Early Life
This is to run too far ahead, however. Let us move now to the start. Where did John Vickers grow up? Where did he go to school? He was born on 7 July 1958. He and his brother spent their boyhoods close to the centre of Eastbourne, by train an hour or so south of London, on the Sussex coast.
While nearby Brighton, its western brother, is raffish, Eastbourne is a town of elegance, now gently fading. It nestles in a dell, sheltered by a range of magnificent hills, “the Seven Sisters”. His family ran a shop selling numerous objects of considerable utility for both residents and holidaymakers, such as handbags and umbrellas. His father served for over 50 years on its town council, chaired its finance committee and took his turn as mayor.Vickers was educated first at Meads Church of England Primary School and then from age 11, at Eastbourne Grammar School for boys. The Grammar School is now a sixth form college. Both it and its sister institution for girls, the High School, were State schools. They charged no fees but were selective. To enter, you needed to do well in an examination based on language, logic, puzzles and maths. In Eastbourne, the pass rate was about 25%. The quality of the education was high. In the sixth form, Vickers took four A level courses: Mathematics, Advanced Mathematics, History and a combined course in Economics and Politics. For nearly all pupils, Maths A Level was partnered with Physics and Chemistry, and not with subjects from the humanities or social science stable. The school had to go to some trouble to alter its timetable to permit the unusual combination which their star student had requested. It is much to their credit that they did accommodate him.
Economics was well taught by an Oxford graduate, Ronnie Ladbroke. Ladbroke would sport a Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) tie. He was a keen cricketer. Vickers shared that enthusiasm, as both player and spectator.
Cricket, with its numerous complexities and fascinating uncertainties which make game theory look almost pedestrian by comparison, has profound appeal to many economists. Though he did not know it at the time, it was also an abiding interest for two of Vickers' future Oxford economist colleagues, Michael Bacharach and Walter Eltis. Ladbroke had imbibed his economics at University College Oxford, partly from the future Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson was at that time a recently graduated researcher, working for Lord Beveridge, the main architect of Britain's modern welfare state.Among the other staff at Eastbourne, one of Vickers' maths teachers was said to have worked in his youth with Barnes Wallis, the father of the Dambusters' bouncing bomb. History was taught impressively by Ken Reed, a Cambridge graduate, and an unusual and charismatic individual with sophisticated views. Reed enlivened his course by introducing his pupils to Marx and Popper. History for Reed was so much more than “just one damned thing after another”.
Eastbourne Grammar School sent alumni to Oxford and Cambridge occasionally and knew little about how to navigate their admissions process. The school advised Vickers, who was keen to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), to apply to Magdalen College, Oxford. Two of Magdalen's PPE tutors were very forceful talkers, inclined to admire that quality in others; they could well have misinterpreted Vickers' reserve and brevity at interview. Assured later that they would certainly have offered him a place, Vickers was trumped with a scholarship by Oriel College. So, that is where he went up, in 1976, three months after his 18th birthday.
Oriel's tutors at that time were Jonathan Barnes (philosophy), Derek Morris (economics) and Christopher Seton-Watson (politics). The first-year course involved all three subjects. After that you could stay with all three or you could drop one, to extend your study of the other two. In her final two years, a PPEist could choose to do no economics or to allocate anything from one- quarter to effectively three-quarters of her time to that subject.
Vickers was committed to economics from the start. He had at first expected to drop philosophy. But he was so taken by it that, when the time came, he opted to forego politics instead.Oriel was a friendly, united college. Vickers was sufficiently popular and respected to be elected secretary of Oriel's Junior Common Room. Sport consisted mainly of cricket, supplemented by croquet and by bridge, where he partnered his philosophy tutor. Two of his four optional Finals papers were Philosophy of Language with Jonathan Barnes, and Philosophy of Mind, with David Charles, who succeeded Barnes after he moved to Balliol College. The other two were in economics. One was the Economics of Industry (Oxford's quaint term for industrial organisation (IO)), which he studied with Derek Morris. The other was Money, with Peter Sinclair at Brasenose. Nearly all of Vickers' subsequent professional work and research were to fall within the ambit of those two optional papers. Sinclair was, by chance, one of the PPE examiners in 1979, and can testify to the fact that Vickers' examination results were simply stellar. He was widely agreed to have gained the highest set of first-class marks in PPE since the war.
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