of its own except AB Rodger, who taught economic history and was better known as a tolerant Junior Dean and a friend of the Master’s. Lionel was one of the clearest-minded economists of his time, and I owe a great deal to his teaching when I was young and his friendly counsel when were both old. It was a distinction that I cherish to have been taught economics by him, and, for a term or two, by John Hicks, who was much later to win the Nobel Prize. My academically ambitious contemporaries in the economics school, like Henry Phelps Brown—a close friend in our undergraduate days, whose talents and lucid good sense, specialising in the economics of of labour, were under-used by governments—thought I was mad not to accept that enticing offer from a great college; but I had a good reason for turning it down. I did not believe, and I still do not believe, that economics—the study of behaviour by business, government and the public in all matters measurable in money, should be taught by people who have no practical experience of economic life, who move straight from school to university and thence to teaching, to instruct a following generation whose brightest members may well follow the same enclosed cycle. The best economists, in my judgment, have all had some such experience, if only in government service. Indeed, in my later life, my acquaintance with younger economists, especially at Ditchley conferences, made me suspect that the evil of academic enclosure had grown worse. Instead of speaking the language of the market-place they employed an occult jargon of their own, and seemed far more interested in technical exchanges among themselves than in answering practical questions from outside their charmed circle, or in learning, from those with experience, how economic man actually ticks. Anyway, without remorse I decided that an academic career, so temptingly exposed to me, was not to be my instant commitment at the age of 22.
So, twice in one summer I rejected the tramlines on which I might have progressed through life. I did it again when I left the staff of the Economic Advisory Council to be apprenticed as editor of The Round Table magazine, and a fourth time when I returned to journalism from the civil service after the war. On that last occasion the circumstances were peculiar, but the others surely reveal a latent impulse which overcame rational calculation of advantage: a thirst for freedom to express oneself, to write, to travel, to have a variety of experiences, to meet many different people. The danger which I did not altogether escape, is to know something about everything, but be expert in nothing.
There was a time, in the 1950s, when I thought of going into politics, but I could not afford it and I would have been a bad politician; for besides finding every party misguided in some major policies, I was not one of those prepared to accept the authority of Ministers and Party Whips on all the other issues on which an MP has to vote. In retrospect, too, I fear that an MP’s life would have put an intolerable strain on my marriage. Unless a woman is herself a keen politician, or is aware, when she marries, of the kind of life she must lead as a politician’s wife, she has a right to expect more time, more attention, more sharing of her own interests, than a husband is able to give who has to spend his evenings in the House, his weekends in the constituency, and his holidays on missions of one sort or another. At a dinner party given by Lady Rhys-Williams, long years ago, an MP, later a Peer, who, as it happened, had entered politics by a door that I might have taken after the war, arrived late with apologies for being detained by a debate, and with more apologies left early for a 10 o’clock vote. Turning to my neighbour, the late Mary Duchess of Devonshire, I said “Of course, you must be used to this sort of thing, having been an MP’s wife for so long.” She paused for a moment before replying: “You know, from my childhood I never thought there was any other kind of life.” She was a Cecil, a Prime Minister’s granddaughter, whose father and two uncles as well as her husband had been MPs before entering the Upper House. But a woman from a more usual background has very different feelings, and is unlikely to enjoy sharing her husband with a mistress so demanding as political ambition.
In the first few years after I went down from Oxford, I changed occupations several times in what must have seemed a shiftless way. My first job, at 300 pounds a year, a fair salary for a beginner in those days, was as a dogsbody on the staff of The Economist, then housed in half-a-dozen rooms in a building in Bouverie Street, next door to Punch. The entire editorial staff, besides my novice self, consisted of the editor, Walter Layton (later Lord Layton), the deputy editor, Leonard Reid, the assistant editor, Aylmer Vallance, the financial editor, my brother-in-law Norman Crump, the stock-exchange editor, Hargreaves Parkinson, a lady in charge of the foreign correspondence, including what she embarrassingly called the French letter, Miss Rhodes (was her first name Diana? I can’t be sure, for modes of address were not as familiar as they are today, and we all called her Miss Rhodes), and a character of warrant-officer status, Mr Chapman, whose duty it was to compile and check the statistical pages (mainly stock-exchange prices and yields) which were then an important feature of the paper: these figures were his whole life, and it was said that, a keen follower of cricket, he took them with him to work on between overs at Lord’s or the Oval. Chapman had his own cubby-hole, the editor and his deputy had their separate offices, while four of us worked in one room not more than 20 feet square.
Besides the permanent editorial staff (and the equally exiguous management presided over by Walter’s brother Gilbert Layton) there were one or two regular contributors outside. Arnold Toynbee wrote the “diplomatic” articles and attended the weekly editorial conferences; his “copy”, written in his own hand, hardly ever bore a correction or deletion, yet was couched in impeccable English and was of precisely the right length—a tribute to the clarity and organisation of his thought. I worked with him closely in the 1930s, as author of the economic chapters in his famous annual “Survey of International Affairs”, on which chapters my own book “Slump and Recovery 1929-1937” was based. For all his vast learning, he was an unpretentious man, easy to talk with and open to the free-est debate. The characteristic nodding of his head as he spoke or listened did not always signify assent, but rather appreciation that there must be a lot in your argument or you would not have advanced it. He had plenty of humour and lightness, notwithstanding his majestic historical philosophy and strong political principles. I was in no position to challenge the former, nor did I dissent from the latter. He lived with encyclopaedic knowledge as other men live with their families, their ambitions or their memories, integrally and all through the day; but in conversation they caused him to be neither pompous nor dogmatic. Working with him made one self-critical of untidy thought or defective evidence.
The Economist was, of course, anonymously written throughout and was very much a home-made product. In one issue I had written four articles out of five in the front of the paper: the leader, a piece on industrial rates, an article in a series I was doing on British investment abroad, and a routine analysis of insurance company reports. I was 23 or 24. Most of us on the staff, probably all, buttered our bread by doing other work of economic journalism. Leonard Reid sent a daily cable to a New York newspaper reporting briefly on the London money market. When he went on holiday one summer he asked me to stand in for him, introducing me to the bankers, discount brokers and others in the City who gave him his information. I faithfully sent off the daily item, using the condensed jargon of the money market in the belief that I was thus saving cable wordage and that a sub-editor in New York would puff out the text into readable English. I was wrong. When Leonard eventually got his clippings from New York he found that for three weeks his space had been filled with despatches unintelligible to anyone without the right technical code. Since not a single complaint reached him he ruefully concluded that no one ever read his money market news. But his bread continued to be buttered.
For my part, in addition to the research I was doing into British investment abroad (on which there were then very few statistics, beyond those compiled by Sir Robert—later Lord—Kindersley of Lazards), I was invited by Sir Edward Hilton Young (later Lord Kennet of the Dene), then editor of the Financial News, to write a series of articles, based on direct investigation on the effect of “de-rating” on British industry. Partial “de-rating” of industrial premises was included in the reform of the local rate system introduced by Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer in an effort to revive industry during the great depression. Hilton Young, a hero of the Zeebrugge raid, where he lost an arm, was a formidable, almost a forbidding person. Strongly built, erect, conventionally clad with white stiff collar and dark suit, he fixed one with a monocular stare and spoke in magisterial periods. When much later he was the visiting lion at a Gresham’s School prize-giving his juvenile audience were riveted less by his speech, which was orotund, or even by his eyeglass, than by his practice of crumpling each sheet of his notes with his single hand and dropping it at the feet of the headmaster.
The Financial News assignment gave me memorable experiences. The lightest among them was accompanying touring theatrical companies on cross-country Sunday trains; for my visits to the provinces had to be made between attendances in Bouverie Street from Tuesday to Friday. After interviews on Saturday mornings (in those days industrialists, like their employees, worked a five and a half day week) I would often relax at the local theatre or music-hall and then find myself on Sunday travelling by train with the artistes—looking very different in slacks and slippers—to their next six-day stand. In Cardiff I was enormously entertained by a certain Gracie Fields, then married to her manager Archie Pitt, years before she became nationally famous. A more important experience was contact with company directors and managers in centres of industry from South Wales to Tyneside, places widely different in economic condition and outlook from London and the south-east where I had spent my life, as they are today. It was a cure for theoretical socialism, for it convinced me that the problems of industry can be solved by the industries themselves, not by politicians or civil servants. I learnt, too, that the larger the concern and the more distinguished its head the more time and trouble he was prepared to give to a serious press investigator: some small manufacturer would keep me waiting in a dingy ante-room as if I were an unwelcome salesman, and then could scarcely trouble to look up from a litter of documents: whereas the chairman of a huge national concern, like Sir Josiah Stamp, chairman of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, at that time the largest private-enterprise company in Britain, would punctually keep an appointment and talk with me for half an hour across a desk cleared of all paper.
Walter Layton was not only my boss as editor but also a friend who became for me quite a hero. Asked what was my hope and ambition in life, I might well have answered, “to be another Walter Layton.” As editor and writer he thought for himself and shaped the thoughts of others; as an economist he advised governments and opposition; as an expert he was enlisted for many a public service; as a man he was simple, friendly and trusting. He exerted much influence behind the scenes, as well through the range of his friends as through the force of his opinions; though a lifelong Liberal, he advised statesmen of all parties. It was impossible to dislike Walter Layton, difficult not to love him, and his wife too, who shared his interests and worked as hard as he did for the causes they believed in. Flexible and undogmatic in his views, he seemed to some people fluffy: I laugh still at that paragraph of Beachcomber’s in The Daily Express: “I hear that the knitted woollen statue of Sir Walter Layton in Trafalgar square is coming unwound.” His rather tremulous manner of speaking, as if the words came to his lips in tiny bubbles, encouraged this judgement. But it was undeserved. He knew his facts and was wise: wisdom is often unemphatic and compromising.
One of my richest experiences was to accompany him to the Reparations Conference in Lausanne. He must have wanted me badly as an aide when he was suddenly called on to assist the British delegation; for I was summoned from a remote Norfolk village, far from telephones, by a policeman on a bicycle. I caught the first train I could to London, and after dining in the mausoleum-like National Liberal Club Walter and I travelled together to Switzerland. At the conference itself I was an outsider, fraternising with the newspaper correspondents and the lesser civil servants. Besides playing confidential secretary to Layton I was his liaison with The News-Chronicle, which he had recently taken over. That role gave me a life-long sympathy for the foreign or specialist newspaper correspondent. I learnt how many hours can be spent waiting in lobbies to garner a grain of information from the official performers; how much must be read from a smile or a frown on the face of an Aristide Briand or a Gustav Stresemann as he left for lunch; how frustrating editorial treatment of one’s copy can be. I had a maddening experience at Lausanne when my scoop of a lifetime, an authentic leak of the Conference’s main conclusions, thinly wrapped to protect my source (not Layton) achieved only a feeble headline on page 2 of The News-Chronicle, while the same news, officially released the next day, was the splash story on page 1. The outcome of that conference was immensely important for the stock market and for the whole economic prospect. Perhaps I might have been more explicit, but I was a novice, and Trilby Ewer, a highly-practised professional, fared no better with The Daily Herald.
Trilby was a first-class journalist, who became the doyen of diplomatic correspondents in Fleet Street. Economics were not his strong line, and I think that some of his opinions were adopted less from conviction than from a wish to conform to the orthodoxy of the Labour right. Many years later, when I was editor of The Sunday Times, he and Paul Bareau and I, chaired by William Clarke (then of The Observer, later of Number 10 Downing Street and the World Bank) held a weekly radio conversation, live and unrehearsed, on current affairs for the BBC European Service. (Percy Cudlipp sometimes took the Labour role.) Though we were supposed to represent three rival party viewpoints we often had to use artifice in order to differ sharply enough for the dialogue to take life. Most politicians are practised in this behaviour, since their reason for existing is to oppose each other. Newspaper editors, professionally practised in criticism, are much more apt to make middle-of-the-road judgments, or to say, “a plague on both your houses.”
Aylmer Vallance, who joined The Economist team shortly after I did, was an odd man out in that rather conventional company. Whereas I lunched at a sandwich bar, he had a glass or two of wine at El Vino’s, after breakfasting on a cup of coffee. “Such men are dangerous.” (The only days on which we usually dined in Fleet Street were Thursdays, when the paper went to press and we worked late: at the now defunct Anderton’s Hotel, I remember, one could get an excellent fillet steak for two shillings, 10 pence in present money.) Aylmer had many interesting and unusual friends, including the Russian ambassador, Maisky, with whom, not knowing who he was, my wife was chatting at an al-fresco evening party at the Vallances’ house in Hampstead. “Have you been long in England?” she asked him. “About three years.” “Won’t you be going back to Russia soon?” At the height of Stalin’s purges, Maisky was quite discomposed, as if this innocent question had been a portent. Aylmer became editor of The News-Chronicle, which he certainly enlivened, but I do not think he had the brass to be in charge of a popular daily.
While I was working for The Economist I was enlisted as honorary secretary of a group of Oxford dons (including two Heads of Houses) and distinguished Oxford alumni who were exercised about the cumbersome, antiquated system under which the University was governed, believing it to be no longer suited to the changing conditions of the day—new subjects, new educational impulses, growth of the physical sciences, closer scrutiny by the outside world, fresh financial problems. After the group had met at weekends for some months it concluded that it needed to know more about the way in which universities in other countries were governed, particularly the presidential systems of North America. So I was invited to go out to Canada and the United States, to investigate and report. Armed with prestigious letters of introduction I met, among others, the Presidents of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, McGill and Toronto Universities, Swarthmore College and the Universities of Virginia at Charlottesville and Michigan at Ann Arbor. Some of these notables have faded from memory, but others I remember well, sometimes for odd reasons. General Currie, a Canadian hero of the first World War, marched me round an Oxford-pastiche quadrangle at McGill in Montreal telling me, not how its affairs were conducted, but how one of its scientists had discovered a means of avoiding (perhaps it was only mitigating, but the General’s enthusiasm carried him away) menstruation in women. It was on this visit that I met Stephen Leacock, the famous humourist, who held the chair of economics at McGill, in the company of Eugene Forsey. Eugene had been one of his pupils before winning a Rhodes scholarship and had shared tutorials with me at Balliol; he became one of Canada’s most eminent academic figures, gaining the Canadian equivalent of the Order of Merit. He had a gift for dialectic, but I think he found Kant and Hegel hard going, as I did. Leacock invited us to tea, with two or three others, at the University Club. A tray of tea was indeed brought in, but no one, except perhaps Eugene, who was abstemious, partook of it: our host made it clear that in his estimation whiskey was the proper drink for a man at the end of an afternoon. In conversation he was not a comedian, but there were flashes of earthy wit from a bluff no-nonsense Tory.
Sir Robert Falconer, President of Toronto University, was reckoned the most powerful figure in Canadian academic life, whose formidable reputation was enhanced by his being protected by a Cerberus of a woman secretary, to pass whose guard cut each visitor down to size. Sir Robert, however, spoke with great frankness about university governance: “The most important roll of a university president,” he told me, “is to protect the faculty from the trustees.” Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia was a famous public figure, a colleague of President Wilson, a notable orator. I thought him rather gaseous, not at grips with the real problems of a vast urban university. Sharply contrasted was Robert Hutchins of Chicago. Appointed to head one of America’s greatest universities at the age of about 30, he was the “whizz kid” of that world; I remember him as a tough, businesslike figure who might well have been a corporation executive, the typical “organisation man”. Contrasted again was president Elliot of Harvard, elderly, slight, yellowish (this may have been a reflection from his light-brown boots), the perfect academic aristocrat, a sad man who had recently lost his wife. We walked together round the campus for an hour, while he talked with me of many things, large and small. More than a year later, to my astonishment, he called on me in London when I was working in the Cabinet Office; that he should even have remembered so young and insignificant a person surprised me, but under his old-fashioned code of manners it was proper to repay a call by an overseas visitor when opportunity arose.
To turn that matter on its head, the problem of repaying hospitality enjoyed abroad has troubled me for much of my life. From my twenties onward I have received, often with my wife, great hospitality from many people in many countries, especially North America and Australasia. If our hosts were personal friends, no problem arose, but many others whom one hardly knew gave dinner parties for me or us, or put me up for a night or two on my travels, and when they came to England one had neither the resources nor, often, the leisure to offer them equal entertainment. When we were much younger than they were, or manifestly less affluent, this may not have mattered; but I remember a New Zealand lady in whose home I had stayed, and to whom we as young-marrieds offered a modest luncheon in London, speaking very sourly of the countless English visitors for whom she and her husband had kept open house but who never thought of returning that welcome when they came to England. I fear there always has been a certain one-sidedness in the exchange. The fact that we British are greatly impressed by the hospitality of Americans, Australians and others whose lands we visit implies, does it not, that our own is much less generous. It is not a matter merely of ill manners, meanness or snobbery, though these are not always absent; there is a natural contrast between the social conduct of an old, enclosed society, and that of peoples who have inherited much of the pioneer tradition and to whom any stranger is a welcome guest.
President Aydelotte of Swarthmore was another charmer and a cheerful host, though my memory of him is scarred by an incident of acute embarrassment. He was not only a nationally distinguished academic figure but also president of the association of American Rhodes Scholars, which was no doubt why on my hasty tour of universities I visited that comparatively small and out-of-the-way though famous college. He and his wife invited me to stay, and gave a dinner party on the evening of my arrival. My train was late, and when I reached their house the other guests were already assembled. I was asked to change as quickly as I could. I tumbled my suitcase out on the bedroom floor and jumped into dinner-jacket gear, but could not find my black tie, search as I might. I dared not appear below, I could not stay above. In an American home there was no domestic servant to ring for. At last, by hanging about in the hall, I was able to send in a message, and Frank Aydelotte lent me an ancient piece of black ribbon which was his only second string. The next morning I found I had been the victim of a classical disappearing trick—a black object lying on a black carpet.
My report was written up on the Aquitania, recrossing the Atlantic. I had been so seasick on the outward voyage on the Berengaria that I wondered how I could ever face the return journey, but the Aquitania only rolled instead of corkscrewing, and all was well. On board, also travelling second-class, was the Reverend Maurice Ridley, chaplain and Fellow of Balliol. Having a drink with him before lunch I said “I didn’t see you at church parade this morning.” “Oh,” he replied, “is it Sunday?” “Yes, it’s Easter Sunday.” He was unperturbed. It reminded me of the Norfolk story of the parish clerk, in some bygone day, reading the Easter notices from his level of the three-decker pulpit. “Last Friday were Good Friday. We forgot it. We’ll have it next Friday.” My North American report was printed as an appendix to a pamphlet recording the group’s analysis and conclusions about the governance of Oxford. No reform whatever followed then; but our recommendations closely resembled those eventually accepted from the Franks report on the same subject thirty years later.
Not long after that episode I was invited, by no less a person than the Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, (of whom more later) to join the staff of the Economic Advisory Council, a recently formed body of eminent economists (including Maynard Keynes), businessmen, trade unionists and other experts under the chairmanship of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowdon, which it was hoped would steer a bewildered Labour Government through the shoals of the Great Depression. It proved no more unanimous and even less effective than the National Economic Development Council of later days. I was too junior to attend its top-level meetings, and I met only those few of its members who served on sub-committees for which I worked. The EAC secretariat was housed in the Cabinet Offices at 2 Whitehall Gardens, once Sir Robert Peel’s house, now, alas, pulled down and forgotten. My office was a large second-floor room, formerly a bedroom—perhaps Peel’s own—with a view across the Embankment gardens and the Thames to Saint Paul’s in the distance. I thought, “However far I rise I shall never again have as lovely an office as this,” and I was right. Indeed in this respect I mostly progressed backwards; when editor of The Sunday Times I occupied a plain smallish room with an outlook over a back street and a bomb site.
The secretary of the EAC was Tom Jones, deputy secretary of the Cabinet under Sir Maurice Hankey, a disciplinarian administrator and a Fort Knox of political secrets. “TJ” had been Lloyd George’s eminence grise and was the great wire-puller of Whitehall. He made it his business to know everybody, to be agreeable to all, to receive confidences and to keep his own counsel. He was one of those clever people who can appear to be frank and open while giving nothing away. I found him a pleasant and understanding master. But I had much more to do with Hubert Henderson, the Council’s deputy secretary, who was nearer to me in years and official station, and who like me had been recruited as an outside expert, a temporary civil servant. (He had been editor of The Nation, which was swallowed by the New Statesman.) By a strange chance which nobody could then have foreseen, though a Cambridge man he became eventually Warden of All Souls, to the College’s grief dying before he could take office. A most engaging man, he and his wife were hospitable to me. Hubert was an incessant smoker who talked fluently with a cigarette held between his teeth. In many ways he, another liberal economist and journalist, resembled Walter Layton, though without the latter’s public recognition and persona.
It was about that time, and probably in that circle, that I first met Sir Arthur Salter (later Lord Salter). His book “Recovery”, which had an enormous success because its title alone raised the spirits of people who for three years had heard of nothing but depression and decline, was published in 1932, and its preface mentions me as one of those to be thanked for help and advice on particular chapters. Arthur told me this cautionary tale about its publication. He was on a liner crossing the Atlantic when the wireless news reported the sudden death in Paris of Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match millionaire, who for years had been the biggest, certainly the best known, international financier in the world. To his horror, Arthur Salter realised that his book, which he had just passed for printing, in its chapters on international lending made no mention of this master figure, an absence which Kreuger’s death would make all the more conspicuous. He wirelessed the publishers to hold up printing until he had made good the omission, which he did in these words: “Good constructive loans, like those arranged by the League, or the central banks, or by a man of such creative vision as Mr. Ivar Kreuger, are threatened with the bad.” Hardly had the presses begun to turn when the truth emerged to a scandalised world that Kreuger had been a super-con-man, who had plastered the loan markets with paper unbacked by real assets, and had committed suicide to escape exposure and the collapse of his whole financial empire. It was too late to back-track on the printing, but at the first opportunity the text was returned to its original state by a chastened author, whose royalties had been cut by the cost of the panic change. I don’t know what lessons can be drawn from this sad story. Second thoughts are not always right? Look before you leap, even if the Devil is at your back? Put not your trust in international financiers?
The episode was so out of character for Arthur Salter, an experienced man of world affairs, cautious, methodical (I remember his mood of melancholy resignation when his American wife, whom he had married late in life, set about rearranging, to suit her own pictorial ideas of order, all the books in his rooms at All Souls), trained as a civil servant to keep his feet firmly on the ground. When I resigned the editorship of The Sunday Times in 1961 and was wondering what to do next, in particular whether to accept the post of Provost of the Ditchley Foundation, I sought the advice of Salter as an old and wise friend. He thought I was too young, at 55, to desert, as he said, the world of action for that of study; he could not know—nor did I myself foresee—that the administration of an international foundation and a great country house was quite as much a theatre of action, and as little an academic retreat, as had been the conduct of a weekly newspaper.
The duties of the EAC staff were not onerous. One task of mine was to be secretary of a sub-committee charged with reporting on the gap that yawned, in those deflationary days, between the downward course of wholesale prices and that of retail prices, especially those of basic food, which was pretty nearly all that the unemployed and the very ill-paid had money enough to buy. While farmers and other producers were getting but a fraction of former prices, too little to meet their costs, the housewife found that prices in the shops had dropped scarcely at all. Philip Snowdon was particularly exercised about this, for it seemed to frustrate his theory that falling incomes and falling prices would soon equate, and that an economic equilibrium would be restored at a lower nominal level. Our committee’s approach was twofold: first to show statistically that the gap was a normal economic phenomenon which no political action could alter, because so much of the intermediate costs were fixed or slow-moving, and secondly to examine the ways in which major farm products were marketed from producer to consumer, in order to consider whether, apart from an inevitable time-lag, the intermediate costs could be structurally reduced. We found that the central fruit and vegetable markets were pretty inefficient from this point of view, but that no short-term reform could have more than a very marginal effect. In short, Snowdon was barking up a wrong tree. Our statistical work was guided by Professor AL Bowley, a dry, assured, clear-headed man whose great pioneer work on the national income had yet to appear in print. Today, when statistics of all sorts—on incomes, production, prices, earnings, balance of payments, money supply and a good deal else—so abound that their production has become a major industry and their interpretation another, it is hard to credit how few were the available figures at that time, how crude were even some of the regular series. We had to make do with such statistics as we could find or dig out for ourselves. I don’t think we did any worse in our conclusions than present-day economists with their immensely vaster equipment.
On the EAC staff our house statistician, one place junior to me, was Colin Clark. Colin was, and remained, farouche, untidy, eccentric, his hair en brosse, his fingers inky. When he was up at Oxford with me, as a chemistry scholar of Brasenose, he had not been allowed by the college to change his school, though his heart was not in physical science but in economics; with hands stained from the chemistry labs, he used to attend lectures on statistics (he and I became the last survivors of a dwindling audience at one term’s series), and to carry everywhere with him a looseleaf folio of ruled paper on which he entered series of figures, as if their mere collection illumined their significance. As an example of his unorthodoxy, when he was interviewed on television, in the 1950s, by a panel of whom I was one (in those days the numbers of bowlers and batsmen were the reverse of most current practice), Colin was asked what he would do first if he could reform the tax system in the interest of the national economy, and instantly replied, “Abolish death duties”—because, he added, all taxes on capital were bad. Yet he was a supporter of the Labour Party, both in Britain and in Australia, where he spent much of his life as an economist. The third member of those lower ranks of the EAC secretariat was Piers Debenham, an elegant young man born to wealth, who though intelligent as well as charming seemed to have no great penchant for the job of economic bureaucrat. We soon lost any illusion that the EAC would endure as an important ancillary organ of government. We thought that it would fade and believed that it might be scrapped, and our jobs with it. Walking out to lunch one day, we three juniors asked ourselves what we would do when that happened. The Economist might take me back, I thought. “I suppose I should return to LSE,” said Colin. In his drawling voice Piers declared, “I shall be a rentier.”
As it happened, my departure from Whitehall Gardens was caused by no such force majeure. I was tempted away by an offer to become assistant editor of The Round Table, with the intention that I should become editor after a probationary period in which I would travel extensively in the Commonwealth. I daresay, however, that I might not have been so readily persuaded by that arch-persuader Lionel Curtis if I had seen in my EAC post a secure future with civil service promotion. In perceiving otherwise I was wrong, to judge from the experience of my successor, (Sir) Denis Rickett, my Balliol contemporary and All Souls colleague, who rose to be Second Secretary of the Treasury and Vice-President of the World Bank.
Before I turn the page on the Economic Advisory Council I must recall a friendship made then which endured until Dick Casey (eventually Lord Casey) died some 45 years later. Major RG Casey held a unique position in Whitehall in the 1920s. His post was that of liaison officer for the Australian High Commission with the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), and his nominal base was Australia House, but he was completely accepted as an insider in the Cabinet Office, which included the secretariat of the CID, headed by Hankey. This was due, without doubt, not to his status but to his personality, especially his Englishness, which was later somewhat of a political handicap an Australia, where they do not like their politicians to look and talk like “poms”. It may also have owed something to the happy hospitality which he and his delightful wife Maie were able to show. Not long after we had met, Casey asked me whether, for a proper fee, I would be willing to give some spare time to teaching him economics, in which he felt himself deficient. So I did that, and can boast that my one and only tutorial pupil in economics became, as Treasurer of the Australian Commonwealth, the equivalent of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Both in England and in Australia my wife and I kept in touch with him and Maie through the years. Even in his elderly semi-retirement in Melbourne, forty years on, I could still see in him the tall, handsome, soldierly, humorous and lighthearted, but diligent and ambitious young man whom I knew in those far-off days.
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