Aliens Exposed
A reader looking just at the publications of the Institute might be forgiven for thinking that it provided a congenial intellectual milieu for its researchers to do applied work using statistics to verify trends in economic activity.
As usual, this reflects the less visible nature of the vexations that emerged with the war. Among those working at the Institute was the industrial economist PW.S. Andrews. According to a note by Kalecki, Andrews was working on a study examining changes in the stocks of consumption goods (Kalecki 1941). However, it seems that Andrews was a conscientious objector (personal communication from John King; see also King 1988: 190). This may explain why, after a brief note on rationing in the fourth issue of the Institute’s Bulletin in 1940 (Andrews 1940), no further articles appear in Andrews’ name, and there are no articles by him in Studies in War Economics. In the late 1940s, Andrews resumed his publishing.Relations with government and the rest of the University were not helped by the concentration in the Institute of so many foreign researchers with distinctly left-wing political views. They had an ally on the Standing Committee in the form of G.D.H. Cole, Reader in Economics at University College and recently appointed the Sub-Warden of the newly founded Nuffield College. In 1941, Cole put forward the idea of a Social Reconstruction Survey. The Survey was to enquire into social conditions and shifts of population in various regions and industries in Britain as a result of the war. It was established with funding from the Treasury at the newly founded Nuffield College that was then still looking for premises. Andrews was appointed Chief Statistician to the Survey.
Cole’s reputation as a radical socialist did not endear him to the man who was paying for the College, the industrialist Lord Nuffield, a man of strongly conservative views.
Anxieties about the political direction of the Survey were supposed to be allayed by having it managed by a Joint Committee consisting of representatives of Nuffield College, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Oxford Institute of Statistics. However, opposition to Cole’s influence continued in the Hebdomadal Council that governs the University of Oxford. In the summer of 1943, that opposition hardened and it was proposed that the Survey should be transferred to the Oxford Institute of Statistics, whose then Director, Bowley, was appointed to a small committee to investigate the academic value of the Survey (“Introduction” to Papers of the Nuffield College Social Reconstruction Survey).It was in this context of political and institutional rivalry over the Survey that, on 9 April 1943, J.D. Denniston, a Classics Fellow at Hertford College, wrote to Sir Douglas Veale, the Registrar of the University of Oxford, concerning the confidentiality of the material being received by the Survey, in view of the proximity of the Survey to the Institute of Statistics where so many “aliens”, the peculiar term then used by the British for foreigners in the United Kingdom, were working.
Denniston’s letter must have been of some importance because Veale referred the matter immediately to Bowley. A handwritten note by Bowley to Veale, dated 13 April 1943, (OIS: UR6/CQ/SI/, File 1, Part 2) lists two British citizens as working for the Institute, Worswick and Nicholson, fourteen aliens with names and ages and two naturalised aliens, that is, foreigners with British citizenship, Balogh, formerly Hungarian, and M.J. Elsas, a German refugee. Bowley noted that ‘in fact no Govt. Department is directly concerned with the Institute, but its Bulletin is circulated and there are occasional enquiries’. On the following day, Veale wrote to Denniston to reassure him that the aliens at the Institute were strictly controlled in their access to confidential government material. In fact, such material was handled by an employee of Chatham House which, together with Nuffield and the Institute, participated in the Joint Committee managing the Survey. Veale attached a “List of Aliens” employed by the Institute. This contained the two naturalised aliens, Balogh and Elsas, seven Germans (including Burchardt and Schumacher), two Austrians (including Steindl), three Czechs (including Goldmann), two Poles (Kalecki and Herbert Frankel, who was called up for military service in November), along with a Mrs Miller who was German- born but British by marriage. The Germans and the Austrians were of course “enemy aliens” two of whom, Rothschild and Steindl, had recently been released from internment (Veale to Denniston, 14 April 1943, OIS: UR6/ CQ/SI/, File 1, Part 2). Shortly afterwards, however, the work of the Survey was wound down, its remaining research transferred to the Institute.
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