Introduction
Philip Walter Sawford Andrews was born on 12 March 1914 into an upwardly mobile working-class family. His father rose from being a railway shunter to retire as Chief Traffic Inspector at Southampton Docks, and his mother was an agricultural labourer’s daughter who worked as a domestic servant before her marriage.
After attending grammar school in the town, Andrews studied at University College, Southampton, graduating in 1934 with a Second Class degree in Economics. For the next three years, he remained at the College as a research student and temporary Lecturer, before moving to Oxford in 1937 at the invitation of D.H. Macgregor. Andrews would remain at Oxford for the next 30 years. At first, he worked on company accounts at the Oxford Institute of Statistics, and between 1938 and 1952 he was Secretary of the Oxford Economists’ Research Group (OERG), which interviewed businessmen on a range of economic issues. A conscientious objector during the Second World War, Andrews took charge of undergraduate teaching at New College for the duration of the war, and he also became part of a Nuffield College research team that undertook economic and social surveys. SupportedI am grateful to Peter Earl and Lowell Jacobsen for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
J. E. King (*)
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia e-mail: j.king@latrobe.edu.au
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R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_17
financially by Samuel Courtauld, Andrews carried out research into the rayon and footwear industries, with a particular interest in the relative efficiency of large and small firms. He became an Official Fellow of Nuffield in 1946. Six years later he founded the Journal of Industrial Economics, and worked as a consultant in court cases involving restrictive business practices.
As a teacher, Andrews ‘was at his best in the cut and thrust of graduate seminars, from which former students conveyed his teachings to many parts of the world' (Corley 2004). Unusually among Oxbridge economists in the 1940s, he was a convinced Conservative, always concerned to defend the entrepreneur against ‘the niggling denigration which tends to make him ashamed of his way of life merely because success brings profits and enriches his business as well as his country' (Andrews 1949a: xvi). In a similar vein, he described his co-authored biography of the car manufacturer Lord Nuffield as ‘an act of piety' (Andrews and Brunner 1959: v). His lifestyle was no less conservative:
Andrews dressed very conventionally, and kept his Hampshire burr to the end. A cultivated man, he adorned his handsome rooms in Nuffield with statues, paintings (some his own handiwork) and sculptures. He played the viola and read widely outside economics, especially in philosophy and literature; he would often bubble with enthusiasm over something new he had learned. Sensitive and in some ways immature, he could be genial and kind; friends and colleagues were warmed by his open, welcoming smile, but remained watchful for passing thunderclouds (Corley 2004).
Andrews was always something of an outsider at Oxford, and in retrospect it is surprising that he stayed there so long. His career might have benefitted had he followed Ronald Coase to the United States; he would have thrived in a supportive environment like the Harvard Business School. In 1967, Andrews left Oxford to head the Economics Department at Lancaster University, where in the following year he appointed me to my first academic job and for the first three years closely supervised my teaching of undergraduate microeconomics. He was a generous and supportive (if sometimes prickly) boss. Philip Andrews died of cancer on 5 March 1971 at his family home, near Carnforth. His extensive papers are now held at the London School of Economics.
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