The Transition to Peace

Bowley retired at the end of 1944 and was replaced by Hubert Henderson as Acting Director of the Institute until a new person was appointed. The Institute needed to secure funding for its research and required a Director who could attract such funding, as well as taking up the position of what was now a Readership in Statistics at All Souls, with the obligation to lecture on statistics.

The upgrade of the All Souls position to a Readership had been reported to the Standing Committee at its meeting on 12 May 1944. But there were plans now for an even more ambitious appointment. On 1 June, Douglas Veale revealed a proposal in the University to turn the Readership into a full Professorship. He reported that the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Sir Richard Livingstone, wanted R.A. Fisher, the Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London and a specialist in biological statistics, to be con­sidered for the position, together with Udny Yule, who lectured in statistics at Cambridge. Henry Clay, economic adviser to the Bank of England, and shortly to be appointed Warden of Nuffield College, recommended Harry Campion, the head of the Central Statistical Office. Other names put forward were Alexander Aitken, Reader in Statistics at Edinburgh University and inventor of the generalised least squares method of statistical estimation, and Egon Pearson, Reader in Statistics at University College London (see OIS: UR6/CQ/SI/, File 1, Part 2).

Pearson did not apply, but was drafted onto a Board of Electors (selection committee) that included Keynes, who excused himself from its meetings because he was out of the country at Bretton Woods, Sir Harold Butler, the Warden of Nuffield College, Sir William Beveridge, the Master of University College, D.H.

On 20 October 1944, Veale wrote to Bowley to inform him that the Rockefeller Foundation had offered a grant to cover the expenses of the Institute for two years but would then cease further funding. This made more urgent the need to appoint a Director able to secure funding after 1947. Four days later, the Master of Balliol, Sandie Lindsay, wrote to Beveridge to inform him that Roy Allen had dropped out of the competition, and that the shortlist comprised Maurice Bartlett, formerly at Cambridge, now working for the Ministry of Supply, Champernowne, and Edmund Rhodes, Reader in Statistics at the London School of Economics. Maurice Kendall, a distin­guished statistical theorist then working for the British Chamber of Shipping, and Harry Campion were still being sounded out in informal discussions. On 24 October, Lindsay wrote to Beveridge that:

There seems to be a definite view that Champernowne has not the qualities suit­able for the head of an institution, that Rhodes is not inspiring, and that Bartlett is probably the best of the three, but not interested in the economic side. I hope you think you have taken the right course (Lindsay to Beveridge, OIS: UR6/ CQ/SI/, File 1, Part 2).

In the event, Kendall pulled out. A.C. Pigou from Cambridge and James Meade at the War Cabinet sent in references for Champernowne stating that he was an excellent statistician, but with reservations about his administrative ability. Bowley went further. He declared Champernowne a brilliant mathe­matician and indicated that Keynes thought highly of his aptitude for eco­nomics.

David Champernowne fitted Oxford perfectly. His father had been Bursar of Keble College. Already before the war, Champernowne had made original contributions to mathematics and statistical theory. He had excel­lent connections in the government, which were nurtured in wartime. In 1948, Champernowne was appointed Professor of Statistical Economics at Oxford. His main interests were more in statistical theory and the applica­tion of statistics to economic theory, rather than in the analysis of economic data and policy. These interests now set the direction for the work of the Institute, a process that was accelerated by the departure of Kalecki and most of the other emigres, technological progress with more powerful data processing, and political conditions that favoured the technical over the political.

Not all the work of the Institute was concerned with statistical theory. In 1945, it provided a new focus for research with the start of a series of monographs put out by the Oxford publisher Basil Blackwell. The first of these was a study of the financing conditions of firms by Joseph Steindl called Small and Big Business: Economic Problems of the Size ofFirms (Steindl 1945). Steindl had been recruited in 1943 to undertake an investigation of firm size financed by the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld, a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield. With the publication of Steindl's monograph, Champernowne introduced the series with a short statement offering

an outlet for research results too long for journals but too short to form a complete book. They are intended to present work of outstanding interest, sometimes even when it is still incompletely developed, in the hope that its early publication will suggest and stimulate research on related subjects and will provoke critical discus­sion. The monographs will be published at irregular intervals and will deal with problems in applied economics and statistics (Champernowne 1945: ii).

It was another two years before the next monograph appeared in the form of The Industrialisation ofBackward Areas, by Kurt Mandelbaum (Mandelbaum 1947) and a further five years before the third monograph emerged, K.G.J.C. Knowles's Strikes: A Study in Industrial Conflict (Knowles 1952).

Knowles's study covered industrial disputes up to 1947, suggesting delays in the publication process. Steindl's classic, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism, also appeared in 1952 (Steindl 1952). Steindl's introduction thanks Miss B.M. Gisborne for reading and correcting proofs. It is dated “Summer 1949”. In 1949, Steindl had left Oxford and returned to Vienna. Monographs continued to emerge occasionally. Klein's important An Econometric Model of the United Kingdom appeared in 1961 (Klein et al. 1961). Klein had arrived in Oxford in 1954 as a refugee from McCarthyism, staying for four years before returning to the United States to join the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Champernowne served as Director of the Institute from 1945 to 1948, with Frank Burchardt taking over the role in January 1949. Thereafter, the Institute's research depended very much on the enthusiasm and projects brought to it by particular individuals, such as Klein (see Chester 1986: 160). The Institute was then housed in a variety of locations in Oxford, before mov­ing into a new building in 1964, having been renamed the Institute of Economics and Statistics in 1962. With that, the Institute finally succeeded in establishing statistics at Oxford as the legitimate vehicle for economic research, putting behind it the struggle for a new economics for a better society that was the common goal of its wartime researchers.